We are changed, as the Old Version has it—­we do not change ourselves.  No man can change himself.  Throughout the New Testament you will find that wherever these moral and spiritual transformations are described the verbs are in the passive.  Presently it will be pointed out that there is a rationale in this; but meantime do not toss these words aside as if this passivity denied all human effort or ignored intelligible law.  What is implied for the soul here is no more than is everywhere claimed for the body.  In physiology the verbs describing the processes of growth are in the passive.  Growth is not voluntary; it takes place, it happens, it is wrought upon matter.  So here.  “Ye must be born again”—­we cannot born ourselves.  “Be not conformed to this world, but be ye transformed”—­we are subjects to transforming influence, we do not transform ourselves.  Not more certain is it that it is something outside the thermometer that produces a change in the thermometer, than it is

          SOMETHING OUTSIDE THE SOUL OF MAN

that produces a moral change upon him.  That he must be susceptible to that change, that he must be a party to it, goes without saying; but that neither his aptitude nor his will can produce it, is equally certain.

Obvious as it ought to seem, this may be to some an almost startling revelation.  The change we have been striving after is not to be produced by any more striving.  It is to be wrought upon us by the moulding of hands beyond our own.  As the branch ascends, and the bud bursts, and the fruit reddens under the co-operation of influences from the outside air, so man rises to the higher stature under invisible pressures from without.  The radical defect of all our former methods of sanctification was the attempt to generate from within that which can only be wrought upon us from without.  According to the first Law of Motion, every body continues in its state of rest, or of uniform motion in a straight line, except in so far as it may be compelled by impressed forces to change that state.  This is also a first law of Christianity.  Every man’s character remains as it is, or continues in the direction in which it is going, until it is compelled by impressed forces to change that state.  Our failure has been the failure to put ourselves in the way of the impressed forces.  There is a clay, and there is a Potter; we have tried to get the clay to mould the clay.

Whence, then, these pressures, and where this Potter?  The answer of the formula is—­“By reflecting as a mirror the glory of the Lord we are changed.”  But this is not very clear.  What is the “glory” of the Lord, and how can mortal man reflect it, and how can that act as an “impressed force” in moulding him to a nobler form?  The word “glory”—­the word which has to bear the weight of holding those “impressed forces”—­is a stranger in current speech, and our first duty is to seek out