and that Christianity has survived more than 1800 years. It is good for another reason; it teaches us to try to understand the feelings of those who don’t believe; it teaches us to try to put ourselves in their place, to try to understand how it is they don’t agree with us; to make all allowances for the honesty of their disbelief, to try to enter fairly into their motives and feelings. If we don’t do this, we are in danger of being hard, and bitter, and unjust in contending for him, but not in his spirit; forgetting that there is not one of those who disbelieve in him, for whom he has not died, forgetting that an unbeliever is not an enemy to be driven back from the fortress, but an exile to be won back by earnest reasoning to his Father in Heaven. Let us learn, above all, that in all our arguments for Christianity we should be filled with the spirit of him for whom we plead, and that we should manifest the truth in love. We ask you then to contemplate this scene, in which we find Christ winning and losing disciples, and learn something. And the first thing we have to remark is this, how very little those that come and go seem to have been influenced by what we call the evidences of Christianity. They were doubtless drawn to Christ by the fame of his miracles, it does not seem to have been his miracles that converted them. It was as “he said those words many believed on him.” Then he said something else, and they left him. It was not that they doubted of his ability to work miracles, but because something he said offended them. They came to him not altogether in consequence of his miracles, and they left him in spite of his miracles. It teaches us that the religion of Christ was not received unquestioningly, even in the case of his miracles, for in spite of his miracles they ventured to question his doctrine; so that those who say Christianity was received in an ignorant age are contradicted by the story of Christianity itself, for many of those who saw his miracles rejected him.