ation, and lie for ever blighted and useless, while others are
carried forward to fuller and more satisfying life, we cannot but ask
with some anxiety to which class we belong. Good and evil are in the
world, happiness and misery, victory and defeat; do not let us deceive
ourselves by acting as if there were no difference between these
opposites, or as if it mattered little in our case whether we belong to
the one side or the other. It matters everything: it is just the
difference between eternal life and eternal death. Christ did not come
to play with us, and startle us with idle tales. He is the centre and
fountain of all truth, and what He says fits in with all we see in the
world around us.

But in endeavouring to ascertain whether the great change our Lord
speaks of has passed upon us, our object must be not so much to
ascertain the time and manner of our new birth as its reality. A man may
know that he has been born though he is not able to recall, as no man
can recall, the circumstances of his birth. Life is the great evidence
of birth, natural or spiritual. We may desire to know the time and place
of birth for some other reason, but certainly not for this, to make sure
we have been born. Of that there is sufficient evidence in the fact of
our being alive. And spiritual life quite as certainly implies spiritual
birth.

Again, we must keep in view that a man may be born though not yet full
grown. The child of a day old has as truly and certainly a human nature
as the man in his prime. He has a human heart and mind, every organ of
body and soul, though as yet he cannot use them. So the second birth
impresses the image of God on every regenerate soul. It may not as yet
be developed in every part, but all its parts are there in germ. It is
not a partial but a complete result which regeneration effects. It is
not one member, a hand or a foot that is born, but a body, a complete
equipment of the soul in all graces. The whole character is regenerated,
so that the man is fitted for all the duties of the Divine life
whensoever these duties shall come before him. A human child does not
need additions made to it to fit it for new functions: it requires
growth, it requires nurture, it requires education and the practice of
human ways, but it requires no new organ to be inserted into its frame;
once born it has but to grow in order to adapt itself with ease and
success to all human ways and conditions. And if regenerate we h