urselves as we should.

But the power is offered us. And it is for you young men to lay fast
hold of it, and accept the world's challenge in a way it has never been
handled and faced before. "Do not talk about the things you believe,"
says the world to us who name the name of Christ; "convince me that you
believe by what you do." And this is said, not from an indifference to
dogma, as some would have us think. It means that a man's beliefs are
between himself and God. It is what comes out of his belief, that can
be reckoned with amid the forces of our everyday life.

You place in cold sheet one of the loftiest passages of a great
composer before a man sensitive to music, but who does not know one
note from the other, and he looks at it with indifference. You put the
sheet before a gifted organist seated at his instrument; and as the
melody rolls forth in swells of power, then in cadences of persuasive
pathos, the indifference of the man vanishes as he catches his breath
like a sob, and feels a prayer he cannot speak. We say we believe in
Christ, and men turn aside with indifference. We live Christ, and men
love Him. It is common enough to find this indifference about
religion, and a marked want of what I have called intellectual
confidence in Christianity as we preach it from the pulpit. But I have
never yet found a man infidel to the fruits of its spirit, which are,
love, peace, goodness, a living faith, and a genuine self-sacrifice.
Before men can be expected to become Christ-like, they must know what
Christ is like, and how far are we prepared to put our lives before men
as an answer to the question: "What think ye of Christ?"

Preach Christ by living Christ. "All men," says the Koran, "are
commanded by the Saint." And no man ever casts the wealth of his life
and the crown of his devotion at the feet of Jesus without "quickening
the earth with a diviner life, and uplifting it with a new courage."
One of the most brilliant of the eighteenth-century poets said: "The
lapse of time changes all but man, who ever has been, and ever will be,
just what he is." Which means that man is by make incurably selfish.
This is a lie. And it is the worst kind of lying, for it represents
not only the inability to find good in man, but the inability to
believe that there is good to be found. My own stand is where thought
and experience have forced me. From human nature left to itself I hope
for nothing; with that natur