heir meaning and power. And then
we must turn these truths from mere notions into life. It is not enough
to know the love that God has to us, in that lower sense of the word
'knowledge.' Many of you know that, who never got any blessing out of it
all your days, and never will, unless you change. Besides the 'knowing'
there must be the 'believing' of the love. You must translate the notion
into a living fact in your experience. You must pass from the simple
work of understanding the Gospel to the higher act of faith. You must
not be contented with knowing, you must trust. And if you have done that
all the rest will follow, and the little, narrow, low doorway of humble
self-distrusting faith, through which a man creeps on his knees,
leaving outside all his sin and his burden, opens out into the temple
palace--the large place in which Christ's love is imparted to the soul.

Brethren, this doctrine of my text ought to be for every one of us a joy
and a gospel. There is no royal road into the sweetness and the depth of
Christ's love, for the wise or the prudent. The understanding is no more
the organ for apprehending the love of Christ than the ear is the organ
for perceiving light, or the heart the organ for learning mathematics.
Blessed be God! the highest gifts are not bestowed upon the clever
people, on the men of genius and the gifted ones, the cultivated and the
refined, but they are open for all men; and when we say that love is the
parent of knowledge, and that the condition of knowing the depths of
Christ's heart is simple love which is the child of faith, we are only
saying in other words what the Master embodied in His thanksgiving
prayer, 'I thank Thee, Father! Lord of heaven and earth, because Thou
hast hid these things from the wise and prudent, and hast revealed them
unto babes.'

And that is so, not because Christianity, being a foolish system, can
only address itself to fools; not because Christianity, contradicting
wisdom, cannot expect to be received by the wise and the cultured, but
because a man's brains have as little to do with his trustful acceptance
of the Gospel of Jesus Christ as a man's eyes have to do with his
capacity of hearing a voice. Therefore, seeing that the wise and
prudent, and the cultured, and the clever, and the men of genius are
always the minority of the race, let us vulgar folk that are neither
wise, nor clever, nor cultured, nor geniuses, be thankful that all that
has nothing to