may seek to enter the kingdom of heaven by a
different method; they may attempt to _speculate_ their way through all
the mystery that overhangs human life, and the doubts that confuse and
baffle the human understanding; but when they find that the unaided
intellect only "spots a thicker gloom" instead of pouring a serener ray,
wearied and worn they return, as it were, to the sweet days of childhood,
and in the gentleness, and tenderness, and docility of an altered mood,
learn, as Bacon did in respect to the kingdom of nature, that the kingdom
of heaven is open only to the little child.

Again, is a man conscious of the corruption of his heart? Has he
discovered his alienation from the life and love of God, and is he now
aware that a total change must pass upon him, or that alienation must be
everlasting? Has he found out that his inclinations, and feelings, and
tastes, and sympathies are so worldly, so averse from spiritual objects,
as to be beyond his sovereignty? Does he feel vividly that the attempt to
expel this carnal mind, and to induce in the place thereof the heavenly
spontaneous glow of piety towards God and man, is precisely like the
attempt of the Ethiopian to change his skin, and the leopard his spots?

If this experience has been forced upon him, shall he meet it with the
port and bearing of a strong man? Shall he take the attitude of the old
Roman stoic, and attempt to meet the exigencies of his moral condition,
by the steady strain and hard tug of his own force? He cannot long do
this, under the clear searching ethics of the Sermon on the Mount,
without an inexpressible weariness and a profound despair. Were he within
the sphere of paganism, it might, perhaps, be otherwise. A Marcus
Aurelius could maintain this legal and self-righteous position to the end
of life, because his ideal of virtue was a very low one. Had that
high-minded pagan felt the influences of Christian ethics, had the Sermon
on the Mount searched his soul, telling him that the least emotion of
pride, anger, or lust, was a breach of that everlasting law which stood
grand and venerable before his philosophic eye, and that his virtue was
all gone, and his soul was exposed to the inflictions of justice, if even
a single thought of his heart was unconformed to the perfect rule of
right,--if, instead of the mere twilight of natural religion, there had
flared into his mind the fierce and consuming splendor of the noonday sun
of revealed truth,