Nothing could be more simple, more intelligible, more natural, more supernatural.  It is an analogy from an every-day fact.  Since we are what we are by the impacts of those who surround us, those who surround themselves with the highest will be those who change into the highest.  There are some men and some women in whose company we are

          ALWAYS AT OUR BEST.

While with them we cannot think mean thoughts or speak ungenerous words.  Their mere presence is elevation, purification, sanctity.  All the best stops in our nature are drawn out by their intercourse, and we find a music in our souls that was never there before.  Suppose even that influence prolonged through a month, a year, a lifetime, and what could not life become?  Here, even on the common plane of life, talking our language, walking our streets, working side by side, are sanctifiers of souls; here, breathing through common clay, is Heaven; here, energies charged even through a temporal medium with the virtue of regeneration.  If to live with men, diluted to the millionth degree with the virtue of the Highest, can exalt and purify the nature, what bounds can be set to the influence of Christ?  To live with Socrates—­with unveiled face—­must have made one wise; with Aristides, just.  Francis Assisi must have made one gentle; Savonarola, strong.  But to have lived with Christ must have made one like Christ:  that is to say, A Christian.

As a matter of fact, to live with Christ did produce this effect.  It produced it in the case of Paul.  And during Christ’s lifetime the experiment was tried in an even more startling form.  A few raw, unspiritual, uninspiring men, were admitted to the inner circle of His friendship.  The change began at once.  Day by day we can almost see the first disciple grow.  First there steals over them the faintest possible adumbration of His character, and occasionally, very occasionally, they do a thing or say a thing that they could not have done or said had they not been living there.  Slowly the spell of His Life deepens.  Reach after reach of their nature is overtaken, thawed, subjugated, sanctified.  Their manner softens, their words become more gentle, their conduct more unselfish.  As swallows who have found a summer, as frozen buds the spring, their starved humanity bursts into a fuller life.  They do not know how it is, but they are different men.

One day they find themselves like their Master, going about and doing good.  To themselves it is unaccountable, but they cannot do otherwise.  They were not told to do it, it came to them to do it.  But the people who watch them know well how to account for it—­“They have been,” they whisper, “with Jesus.”  Already even, the mark and seal of His character is upon them—­“They have been with Jesus.”  Unparalleled phenomenon, that these poor fishermen should remind other men of Christ!  Stupendous victory and mystery of

          REGENERATION