1. Men become Christians by a great emigration.

'Get thee out from thy father's house, and from thy country, and
from thy kindred,' was the command to Abram. And he became the heir
to God's promises and the father of the faithful, because he did not
hesitate a moment to make the plunge and to leave behind him all his
past, his associations, his loves, much of his possessions, and, in
a very profound sense, his old self, and put a great impassable gulf
between him and them all.

Now I am not going to say anything so narrow or foolish as that the
Christian life must always begin with a conscious and sudden change;
but this I am quite sure of, that in the vast majority of cases of
thoroughly and out-and-out religious men, there must be a conscious
change, whether it has been diffused through months or years, or
concentrated in one burning moment. There has been a beginning;
whether it has been like the dawn, or whether it has been like the
kindling of a candle, the beginning of the flashing of the divine
light into the heart; and the men that are most really under the
influence of religious truth can, as a rule, looking back upon their
past experience, see that it divides itself into two halves,
separated from each other by a profound gulf--the time on the other
side, and that on this side, of the great river. We must take heed
lest by insisting on any one way of entrance into the kingdom we
seem to narrow God's mercy, or sadden true hearts, or make the
method of approach a test of the fact of entrance. God's city has
more than twelve gates; they open to all the thirty-two points of
the compass, yet there is, in the religious experience of the truest
saints, always something analogous to this change. And what I desire