tentially it is there. "The
kingdom of God is within you," says Jesus, and it is ours to bring it
out in all its actual reality. It is the greater which includes the
less, of the gracious possessions God has put in our being, and of
which we know so little because we do not work these inward mines:
"Work out your own salvation, for it is God that worketh in you."

Some one makes a great inventor say: "Anybody might have done it, but
the secret came to me." Do you believe the first part of this
statement? Would you hold me true in saying that anybody might have
anticipated the discovery of wireless telegraphy? There are times when
the world appears to halt for want of some new thing, or for want of
some one to put new meaning into the old. And when the fulness of time
has come, the secret, which has been sleeping through centuries of men,
awakes in a man. He is the chosen of Providence to deliver unto us
that which he also has received.

What is true of a few in the endowment of what we call genius, may be
true of us all in the power of God unto salvation. When we were "made
in secret, and curiously wrought in the lowest parts of the earth," the
Maker of us all put a part of Himself into the mysterious substance.
"Let each man," says Browning, "think himself a thought, an act, a
breath of God." There is evil in our nature; but evil can mar us only
so far as we allow it to become sin. It is in victory over evil that
we find character and make. There is evil in our nature, but there is
also a germ of God which He can touch into immortality and glorify with
the very splendour of His own image and being. When that germ is
quickened into life, we are, in the language of theology, converted; as
it develops and becomes the more life and the fuller, we are, in the
same language, sanctified and made meet for the Master's use.

Is there anything mysterious in this; anything we may not understand?
Christ did not think so, if we may judge from His conversation with
Nicodemus. "Marvel not that I said unto thee, Ye must be born again."
Our Lord, if I understand Him aright, tells this master of Israel that
there is nothing more wonderful about this new birth than there is
about a new affection or a new love. And what cannot love do? No one
enters our life except through love. They may influence it profoundly,
but that of itself gives no admittance to the heart. What, I ask
again, cannot love do? Have we never known