e were washed, but ye were sanctified, but ye
were justified in the name of the Lord Jesus Christ and in the Spirit
of our God. One cannot find in the New Testament anything stiff and
stilted about this experience. Paul's change came suddenly; Peter's
came slowly. They did not even have, as we have come to have, a
settled word to describe the experience. Ask James what it is and,
practical-minded man that he is, he calls it _conversion_--being turned
around. Ask Peter what it is and, as he looks back upon his old
benighted condition, he cries that it is like _coming out of the
darkness into a marvelous light_. Ask Paul what it is and, with his
love of superlative figures, he cries that it is like _being dead and
being raised again with a great resurrection_. Ask John what it is
and, with his mystical spirit, he says that it is _being born again_.
See the variety that comes from vitality--no stiff methods, no stiff
routine of experience, but throbbing through the whole book the good
news of an illuminating, liberating, transforming experience that can
make men new!

It is the more strange that this central element in the Christian
Gospel should be neglected in the interests of social reformation
because it is so indispensable to social reformation. Wherever a new
social hope allures the efforts of forward-looking men, there is one
argument against the hope which always rises. You cannot do that--men
say--human nature is against it; human nature has always acted another
way; you cannot change human nature; your hope is folly. As one
listens to such skepticism he sees that men mean by human nature a
static, unalterable thing, huge, inert, changeless, a dull mass that
resists all transformation. The very man who says that may be an
engineer. He may be speaking in the next breath with high enthusiasm
about a desert in Arizona where they are bringing down the water from
the hills and where in a few years there will be no desert, but orange
groves stretching as far as the eye can reach, and eucalyptus trees
making long avenues of shade, and roses running wild, as plenteous as
goldenrod in a New England field. But while about physical nature he
is as hopeful of possible change as a prophet, for human nature he
thinks nothing can be done.

From the Christian point of view this idea of human nature is utterly
false. So far from being stiff and set, human nature is the most
plastic, the most changeable thing with w