“Hath not a Jew eyes? hath not a Jew hands, organs, dimensions, senses, affections, passions?” In effecting the renovation of a man the external agent is ever an _idea_, of such potency as to be seized upon with avidity by the mind, and, therefore, to make an impression upon the nervous substance of the cerebrum. The potency of an idea depends upon the fact of its being complementary to some desire or affection within the man. Man wants knowledge, for example, and power, and esteem, and love, and company; also, he has within him capacities for love, esteem, gratitude, reverence, kindness. He has an unrecognised craving for an object on which to spend the good that is in him. The idea which makes a strong appeal to any one of his primal desires and affections must needs meet with a response. Such idea and such capacity are made for one another; apart, they are meaningless as ball and socket; together, they are a _joint_, effective in a thousand ways. But the man who is utterly depraved has no capacity for gratitude, for example? Yes, he has; depravity is a disease, a morbid condition; beneath is the man, capable of recovery. This is hardly the place to consider them, but think for a moment of the fitness of the ideas which are summed up in the thought of Christ to be presented to the poor degraded soul: divine aid and compassion for his neglected body; divine love for his loneliness; divine forgiveness in lieu of the shame of his sin; divine esteem for his self-contempt; divine goodness and beauty to call forth the passion of love and loyalty that is in him; the Story of the Cross, the lifting up, which perhaps no human soul is able to resist if it be fitly put. And the divine idea once received, the divine life is imparted also, grows, is fostered and cherished by the Holy Ghost. The man is a new creature, with other aims, and other thoughts, and a life out of himself. The old things have passed away, and all things have become new--the physical being embodying, so to speak, the new life of the spirit. We may well believe, indeed, that “conversion” is so proper to the physical and spiritual constitution of man that it is inevitable to all of us if only the ideas summed up in Christ be fitly introduced to the soul. The question then turns, not upon the possibility of converting the most depraved, nor upon the potency of the ideas to be presented, but altogether upon the power of putting these ideas so that a man shall recognise and seize upon the fulness of Christ as the necessary complement to the emptiness of which he is aware. THE HABITS OF THE GOOD LIFE.