n. They are roused and stirred
to new capacity by the touch and inspiration of this Divine life. This
is what is meant when it is said that if any man be in Christ he is a new
creature. He has received into his nature this mysterious gift, or
rather this seed of the new life.

Such is the Christian doctrine of the new birth, or of the life-giving
breath of the Spirit, or of the sowing the seed of Divine life in us. You
may describe it how you please, if only you take due note of this, that
in proportion as you realise or accept this truth as in any way
intimately connected with your own personal life and conduct, all the
common things around you acquire a new importance, and I might even say
some touch of sacredness, because they are felt to be strewn with these
seeds of influence which God is sowing around us, with a hand that never
rests, through all our years, in uncounted ways.

This seed of new life which is to save you from the power of sin and the
flesh and give you new aspirations, purer tastes, stronger purposes, need
I remind you how it is sown, in what manifold and various ways? It must
be within the personal experience of some of you to testify how your
meetings in this chapel every morning may sow it. One day it falls on
your heart in some word of some hymn or prayer, or in some thought or
feeling which flashes through you, or some pricking of conscience for no
other knows what sin or fault, or in some new resolve.

Sometimes it is found that a passing word of a preacher sows it (it is
in this hope I preach to you), or again it is sown in the common ways of
daily life, by the reading of some book, or by the word or example of a
friend, or by some casual sight or experience. We remember how the seed
of an unresting and beneficent life, a life devoted to the good of the
poor and the suffering, was sown in Lord Shaftesbury by the shocking
sight of a pauper funeral when he was a boy at Harrow. So it may be sown
in your hearts you know not beforehand when or where, to grow up and bear
fruit an hundred fold.

The wind bloweth where it listeth--so is every one that is born of the
Spirit. You never know what Divine seed it may deposit in your heart at
any moment; but this you do know, that if the word of Christ be true,
whenever this gift of life comes to you it is a new birth.

And there is all the more mystery and sacredness about our common life
just because we never know how or when these seeds ma