dropped, eighteen hundred years ago, from the lips
of that august Being who is now seated upon the throne of heaven, and who
knows this very instant the effect which they are producing in the heart
of every one who either reads or hears them. Let us remember that these
few and simple words do verily contain the key to everlasting life and
glory. In knowing what they mean, we know, infallibly, the way to heaven.
"I tell you, that many prophets and kings have desired to see those
things which we see, and have not seen them: and to hear those things
which we hear, and have not heard them." How many a thoughtful pagan, in
the centuries that have passed and gone, would in all probability have
turned a most attentive ear, had he heard, as we do, from the lips of an
unerring Teacher, that a child-like reception of a certain particular
truth,--and that not recondite and metaphysical, but simple as childhood
itself, and to be received by a little child's act,--would infallibly
conduct to the elysium that haunted and tantalized him.

That which hinders us is our pride, our "manhood." The act of faith is a
child's act; and a child's act, though intrinsically the easiest of any,
is relatively the most difficult of all. It implies the surrender of our
self-will, our self-love, our proud manhood; and never was a truer remark
made than that of Ullmann, that "in no one thing is the strength of a
man's will so manifested, as in his having no will of his own."[4]
"Christianity,"--says Jeremy Taylor,--"is the easiest and the hardest
thing in the world. It is like a secret in arithmetic; infinitely hard
till it be found out by a right operation, and then it is so plain we
wonder we did not understand it earlier." How hard, how impossible
without that Divine grace which makes all such central and revolutionary
acts easy and genial to the soul,--how hard it is to cease from our own
works, and really become docile and recipient children, believing on the
Lord Jesus Christ, and trusting in Him, simply and solely, for salvation.

[Footnote 1: "Concerning the object of felicity in heaven, we are agreed
that it can be no other than the blessed God himself, the
all-comprehending good, fully adequate to the highest and most enlarged
reasonable desires. But the contemperation of our faculties to the holy,
blissful object, is so necessary to our satisfying fruition, that without
this we are no more capable thereof, than a brute of the festivities