to press upon you is, that unless you are only religious people
after the popular superficial fashion of the day, there will be
something like it in your lives.

There will be a change in a man's deepest self, so that he will be a
'new creature,' with new tastes, new motives stirring to action, new
desires pressing for satisfaction, new loves sweetly filling his
heart, new insight into the meanings and true good of life and time
guiding his conduct, new aversions withdrawing him from old delights
which have become hateful now, new hopes pluming their growing
wings, and new powers bearing him along a new road. There will be a
change in his relations to God and to God's will. God in Christ will
have become his centre, instead of self, which was so before. He
lives in a new world, being himself a new man.

Our Lord uses this very illustration when He says, 'He that heareth
My Word, and believeth Him that sent Me, hath eternal life, and
cometh not into judgment, but hath passed out of death into life.'
That is a great migration, is it not, from the condition of a corpse
to that of a living man? Paul, too, gives the same idea with a
somewhat different turn of the illustration, when he gives 'thanks
to the Father who delivered us out of the power of darkness, and
translated us into the kingdom of,'--not, as we might expect to
complete the antithesis, 'the light,' but--the 'kingdom of the Son
of His love,' which is the same thing as the light. The illustration
is probably drawn from the practice of the ancient conquering
monarchs, who, when they subjugated a country, were wont to lead
away captive long files of its inhabitants as compulsory colonists,
and set them down in another land. Thus the conquering Christ comes,
and those whom He conquers by His love, He shifts by a great