to work.  These are the principles, these are the pictures which represent that which we have in mind as we come together for a little while each Monday in these few weeks, in order that we may think about things of God and try to realize the depth of our own human life.  The first thing that we ought to understand about it is that when we turn aside from life it is only that we go deeper into life.  This hour does not stand apart from the rest of the hours of the week, in that we are dealing with things in which the rest of the week has no concern.  He who understands life deeply and fully, understands life truly; he has forever renewed his life; and if there comes into our hearts, in the life which we are living, a perpetual sense that life needs renewal, a richening and refreshing, then it is in order that we may go down into the depths and see what lies at the root of things—­things that we are perpetually doing and thinking.  It is this that brought us together here:  it is that we may open to ourselves some newer, higher life.  It is that we may understand the life that we may live, along side of and as a richer development of that life which we are living from day to day, which we have been living during the years of our life.  How that idea has haunted men in every period of their existence, how it is haunting you, that there is some higher life which it is possible to live!  There has never been a religion that has not started there, lifted up its eyes and seen, afar off, what it was possible for man to do from day to day, in contrast with the things which men immediately and presently are.  There is not any moment of the human soul which has not rested upon some great conception that man was a nobler being than he was ordinarily conceiving himself to be; that he was not destined to the things which were ordinarily occupying his life; that he might be living a greater and nobler life.  It is because the Christian Scriptures have laid most earnestly hold of this idea, it is because it was represented not simply in the words which Christ said, but in the very being which Christ was, that we go to them to get the inspiration and the indication, the revelation and the enlightenment which we need.  I have read to you these few words in which Christ declares the whole subject, the whole character of which His life is and what His work is about to do, because it seems to me that they strike at once the key-note of that which we want to understand.  They let us enter into the full conception of that which the new life which is offered to man really is.  There are two conceptions which come to every man when he is entering upon a new life, changing his present life to something that is different from the present life, and being a different sort of creature and living in a different sort of a way.  The first way in which it presents itself to him—­almost always at the beginning of every religion, perhaps—­is in the way of restraint and imprisonment.  Man