imself alone. A Job may take at second-hand the conventional views
of God current in his day, and through them have some touch with the
Divine; but this will seem mere hearsay when the stress of life compels
him to fight his way past the opinions of his most devout friends to a
personal vision of God. Religious experience is hardly worthy the name
until one can say, "O God, Thou art _my_ God." There is no sphere of
life in which a man is so conscious of his isolation as in his dealings
with his Highest. The most serious decisions of his life--his
apprehension of Truth, his obedience to Right, his response to Love--he
must settle for himself.

Space is but narrow--east and west--There
is not room for two abreast.

"Each one of us shall give account of himself to God." In our
consciousness of sin, in our penitence, in our faith, others may
stimulate and inspire us, may point the way saying, "Behold the Lamb of
God," may go with us in a common confession of guilt and a common
aspiration towards the Most High, but we are hardly conscious of their
fellowship; it is the living God with whom we personally have to do.

Points have we all of us within our souls
Where all stand single.

The Gospel comes as a summons to men one by one. Christ knocks at each
man's door, offering the most complete personal friendship with him.
Were there but a single child of God astray, the Good Shepherd would
adventure His life for him, and there is joy in the presence of the
angels over _one_ sinner that repenteth.

The Evangel has always been good news to sinning people who wished to be
different. In _Adam Bede_ Mrs. Poyser says of Mr. Craig, "It was a pity
he couldna' be hatched o'er again, and hatched different." The Gospel
claims to be the power of God which can make the worst and lowest of
men--an Iago or a Caliban--into sons of the Most High in the measure of
the stature of the fulness of Christ.

This has seemed incredible to most outsiders. Celsus in the Second
Century, in his attack on Christianity, wrote, "It must be clear to
everybody, I should think, that those who are sinners by nature and
training, none could change, not even by punishment--to say nothing of
doing it by pity." Dickens' Pecksniff "always said of what was very bad
that it was very natural." But it has been the glory of the Gospel that
it could speak in the past tense of some at least of the sins of its
adherents: "such _were_ some of you." Individual re