1. The new birth is the commencement of a new life. When the child is born it begins to live. No one can tell what that mysterious power is that we call life. It is something which all the science of the world is unable either to create or to define. Now as life commences in the child at the moment of its birth, so life commences in the soul when it is born again of the Spirit. The new birth is not merely a change of habit in a living soul, it is the commencement of life where there was none before. Thus the change when a person is born again is of the same character as that which took place in Adam when God " breathed into his nostrils the breath of life; and man became a living soul." There is the same difference in a person before the new birth and after it as there is between a beautiful statue and a living man. The statue may be perfect in form, but it is lifeless ; the living person may be in some respects less Ijeautiful in figure, but he is alive, and, being alive, can move, and think, and act for God.
^ Ruskin, The Bible of Amiens ( WorkSf xzxiii. 39).
ST. JOHN III. 5 171
^ They tell me that some months ago a young Scotsman, who had been blind all his life, suddenly, by a marvellous operation, received his sight. They say that to that young man the world is another place. He wanders daily up and down in scenes with which you and I are so familiar that we do not even call them beautiful, and he sees a radiance which was hidden from ordinary everyday eyes that have gazed upon them all their lives. " Oh," he says, " the world is so beautiful ! Who would have thought it was so beautiful ? " Apt figure of the experience of the man who has found his God through the touch of a quickening Spirit.^
Lord, I was blind: I could not see In Thy marred visage any grace; But now the brightness of Thy face
In radiant vision dawns on me.
2. The fundamental difficulty in understanding the truth of the new birth and the new life lies in attempting to grasp it as a whole, and not in its special activities. All life grows vague if you try to understand its central essence. All life is clear, if you look at its special exhibitions. Ask us what life is in the most commonplace of living men, and we utterly fail to tell what it is in its unfound essence, or where it lurks among the hiding-places of the wondrous body; but when he lifts his hand and strikes, when he opens his mouth and talks, then in a moment we know unmistakably the living man. Now, so it is with the spiritual life. It is hard to tell just what the essence of the new Christian life is in any man. Theologians may contend over that, just as the physiologists contend over the essence of life in the body; but the new functions of the new existence, the way in which each separate power works differently, and each separate act is done differently, in the Christian's experience — this is not hard to trace.
(1) One of the features of the new life is self-satisfaction. — There is a bad and a good self-satisfaction. The bad self- satisfaction is only too common. It is what we call self-conceit. A man seems to himself sufficient for everything. There is no task that he vdll not accept. He does not look outside himself. The strength is in his own arm, which he can make strong as iron to subdue his foes; in his own heart, which he can make
» E. J. Campbell, The Song of Agt$, 160.
172 A NEW BEGINNING
hard as a rock to bear his troubles. For doing or enduring he needs nothing but himself. He can do anything. That self- conceit must die, or the man is a failure. Somehow or other, the man must learn that in himself he can do nothing. Then comes humility; and when in his humility he casts himself upon another strength, and expects to do nothing save in the power of God, then he is born again into a new self-satisfaction. To find himself taken by God ; to feel that God is giving him His strength ; to say, " I can do anything through Christ " ; to face the world not in his own power, but in his Master's — that is the new, the deeper self-satisfaction.
^ " The first effect of conversion," says Pascal, " is that we see the world and ourselves from a standpoint altogether new." New also are the feelings of relief after struggle, of peace and harmony, of strength suddenly acquired, that the triumph of unity brings in its train. The convert is caught up into a world of grandeurs hitherto unknown. While shackled to the Moi he was a prisoner in a strange land, cooped up in narrow bounds of space and time. Its chains once broken, he feels heir to immensities beyond all telling.^
T[ It is with man's Soul as it was with Nature : the beginning of Creation is — Light. Till the eye have vision, the whole members are in bonds. Divine moment, when over the tempest- tost Soul, as once over the wild- weltering Chaos, it is spoken: Let there be Light! Ever to the greatest that has felt such moment, is it not miraculous and God-announcing ; even as, under simpler figures, to the simplest and least ? The mad primeval Discord is hushed ; the rudely-jumbled conflicting elements bind themselves into separate Firmaments: deep silent rock-founda- tions are built beneath ; and the skyey vault with its everlasting Luminaries above : instead of a dark wasteful Chaos, we have a blooming, fertile, heaven-encompassed World.^