ing since I have
practised it steadily." The reply was "it is not wonderful when we
realize that the Lord meant what He said when He told us not to resist
evil." At this suggestion the speaker looked up with surprise and said:
"Why, is that in the New Testament? Where, in what part of it?" She
never had thought of the sermon on the Mount as a working plan, or,
indeed, of the New Testament as a handbook of life,--practical and
powerful in every detail. If we once begin to use it daily and hourly
as a working plan of life, it is marvellous how the power and the
efficiency of it will grow on us, and we shall no more be able to get
along without it than an electrician can get along without a knowledge
of the laws of electricity.

Some people have taken the New Testament so literally that they have
befogged themselves entirely with regard to its real meaning, and have
put it aside as impracticable; others have surrounded it with an
emotional idea, as something to theorize and rhapsodize about, and have
befogged themselves in that way with regard to its real power. Most
people are not clear about it because of the tradition that has come to
us through generations who have read it and heard it read in church,
and never have thought of living it outside. We can have a great deal
of church without any religion, but we cannot have religion without
true worship, whether the worship is only in our individual souls, or
whether it is also the function of a church to which we belong, with a
building dedicated to the worship of the Lord to which we go for prayer
and for instruction. If we could clear ourselves from the deadening
effects of tradition, from sentimentality, from nice theory, and from
every touch of emotional and spurious peace, and take up the New
Testament as if we were reading it for the first time, and then if we
could use it faithfully as a working plan for a time, simply as an
experiment,--it would soon cease to be an experiment, and we should not
need to be told by any one that it is a divine revelation; we would be
confident of that in our own souls. Indeed that is the only way any one
can ever be sure of revelation; it must come to each of us alone, as if
it had never come to any one before; and yet the beauty and power of it
is such that it has come to myriads before us and will come to myriads
after us in just the same way.

But there is no real revelation for any one _until he has lived what he
sees to be tru