Now, this was the vary last kind of message that the Pharisees of Christ’s day were looking for.  They wanted the world put right—­according to their own ideas of right—­it is true; but to be told that they must begin with themselves was not at all what they wanted.  Are not many of us in the same case to-day?  We are all eager for reforms, at least so long as they are from without.  We have a touching faith in the power of machinery and organization.  We are quite sure that if Parliament would only pass this, that, and the other bit of legislative reform, on which our hearts are set, the millennium would be here, if not by the morning post, at least by the session’s end.  And there is much, undoubtedly, that Parliament can and ought to do for us.  Nevertheless, was not Christ right?  Instead of the old prayer, “Create in me a clean heart, O God; and renew a right spirit within me,” some of us, as one writer says, would rather pray, “Create a better social order, O God; and renew a right relation between various classes of men.”  We are ready to begin anywhere rather than with ourselves, at any point in the big circumference rather than at the centre.  “I don’t deny, my friends,” wrote Charles Kingsley to the Chartists, “it is much cheaper and pleasanter to be reformed by the devil than by God; for God will only reform society on the condition of our reforming every man his own self, while the devil is quite ready to help us to mend the laws and the Parliament, earth and heaven, without ever starting such an impertinent and ‘personal’ request as that a man should mend himself.”  Yet without self-reform nothing is possible.  “The character of the aggregate,” says Herbert Spencer, “is determined by the characters of the units.”  And he illustrates thus:  Suppose a man building with good, square, well-burnt bricks; without the use of mortar he may build a wall of a certain height and stability.  But if his bricks are warped and cracked or broken, the wall cannot be of the same height and stability.  If again, instead of bricks he use cannon-balls then he cannot build a wall at all; at most, something in the form of a pyramid with a square or rectangular base.  And if, once more, for cannon-balls we substitute rough, unhewn boulders, no definite stable form is possible.  “The character of the aggregate is, determined by the characters of the units.”  Every attempt to reconstruct society which leaves out of account the character of the men and women who constitute society is foredoomed to failure.  Behind every social problem stands the greater problem of the individual, the redemption of character.  We may get, as assuredly we ought to get, better houses for the working-classes; but unless we also get better working-classes for the houses, we shall not have greatly mended matters.  And no turn of the Parliamentary machine will produce these for us.  We can pass new laws; only the grace of God can make new men.  “For my part,” says Kingsley once more, speaking through the lips of his tailor-poet, “I seem to have learnt that the only thing to regenerate the world is not more of any system, good or bad; but simply more of the Spirit of God.” “Except a man be born anew, he cannot see the kingdom of God.”