ilosophy of life ever
spoken. But let us be quite sure when we speak of Christianity that we
mean Christ's Christianity. Other versions are either caricatures, or
exaggerations, or misunderstandings, or shortsighted and surface
readings. For the most part their attainment is hopeless and the
results wretched. But I care not who the person is, or through what
vale of tears he has passed, or is about to pass, there is a new life
for him along this path.

III. HOW FRUITS GROW.

Were Rest my subject, there are other things I should wish to say
about it, and other kinds of Rest of which I should like to speak.
But that is not my subject. My theme is that the Christian experiences
are not the work of magic, but come under the law of Cause and Effect.
I have chosen Rest only as a single illustration of the working of
that principle. If there were time I might next run over all the
Christian experiences in turn, and show the same wide law applies to
each; but I think it may serve the better purpose if I leave this
further exercise to yourselves. I know no Bible study that you will
find more full of fruit, or which will take you nearer to the ways of
God, or make the Christian life itself more solid or more sure. I
shall add only a single other illustration of what I mean, before I
close.

Where does Joy come from? I knew a Sunday scholar whose conception of
Joy was that it was a thing made in lumps and kept somewhere in
Heaven, and that when people prayed for it, pieces were somehow let
down and fitted into their souls. I am not sure that views as gross
and material are not often held by people who ought to be wiser. In
reality, Joy is as much a matter of Cause and Effect as pain. No one
can get Joy by merely asking for it. It is one of the ripest fruits of
the Christian life, and, like all fruits, must be grown. There is a
very clever trick in India called the mango trick. A seed is put in
the ground and covered up, and after diverse incantations a full-blown
mango-bush appears within five minutes. I never met any one who knew
how the thing was done, but I never met any one who believed it to be
anything else than a conjuring trick. The world is pretty unanimous
now in its belief in the orderliness of Nature. Men may not know how
fruits grow, but they do know that they cannot grow in an hour. Some
lives have not even a stalk on which fruits could hang, even if they
did grow in an hour. Some have never planted one sound s