---

1. As the family is the unit of the nation, so the individual is the unit of the family. We get at the inmost meaning of what the gospel was intended to achieve when we ask, "What should the new life effect for each separate soul?"

2. Look out into the world around you and see, as Ezekiel saw, the torn and wandering flock, sheep without a shepherd, scattered on the dark hills in the dark and cloudy day. Many simply shrug their shoulders at the sight in despair. They say all this curse is irretrievable. Some have nothing but scorn and contempt. Not so Christ. There is nothing irretrievable with God.

3. And how did the Lord of Mercy work? It was not in accordance with the laws of the Divine will to convert the whole world, as it were, by one lightning flash. Such compulsory conversion is no conversion. Christ's word was, as ours ought to be, largely with the individual. He came to a land full of misery. He saw the blind, the halt, the leper, etc., and He cured the incurable who came to and believed on Him. But far Diviner was the miracle which He wrought upon the souls of all who received Him. The official religionism and ritual and priestliness had wholly failed to touch this mass of sin and misery. But He turned the wretched to his Father in heaven, and shed on the souls of the humble and the penitent the pure eternal ray of His transcendent love. Then each soul, however lost and fallen, revealed the beauty which was in it; and as when one uplifts a torch in a cavern full of gems, and they awaken into million-fold lustre, so at the touch of Christ's heavenly sympathy each soul flashed back its inward gleam of peculiar light.

4. Herein lies the secret of our regeneration, and of the regeneration of the world. The publicans were hated, and naturally hated, as the greedy jackals of a distasteful oppression. Yet even of these wretches Christ did not despair. One loving word to Zaccheus, and lo! one half of his goods he gives to the poor; one loving word to Matthew, and lo! he springs up an evangelist and an apostle. And so it was with yet more miserable outcasts. The woman that was a sinner, lost to purity, to innocence, to womanhood — yet He suffered her to wash His feet with her tears and to wipe them with the hairs of her head. The dying malefactor, even he repented and heard the gracious words, "This day shalt thou be with Me in paradise." And, as though to show us that these were not accidental cases, He, the Friend of publicans and sinners, embraced the degradation of all sinners alike in His pearl of parables — the parable of the prodigal son. It was the revelation of God as a loving Father; it was not any weak and beggarly observances, it was not any threats of a bodily hell which made multitudes holy in a world of paganism, where heretofore the very ideal of holiness had been unknown. And herein lies the essential and the irrevocable evidence of Christianity — the changed lives of multitudes of Christian men.

5. But here we come back to the momentous question — Christ has saved a multitude whom no man can number, but are we saved? The work of salvation is, and it must be personal; it must be not only Christ for us, but Christ in us. Alas, multitudes know nothing of personal salvation — because they love their sins better than their Saviour, or out of carelessness, defiance, or despair, and some because of the religiosity which they mistake for religion have been ossified into mere function and routine, and their souls are rotting asleep amid formula and rites; but the vast majority, I think, chiefly because they have not faith to believe that they can be healed and Christ can heal them. You know, many of you, that you are living in a state of sin — sloth, or dishonesty, or hatred, or falsehood, or impurity, or habitual discontent. You do not love your sin; it may be that you loathe it, and yet you have become a slave to it. You are like the leper, who thinks his leprosy is altogether incurable. I bid you shake off this despair; I bid you hope. Fly into the stronghold. You are the slaves of sin; but Christ came to ransom you from sin. You think that you can never be born again when you are old. So did Nicodemus; yet he became a servant of Christ. Christ is mighty to save.

6. He saves in many ways. Sometimes gently and gradually He wins the soul with cords of love; sometimes He rends from the destroyer; sometimes He breaks the hard soul with the blows of affliction; sometimes He makes it soft with the gracious rain of sorrow; but so long as there is one sign of hope He will not break the bruised reed nor quench the smouldering wick.

(Archdn. Farrar.)

---

---

KJV: Know ye not, that so many of us as were baptized into Jesus Christ were baptized into his death?

WEB: Or don't you know that all we who were baptized into Christ Jesus were baptized into his death?