instinct or noble appetite is a ray of
sunlight, not the sun, is the projection into my life of some force
above, outside of me, which I can find only by climbing back along the
ray that is projected, up to it; let me see all animal life a
study and preparation for this final life of man, sensations and
perceptions, growing clearer and clearer as we rise in the scale until
in man they are fit to convey this knowledge which man alone can have,
the knowledge of God; let me see this, and I must be ashamed to make
that life a thing of pride which might be the seat of such an exalted
and exalting dependence and humility. I am unwilling that those
well-built cisterns which ought to be so full of God should hold
nothing but myself, as if one crept into his aqueduct and closed it up
where the water came into it from the fountain and lived in it for a
house and found it very dry.

We see clearly enough what the change is that is needed. It is
to substitute for self-consciousness as the result of life the
ever-abiding consciousness of God. Do you ask how it shall be done?
Ah, my dear friends, that is the very miracle of the gospel. I can
tell you only this about it, which the Lord has told us all before:
"Except a man be born again, he cannot see the kingdom of God." The
kingdom of God, that region of life in which God is the life's King.
And again: "If any man love me he will keep my words and my Father
will love him and we will come unto him and make our abode with him."
"We will come to him!" That is what we want, for that is the source of
all humility, the coming of God into us, and the condition is love and
obedience, the spiritual and the active forms of faith. That is all we
can say. And that is enough, for in that this at least is clear, that
such a conversion is a work that God has undertaken to do for us, that
He asks of us nothing but submission to His willing helpfulness, and
that being a transformation of life, it may, nay it must, be done
while life is in possession, it can be done best when life is in its
fullest. We have not to wait till movement is slow and color is dull.
We are not tempted to make a vacancy and call it piety; but when man's
life is so full that it tempts him daily to self-consciousness and
pride, then let him open it wide to the consciousness of God and
ennoble it with the full dignity of that humility whose first
condition is the presence of God in the soul that He built for His own
inhabitin