differs from itself simply in being a higher manifestation of that central Life from which it sprang. The change of the second birth, therefore, presupposes and insists upon a recipiency on the part of the old nature. Christianity only contends that the change itself is not an object of actual perception, is not present to the consciousness of the old nature until it manifests itself by its subsequent effects. In order to distinguish the difference between night and day, a man must open his eyes: but even by opening his eyes he will not detect the precise moment in which the sun rises; what he calls its rising is really but the first manifestation to his senses of an event which has already taken place beyond the range of his

senses.

There are two things which tend to obscure the work of the Spirit in its first and preliminary stage, and they are both things in which the law. of the Spirit of life is in harmony with the law of the evolution of all life. The first of these is the fact that the beginning of the Spirit in the human soul is a birth. We popularly speak of birth as the transition from a world of emptiness, voidness, and non-existence into a world of fulness, light, and life. Potentially, it no doubt is so. But the actual process of birth is very far indeed from achieving, or even from suggesting, such a grand result. Between the life of the em

bryo and the first hours of infant existence, there is to all appearance a very thin line of separation. Birth does not immediately usher the life into a full blaze of consciousness. The new-born infant is practically ignorant of the fact of its own being; and even those faculties of sense which are waiting ready for its use are compelled for a time to lie inactive and dormant. That is the reason why the natural life is never able to give any account of the earliest period of its existence. The facts of that period were not registered even at the time, and therefore they cannot be recalled at any future time. It is in strict analogy with this evolutionary law that a man, even when in possession of the new life, is still unable to tell "whence it cometh." The new life, like the old, had its origin in a birth; and the birth of the new life, like that of the old, was followed by a period in which the impressions made upon the heart and mind fell upon them, as it were, unconsciously, and left behind them no record of their existence.

The second thing which causes the work of the Spirit to be obscure in its preliminary stage is the fact that, like every other form of vital growth, it proceeds from within to without. It is a law of our being that we never observe a phenomenon as long as it is purely inward. The feelings of the human heart do not become objects of our conscious reflection until they begin to experience

some resistance to their exercise from the events and objects of outward life. Many a man is ignorant how fully he loves a friend until that friend is removed by death. The illustration is pertinent to the present subject. The work of the Spirit, beginning as it does in the innermost region of our nature, is not at first in contact with the outward experiences of the world. The man who possesses it is, therefore, originally very much in the position of one who carries a treasure unconsciously within an earthen vessel, and is himself unaware of the great resources which lie at his command. In order that a man may awake to the knowledge of his own spiritual power, it is necessary that this power should be brought into collision with some other and more external power. As long as it is perfectly internal, it must, of necessity, be perfectly spontaneous, or, which is the same thing, perfectly unrealised.

This leads us to consider the second of the evolutionary stages embraced in the work of the Spirit that stage in which the life of spontaneity passes away, and is replaced by a life of struggle. And here it is that we are confronted by one of the greatest paradoxes of all Christian experience. To a reader of St Paul's Epistle, it must be at once evident and surprising that the period of his greatest inward struggle is not the period when the new life dawns upon him, but the time when

it is nearing its meridian.

When the man of Tarsus is first struck by the light from heaven, we hear nothing immediately of any inward struggle. That struggle emerges only in the Paul of the Epistles, in the man who has already reached the ripeness of the spiritual life. It is just at this stage where we should expect to find the man rejoicing in the sense of a vanquished height that we find him oppressed beyond measure with the sense of his own sin. "O wretched man that I am, who shall deliver me from this body of death?" "There is a law in my members warring against the law of my mind;" "the flesh lusteth against the spirit, and the spirit against the flesh; the evil that I would not, that I do, and the good that I would, that I do not," these are amongst the utterances that come from the days of his high spiritual culture. His sense of sin seems to increase in proportion to his advance in holiness, and his feeling of distance from the goal becomes more pronounced and painful in proportion as the goal itself is neared.

Yet this experience of St Paul in the field of Christianity is paralleled by every man's experience in every field of thought. The law of the spirit of life is, in fact, a law of vital evolution. All dissatisfaction is the sign of growth, and all growth must issue in dissatisfaction. The region of the new Christian life is no exception to the

rule.

The growth of Christian experience is accompanied by a corresponding decrease in the sense of merit, and the heights already gained seem insignificant in proportion as the ideal of duty appears high and luminous. Paul counts not himself to have apprehended just because his eye is riveted upon the mark of a prize which must necessarily seem to him more inapproachable in proportion as he himself comes closer to its attainment. Therefore it is that he and such as he have found the second stage of the Spirit more hard to bear than the first. It has even seemed to them as if the march of the upward evolution had been arrested, and as if they had begun to enter on a declining path. The path, however, is really an ascent, and the shadows that are cast upon its way are shadows caused by light. The increasing sense of sin is the increasing power of holiness, and the increasing power of holiness is the enlarged diffusion of the Spirit of life.

And this furnishes the real point of transition to the third and final stage of the spiritual evolution. If the first was an unrealised calm, if the second was a broken calm, the third is a calm restored, and restored no longer as a state of spontaneity, but as a state of consciousness. Christianity terms it distinctively the peace of God. The peace is reached not by any act of asceticism, not by any actual cessation from the conflict of life, but by