momentous effort of the inner man, which is its very essence. Let reason do its perfect work: let it heap up witness upon witness, proof upon proof. Still there will come at last the moment when the call to believe will be just the same to the complete and reasonable man as it always is to the simplest child--the call to trust Another with a confidence which reason can justify but can never create. This act, which is faith, must have in it that spirit of venture, which closes with Another's invitation, which yields to Another's call. It must still have in it and about it the character of a vital motion,--of a leap upward, which dares to count on the prompting energies felt astir within it. Faith cannot transfer its business into other hands to do its work for it. It cannot request reason to take its own place, or achieve its proper results. There is no possibility of devolution here; it cannot delegate its functions to this faculty or to that. It is by forgetting this that so many men are to be found, at the close of many arguments of which they fully acknowledge the convincing force, still hovering on the brink of faith, never quite reaching it, never passing beyond the misery of a prolonged and nerveless suspense. They hang back at the very crisis, because they have hoped that their reasoning powers would, by their own force, have made belief occur. They are like birds on a bough, who should refuse to fly until they have fully known that they can. Their suspense would break and pass, if once they remembered that, to enter the Kingdom of Heaven, they must always be as little children. They must call upon the child within them. At the end, as at the beginning, of all the argumentative work, it is still the temper of a child which they must bring into play. There must still be the energy of self-committal,--the movement of a brave surrender. Once let them turn, enforced by all the pressure of reasonable evidence, to this secret fount of life within the self, and back flows the strength which was theirs long ago, when the inspiration of their innate sonship moved sweetly in them, breeding confidence, secure of itself, undaunted, and unfatigued. That sonship abides in us all, cumbered and clouded though it be by our sin; it abides on and on, fed by the succours of a Father Who can never forget or forsake, and Who is working hitherto to recover and redeem. And while it abides, faith is still possible. For its native motions are the spontaneous outcome of that spiritual kinship which, if once alive and free, impels us towards Him by Whose love we have been begotten. Reason and feeling, proof and argument--these are means and instruments by which we can invoke this sonship into action, and release it from much which fetters and enslaves. But it is the actual upspringing force of the sonship itself, which alone can be the source of belief. And as it is given to all to be sons of God, through the eternal sonship of Christ,