renewing influence. This certitude, brethren, may be contributed to
by books of apologetics, and by other sources of investigation and
study which I should be sorry indeed to be supposed in any degree to
depreciate. But the true way to get it is, by deep communion with the
living God, to realise the personality of Jesus Christ as present
with us, our Friend, our Saviour, our Sanctifier by His Holy Spirit.
Why, Paul's Gospel was, I was going to say, altogether--that would be
an exaggeration--but it was to a very large extent simply the
generalisation of his own experience. That is what all of us will
find to be the Gospel that we have to preach. 'We speak that we do
know and testify that we have seen.' And it was because this man
could say so assuredly--because the depths of his own conscience and
the witness within him bore testimony to it--'He loved me and gave
Himself for me,' that he could also say, 'The power of God unto
salvation to every one that believeth.' Go down into the depths,
brother and friend; cry to Him out of the depths. Then you will feel
His strong, gentle grip lifting you to the heights, and that will
give power that nothing else will, and you will be able to say, 'I
have heard Him myself, and I know that this is the Christ, the
Saviour of the world.'

But there is yet another source of certitude open to us all, and that
is the history of the centuries. Our modern sceptics, attacking the
truth of Christianity mostly from the physical side, are strangely
blind to the worth of history. It is a limitation of faculty that
besets them in a good many directions, but it does not work anywhere
more fatally than it does in their attitude towards the Gospel. After
all, Jesus Christ spoke the ultimate word when He said, 'By their
fruits ye shall know them.' And it is so, because just as what is
morally wrong cannot be politically right, so what is intellectually