forever; and who, as such, is the head and
beginning of the new creation of God.

By him it is communicated to those who own him as their atoning
sacrifice.

The instrument is the word of the Gospel.

The agent is the Holy Spirit.

The Word is preached--it falls into the heart of the believer as
seed into the ground.

The Spirit quickens it--the new life is germinated.

That new life is the life and nature of the risen one, our great God
and Saviour Jesus Christ, the man in the glory; it is the mind of
him who is called Christ, and it is, therefore, in final term--"the
mind of Christ."

It is wrought, not in the soul, but in the spirit of the believer.

By no slow process does it enter--this life of the risen Lord--but
by absolute fiat--the fiat of him who said--"Lazarus, come forth."

It is fiat life.

Its entrance into a human being is as light flashes into darkness.

It is as instantaneous as when God of old said, "Let there be
light," and light burst over a world cataclysmically fallen into
chaos.

It is as transforming as when morning awakens the sleeping earth and
hill and dale, river and sea, shine forth in their beauty.

It is as startling as when Lazarus himself, obeying the voice of his
Lord, rose from the dead and came forth.

Behold the illustration of it.

Here is a man who grovelled in the lowest animalism.

He was a husband and father. What a husband! and what a father!

She who was his wife fled oftentimes at the very sound of his
footsteps, shivering with the same fear, as though he who had
solemnly sworn to love and protect her, were a mad brute intent on
gratifying his own fierce lust, and ready with unchecked sensualism
to trample her in the mire of his bestiality. A father, whose very
name made the cheeks of the children grow white and their pulses
almost to cease with terror. A drunkard, who drowned in his cup, not
only wife and children and home and all outward decency, but every
characteristic of truth and honesty and manhood of his own soul. A
man, who through self-indulgence and the incessant yielding to
unspeakable desires, had become little better than a human sewer,
through whom the slime and indescribable filth of fallen and
degraded humanity found its unhindered course. A human being, who
had become a lazar spot, a walking pest, whose inmost thought rotted
and putrified his own mind; and whose words without license were a
poison and contagion to every one whose ears