over-balancing evil in him, enough of wrong affections and triumphant sin, to excite him to endeavor to make for himself a new heart and a new spirit.

So this exhortation before us is no mere historical saying, fossilized in the past-bound up with the history of the rebellious Jews. It is a living word, and speaks at this very hour, vibrating from heaven throughout every soul: 66 Make you a new heart and a new spirit."

Another question may be disposed of, when we consider how practical this appeal is, and that is the question of, Who makes a new heart? Do you make it, or does God make it? Now a little further back in this same book of Ezekiel, we find God's agency brought pre-eminently forward, when He says: "I will give them one heart, and I will put a new spirit within you; and I will take the stony heart out of their flesh, and will give them an heart of flesh." Now here, as almost everywhere else, we find two poles to one truth, one referring to God, and one to man, but the moment we come to act, they are reconciled. If one warms into earnest effort upon the idea of having a new heart and a new spirit, the two conditions of God's agency and man's agency will melt together. If he stand still in cold, barren speculation, he freezes to death. God does something, and you have something to do in this achievement of making a new heart and a new spirit. The Apostle puts the two agencies close enough together, I think, when he says-"Work out your own salvation,

for it is God that worketh in you to will and to do." Now there is no more difficulty about the theory of making a new heart, or entering upon a religious life, than there is about anything else, the moment we enter earnestly into action. But it certainly seems a very perplexing and discouraging procedure to keep urging a man to turn from evil, and get rid of his bad habits and affections-to make himself a new heart and a new spirit—and then to add that he can do nothing for himself, but must wait the breath and influence of Godmust wait until God gives him a new heart and spirit. As I said last Sunday, so I take occasion to say now, that I verily believe that one reason why people stand aloof so much from the religious life, from entering heartily and earnestly into it, is the fact that it has been presented in such a vague and perplexing way, and encumbered with so many speculations; so that we have really a kind of preaching which urges upon men the great guilt of their sin and their alienation from God, and then tells them that they can do nothing of themselves. And I repeat this is all borne away by the simple condition, that a man must be in earnest in regard to this new heart and spirit. And it is a mistake to suppose that God is not glorified when we dwell upon the point of human action. When we say you can make a new heart and a new spirit, it is a great mistake to suppose that we take the glory from God. For whence come all good desires and all right actions? They proceed from God, and from Him alone. And so

do all strength and all ability. One of the greatest intellectual errors into which a man can fall, is the habit of ignoring the divine in the common, and looking for it only in the special and unfamiliar, not to see God in the ordinary machinery of action, not to behold Him in ordinary processes; but if something strange bursts upon us, something not in accordance with the usual course of events, then to recognize the divine. It is not the thing itself, its utility, its beauty, its power, that stamps it as divine-only its strangeness.

You see in this tendency the danger that we are apt to encounter. The moment we can discover the law of the event, the moment we find it taking its place in the order of natural sequence, it becomes no longer divine; and so, by-and-by, all nature becomes atheistic. There was a time when almost every phenomenon in nature was unaccounted for, and everything was called divine; but as fast as its law was discovered, and it took its place in the order of natural sequence, the thing was no more divine; that only which was mysterious and unknown being placed in that category. And so as the torch of investigation advances farther and farther into the realms of nature's laws, men could limit the divine and at length eliminate it from all things. No, my friends, the truest philosophy is that which recognizes everything as divine; that sees in all laws, in all constituted order, in the flow of common events, in the movements of familiar things, the Divine hand, the Divine presence and power. just as much as in the

strange and marvelous that startle the mind and weigh it down with awe.

I repeat: all strength, all ability, is from God. A man does not get an education, any more than a new heart, of himself. Is it not Providence that furnishes the circumstances which may incite him to the pursuit of an education, and help him to get it? Is it not Providence that touches the mysterious processes of the mind by which education becomes possible? Now suppose we should say, "This matter of getting a new heart is a process of self-education;" it would be reduced to simple terms, and yet a great many would start from it and say, "This won't do; it is too cold and naturalistic-too much of human agency to call getting religion a process of self-education." And yet what is self-education but the inspiration and the life of the divine? You do not strike God out when you put human agency in. In reality this is the sum of the matter; self-education in the Christian spirit and Christian life, is the process of getting a new heart and a new spirit with the Divine agency implicated with it, and apparent in it. A man does not steer a ship, does not sow a seed, does not lay a brick, of himself; God works with him; implicated, in the last analysis, in the mysterious action both of the mind and body. Why will we turn divine inspiration out of the broad area of human affairs and limit it only to the Bible? Grant that, in a fuller and more peculiar measure, it flowed into him who penned the Psalms and those who

spoke burning words of prophecy; grant, that, with a peculiar light, it beamed forth from the face of the Apostles; still, at the same time, has God breathed no inspiration at all into other men? Grant, that the old heathen sages were not in the advanced light of divine revelation; were they so utterly excluded from God that their words of wisdom and of love were but mere words of man's wisdom? Was that the measure of moral stature to which they attained-utterly excluded from God? Is any achievement of manof the cunning pencil, the strong hammer-the work of the eye or the arm-of the eager muscles, or the bounding brain-entirely without God's help and agency?

The fact is just this: God stands ready with His conditions which are necessary to all human effort and to all success, whenever man is ready to fall in with those conditions. When we set the sail, the wind will blow; when we sow the seed, the agencies that God himself has prepared in the atmosphere and in the earth will perform their part; and when we set ourselves to work to make a new heart, God's spirit will breathe upon us and help us to consummate the work. That is the answer to all quibbles about prayer-how God Almighty can answer prayer and yet keep the laws of the physical universe stable. Why, the laws of the physical universe do not transcend all laws. There is a realm of spirit above the mere physical where man comes in contact with God, and God comes in contact