uttering itself in new actions because it
is the new life. "Except a man be born again he cannot see the kingdom
of God." So Jesus said to Nicodemus the ruler, Nicodemus the amateur in
religions, who came and said, "Perhaps this teacher has something else
that I can bind into my catalogue of truths and hold it." Jesus looked
him in the face and said: "It is not that, my friend, it is not that; it
is to be a new man, it is to be born again. It is to have the new life,
which is the old life, which is the eternal life. So alone does man
enter into the kingdom of God." I cannot help believing all the time
that if our young men knew this, religion would lift itself up and have
a dignity and greatness--not a thing for weak souls, but a thing for the
manliest soul. Just because of its manliness it is easy. "Is it easy or
is it hard, this religion of yours?" people say to us. I am sure I do
not know the easy and the hard things. I cannot tell the difference.
What is easier than for a man to breathe? And yet, have you never seen a
breathless man, a man in whom the breathing was almost stopped, a
drowning man, an exhausted man? have you never seen, when the breath was
put once more to his nostrils and brought down once more into his empty
lungs, the struggle with which he came back to it? It was the hardest
thing for him to do, so much harder for him to live than it was for him
to die. But by and by see him on his feet, going about his work, helping
his fellow-men, living his life, rejoicing in his days, guarding
against his dangers, full of life. Is life a hard thing for him? You
don't talk about its being hard or easy any more than you talk about
life itself. The man who lives in God knows no life except the life of
God. Let men know that it is not mere trifling, it is not a thing to be
dallied with for an instant, it is not a thing for a man to convince
himself by an argument, and then keep as it were locked in a shelf: it
is something that is so deep and serious, so deep and serious that when
a man has once tested it there is no more chance of his going out of it
than there is of his going out of the friendship and the love which
holds him with its perpetual expression, with the continued deeper and
deeper manifestation of the way in which the living being belongs to him
who has a right to his life.

Now in the few moments that remain I want to take it for granted most
seriously, most earnestly, that the men who are listening