LORD’S character and career, and the most cogent argument for accepting Him as the Messiah, concluded all by saying: “And yet I cannot believe in Him.” No! brethren; nature is the _handmaid_ of religion. It will corroborate what is already revealed; but it is no ladder to heaven; it is no telescope, to bring near what is afar off. Look at yourselves, and at all around you, by natural light only. You perceive Providence, but not love; sin, but not its remedy; mortality, but not immortality. Read history, ponder probabilities, accredit testimony. Your mind will be instructed; your heart, perhaps, touched; but your spirit will not be quickened. It is for this reason that the advocates of religion protest so stoutly against harmless, intellectual recreation as a compromise between godliness and ungodliness; and maintain, on Scripture grounds, that however sobered, however civilised, however naturally elevated, the man is not one inch nearer to heaven and spiritual discernment who spends his Sunday in a crystal palace, or a museum of nature, than he who riots in a den of infamy. “Eye hath not seen.” The natural man receiveth not the things of the Spirit of GOD. Neither, again, hath _ear_ heard them. Others, that is, cannot describe them to us. It was this which made Paul’s preaching foolishness to the Corinthians. Judges of beauty, lovers of philosophy, fertile imaginers they were, but they had no spiritual ear; they were not enabled by the Holy Spirit; and so the preaching of Christianity sounded to them as some unknown tongue would to us; as unintelligible, unmeaning jargon. Ask an unlearned man to give you an account of some abstruse lecture he has heard; and he will be able to tell you as much as the natural man can tell you of the religious instruction he has received. He will have caught certain names and definitions; he will have remembered, that something was to be thought about _this_, and something to be done about _that_; and, if he is enthusiastic, he will, perhaps, attempt the thinking and the doing. But he will not have grasped the subject; he will have no soul to receive it; for the necessary qualification is wanting—learning, and love of learning. And so, when the Bible, or the preacher, sets forth the things of the Spirit, the natural reader, or hearer, receives them not, and cannot know them. When Christ was on earth, and spoke in simplest words, the men who heard Him, even His own disciples, knew not what He said; and if He were now to come down from heaven and preach to us, all His instruction, all his loving remonstrances, all His precepts and promises, all his glowing pictures of bliss, all His threats of wrath, would be heard by the mere natural man (by those who are not spiritually fitted for spiritual instruction) without influence, and all but without comprehension.