this generation frown very largely upon the frank utterance of
religious convictions on the part of religious people, except on
Sundays, in Sunday-schools, pulpits, and the like. But for all that,
what is in you will come out. If you have never felt 'I was weary of
forbearing, and I could not stay,' I do not think that there is much
sign in you of a very deep or a very real being with Jesus.

III. The last point to be noted is, the impression which such a
character makes.

It was not so much what Peter and John said that astonished the
Council, as the fact of their being composed and bold enough to say
anything.

A great deal more is done by character than by anything else. Most
people in the world take their notions of Christianity from its
concrete embodiments in professing Christians. For one man that has
read his Bible, and has come to know what religion is thereby, there
are a hundred that look at you and me, and therefrom draw their
conclusions as to what religion is. It is not my sermons, but your
life, that is the most important agency for the spread of the Gospel
in this congregation. And if we, as Christian people, were to live so
as to make men say, 'Dear me, that is strange. That is not the kind
of thing that one would have expected from that man. That is of a
higher strain than he is of. Where did it come from, I wonder?' 'Ah,
he learned it of that Jesus'--if people were constrained to speak in
that style to themselves about us, dear friends, and about all our
brethren, England would be a different England from what it is to-
day. It is Christians' lives, after all, that make dints in the
world's conscience.