pt a man be born again he cannot
see the Kingdom of God._

Instantaneous renewal of the character and the life is not even claimed
by other faiths; there is in them nothing like the conversion of Saul of
Tarsus, or that of thousands of others well known in the history of
Christian experience. There are no such changes in men who, from having
led lives of profligacy and irreligion, have turned at once into paths
of righteousness--have tamed their wild propensities and submitted
themselves to the gentle law of love. But under Christian influence we
have seen Africaner the savage transformed to a tractable, humane, and
loving disciple. We have seen the wild and bloodthirsty Koord subdued
and made as a little child. We have seen the cannibal King Thokambo, of
Fiji, turned from his cruelty to a simple, childlike faith, and made to
prefer the good of his people to the glory of a powerless sceptre. Whole
races, like the Northmen, have been tamed from savagery and made
peaceable and earnest followers of Christ. In our own time it has been
said of a missionary in the South Pacific Islands, "that when he arrived
on his field there were no Christians, and when he closed his labors
there were no heathen."

The religion of Gautama has won whole tribes of men, Hinduism and
Mohammedanism are even now winning converts from fetish-worshipping
races, but, so far as I know, none of these faiths have ever made
converts except either by war or by the presentation of such motives as
might appeal to the natural heart of man; there has been no spiritual
transformation. If it be said that the Buddhist Nirvana and the Hindu
doctrine of final absorption cannot attract the natural heart, the ready
answer is that Nirvana and absorption are not the real inspiration of
their respective systems. They are so far removed into the dim future as
to exert no practical influence on the great mass of men. The future
estate that is really expected and desired is a happy ideal
transmigration, and perhaps many of them; and the chief felicity of the
Hindu is that no particular estate is prescribed. While the Christian is
promised a heaven to which the natural heart does not aspire, the Hindu
may imagine and prefigure his own heaven. His next life may be as carnal
as the celestial hunting-ground of the Indian or the promised paradise
of the Moslem. It may be only the air-castle of a day-dreamer. There is
no moral transformation. There is no expulsive power of a