“Now, though so many attempts have been made, with only partial success, to define Life, as I told you a while ago, I suppose all of us have a fair working idea of it, at least as regards this outside world. We know that a plant or animal is dead when it ceases, as Herbert Spencer says, to ‘correspond with its environment;’ that is, to receive something from and return something to the air or water or earth around it. Now, spiritual Life, or eternal Life, as we often call it, is exactly the same. We must correspond with our Environment, in Whom ‘we live and move and have our being;’ that is, our _breathing_, according to Mr. Matthew Arnold. We must breathe in Truth, and breathe out Love, if we would correspond with _this_ environment; and then—because He lives we shall live also. For there is one peculiarity about Life. It cannot stand still, any more than we can cease breathing; it must grow, else it ceases to be Life and becomes Death. And so He says _because_ I live ye shall live also. Not merely His disciples, not merely those who profess to believe on Him, but the whole world shall live also. ‘The Kingdom of God is like leaven which a woman took and hid in three measures of meal until _the whole_ was leavened.’ “If you look back on the story of the world, you will see for yourselves how the history of mankind is a history of progress, of climbing higher and higher. That the world, as a whole, is perceptibly better off, freer, wiser, and purer, than it was even a hundred years ago, is a proposition which I suppose few will controvert; but if I say that all this, and the almost incalculable progress that preceded it, is owing to the Life of Christ which is in the world, there will not fail some to deny it. Yet growth implies life, cannot be without life; and he who refuses to ascribe certain known results to an adequate cause must be able to produce in evidence some other cause capable of producing the same effects. But this is the very point where those who deny that the life of Christ _is_, not _was_, in the world, utterly fail. Also, their strongest point against Christianity is that the lives of those who do not believe in the Divinity of Jesus Christ often resemble more nearly what we call His human character than the lives of professing Christians. Well, why not? He has told us Himself that He does not care to be called Lord, Lord, unless we do the things that He says; and if we really do the things that He says, if we are pure, true, unselfish, and loving, then, whether we know it or not, His life _is in us_, and will transform us into its own likeness, just as surely as the life of the acorn transforms air, earth, and water into the likeness of an oak. “Perhaps there are some here who think that Jesus Christ was simply a good man, not even a perfect man, far less the God-man. In fact, I have often heard just such words from some whom I see here before me.