at you may read it any way, spell it out in your youth
letter by letter, read it through your tears as you reach middle life
and your heart is aching, hold it against your heart when your eyes are
too dim to read its pages, and it will yield to you a sweetness which
is actually beyond the power of man to describe. This is a wonderful
Book and in this Book God reveals himself. Handle it irreverently and
you will have no vision.

Third: It seems to me that the church is not what she ought to be, and
this being true the vision is denied. One of my friends said the other
day that the difficulty with the church is that she has lost her
interrogation point. At the day of Pentecost people were saying, "What
do these things mean?" To-day they never think of saying it. I have
been told in a little pamphlet issued by an English writer that the
church has lost her possessive case, which means that somehow she has
gone on without realizing that the risen, glorified Christ is her
blessed Lord. It is a great thing to say "Jesus"; infinitely greater
is it to say "My Jesus." The church has lost her imperative mode. In
days that are past it was possible for the church to stand in the
presence of evil and say, "In the name of Almighty God this iniquity
must stop." But to-day it is not possible. The church has lost her
present tense. We are constantly looking for blessings in the future.
God's promises are all written for the present. It is to the church on
fire that God grants a vision.

Fourth: Some of the difficulty must rest with us as ministers of the
Gospel. I fear that some of us have lost our message. It has loosened
its grip upon us, and you never can move another man until you are
first moved yourself by the message you would give to him.

At a great gathering not long ago I heard a distinguished Eastern
professor speaking. The topic of his lecture was "My Foster Children,"
and these foster children were some animals which he had had as pets,
whose habits he had carefully studied. One was a Gila monster from the
plains of Arizona, another was a horned owl, the third was a rat, and
the fourth was an opossum. If you can imagine more uninteresting
subjects than these you are more imaginative than myself, and yet he
thrilled me and held three thousand people in breathless interest. Oh,
my brethren, if I believe in Jesus Christ as the Son of God and as a
Savior able not only to save to the uttermost but to keep t