more
of that Christ. That friend, the Christ he knows at twenty-five, shall
be different from the Christ he knew at ten, just exactly as the friend
I know at fifty is different from the friend I knew at thirty, twenty
years ago; and yet He is the same friend still, forever opening the
richness of an ever richer life, filling it with new experiences, with
new manifestations of Himself. Let him drop something which seemed to
him to be a part of the religion, but was only a temporary phase or
condition of it, going forward with the soul all through the opening
stages of life, and at last going forward with the soul into the life
where it shall see as all along it has been seen, and know as it has
been known. The old legend was that the clothes of the Israelites, which
the Bible said waxed not old upon them in the desert during those forty
years, not merely waxed not old those forty years, but grew with their
growth, so that the little Hebrew who crossed the Red Sea in his boy's
clothes wore the same clothes when he entered into the Promised Land. It
is the parable of that which comes to the man who has a true Christian
faith, a faith which comes in the personal friendship of Christ, a faith
which comes not in the belief of certain things about Him, not in the
doing slavishly of certain things which it seemed as if it had been said
by Him that we must do, but in the personal entrance into His nature in
a life for Him, in which He is able to send His life down into us.

Then there is another thing that people are always thinking, that I hear
very often from men, and that I have no doubt that I should hear from
many of you, one by one. You talk about your earlier religion as if it
had been some sort of a bondage from which you had escaped. How common
it is to hear men, especially in this region, say: "I would be, perhaps,
religious, except that there was so much religion forced upon me in my
earliest days. I was driven to church when I was a boy, in those old
Puritan days. I went to school, where they forced prayers upon me all
the time. I was made to be religious, so now I cannot be religious." Was
there ever a more dreadful thing than for a soul to say that, because,
it may be, of the unwisdom, or the imprudence, the overzeal and the
mistaken zeal of other men, we have not got the full blessing of that
rich, open, free life with Christ which the youth may have, and
therefore we will abandon the privileges of our higher life