in this very
passage. Moreover, the higher experience which reveals to us a Power
of righteousness in the world, no less reveals to us the living
personal character of this Power. Shut out conscience as a true source
of knowledge, and the very idea of righteousness will disappear with
it--there will be nothing to fall back upon but the combinations of
intelligence, and such religion as may be got therefrom; admit
conscience, and its verifying force transcends a mere order or
impersonal power of righteousness. It places us in front of a living
Spirit who not only governs us righteously and makes us feel our
wrong-doing, but who is continually educating us and raising us to His
own likeness of love and blessedness. We realise not merely that there
is a law of good in the world, but a Holy Will that loves good and
hates evil, and against whom all our sins are offences in the sense of
the Psalmist: "Against Thee, Thee only, have I sinned, and done this
evil in Thy sight."

So much as this, we say, may be realised--this consciousness of sin on
the one hand, and of a living Righteousness and Love far more powerful
than our sins, and able to save us from them. These roots of religion
are deeply planted in human nature. They answer to its highest
experiences. The purest and noblest natures in whom all the impulses
of a comprehensive humanity have been strongest, have felt and owned
them. The missionary preacher, wherever he has gone--to the rude
tribes of Africa, or the cultured representatives of an ancient
civilisation--has appealed to them, and found a verifying response to
his preaching. St Paul, whether he spoke to Jew, or Greek, or Roman,
found the same voices of religious experience echoing to his call--the
same burden of sin lying on human hearts--the same cry from their
depths, "What must I do to be saved?" It is not necessary to maintain
that these elements of the Christian religion are verifiable in every
experience. It is enough to say that there is that in the Gospel which
addresses all hearts in which spiritual thoughtfulness and life have
not entirely died out. It lays hold of the common heart. It melts with
a strange power the highest minds. Look over a vast audience; travel
to distant lands; communicate with your fellow-creatures
anywhere,--and you feel that you can reach them, and for the most part
touch them, by the story of the Gospel--by the fact of a Father in
heaven, and a Saviour sent from heaven, "tha