Regeneration, or the New Birth, is one of the key words in which Christianity asserts its claim to be a supernatural religion. Nowhere in the pages of the New Testament does natural piety speak to us more plainly than on the lips of the Pharisee Nicodemus, who first heard this claim made. Rabbi, we know that thou art a teacher come from God. A heaven-sent teacher, with a new message of spiritual things-that was how this God-fearing Jew summed up the significance of Jesus. That is how the best Jews of all times have envisaged him. That is the place which the founder is Islam explicitly gave him, and which Mahommed's followers still assign to him to-day, in the history of mankind. That, let us add, is how men have thought of him who yet doubted on other grounds whether indeed there be a God-men like Mill or Renan or H.G. Wells. And it represents the thought of thousands whose attachment to any Church or Creed is of the loosest, and who yet turn to Christ and to his teaching with reverence and admiration--Unitarians like Martineau, poets like Matthew Arnold, philosophers like Emerson, seekers after truth like Kirsopp Lake or T.R. Glover.

And yet Christ himself met this approach with something almost like a rebuff. Verily, verily I say unto thee, Except a man be born again, he cannot see the Kingdom of God. What he means is that Christianity, the total fact and essential genius of it, cannot be apprehended by any natural faculties of men nor explained in the categories of any other faith. It is unique in, sui generis, "from heaven." through the Incarnation of the Son of God, and through his Death, Resurrection, and Ascension, a new relationship between God and man, a new status for man, has been made possible in the world. The Kingdom of Heaven is not simply a flowery name for the ardent, and often self-contradictory, ideals that you or I may happen to have for the improvement of society. It is a new and supernatural order actually established in human history and encroaching more and more, as the Church expands, upon the sphere of natural civilisation. Various terms are used in the New Testament to express it. Some refer to its visible embodiment in the Church, as when St. Paul speaks of the Body of Christ, of incorporation in, and union with, him, of our being members of Christ, of the Israel of God, of the Covenant, Others bring out its cosmic significance-such as St. Paul's metaphor of the "New Creation"; while yet others emphasise its meaning for the individual-as when St. John speaks of Christians being "children" or "sons" of God, or St. Peter of our being "re-begotten," or St. Paul of our receiving the "adoption of sons" or being made "heirs of God." But all alike point unequivocally to one idea, viz., the idea of Christianity as being the sphere of a new and supernatural relationship, established by the finished work of Christ, and renewed in Christians by the Holy Spirit.

I want to stress that word "relationship." what are we if not living and conscious centres of relationship? That was what Aristotle meant when he called man "a social animal." Take away from anyone his loves and his hates, his fears and his desires, his jealousies, his loyalties, and his worship-and how little is left of him! Certainly, there is a subject behind all these sentiments, a soul in which they inhere: but it is through the relationships implied in these sentiments that the soul functions, grows,-or dies. That is why we urge our boys and girls in their formative years to be careful, as the phrase is, what company they keep. Ruskin used to say that if he had the training of a child during its first seven years he would guarantee to mould its character for life. Only for seven years!-years when the capacity for knowledge or for choice is at its lowest. Yet they are enough. For company is the strongest of all influences we know, for good and for evil. So silently, secretly, unwittingly do our relationships touch this instinctive life to fine issues of joy or sorrow, sympathy or shame and on these reaction the sensitive souls feeds and changes and lives.

To be born, no less than to die, must surely be, in Peter Pan's phrase, "an awfully great adventure." To become a son or daughter, a brother or a sister or a grandchild; to enter a world requiring such things as clothes and baths and bottles; to be gazed at, kissed, caressed; to be able to cry, and to attract attention by doing so-here are a host of new relationships that might well appal the heart of the stoutest infant. The vital energy, in which biologists find the clue to evolution, is strong enough not only to project the child into this world, but to maintain it when it arrives. And so the infant, like Jeshurun, waxes fat and kicks. Aeons upon aeons have gone to the making of it; atoms, electrons, chemicals, all the mysteries of matter, have gone to build up the tiny body; all the history of the race has been recapitulated in its embryonic life-and now here it is, itself and none other; a living souls; heir of the ages and their potential master; the advance guard of humanity; the drummer-boy of the army of evolution.

And the Christian doctrine of Regeneration asserts that becoming a Christian or seeking the Kingdom of God is analogous to that. It involves a change no less momentous, a venture no less bold, the acceptance of relationships no less novel. It asserts that this natural world we enter at birth is not the whole world, nor the real world, but a part only, and a part that has been spoiled. This cosmic system that we see and measure and describe, this Nature which is the inspiration of artist and poet, is but an enclave within the whole order of God's creation-His handiwork indeed, and yet so walled off from the rest by human pride and distrust-or should we say, by the devil?-that his power and goodness are not completely manifest within it. To those who charge Catholic theology with an antiquated dualism, we can reply in the words of Erigena: "Nature and grace are one, the ways of Nature being manifestations of grace, and grace achieving its purposes through the eternal orderliness of Nature." And yet in practical experience Nature and Supernature denote two series of relationships which it is convenient and necessary to distinguish. For man's true end and home is not in Nature, but in Supernature, or, as St. Paul says, "in the heavenly places." Creature of earth, he is made for eternal life; child of corruption, he is destined for incorruption; born into this life, he is born anew into immortality. All flesh is as grass, and all the glory of man as the flowers of grass. And yet weeping o'er the grave we make our song: alleluya, alleluya, alleluya. For we are children of the Father which hath made us meet to be partakers of the inheritance of the saints in light: who hath delivered us from the power of darkness and hath translated us into the Kingdom of his dear Son, in whom we have redemption through his blood.

But how? Some say, by knowledge. That was the answer of Gthe and the "Illumination" in Germany over a century ago. It was the answer of the Neo-platonists and before then of the Gnostics in the early centuries of Christianity. It was the answer of the noblest of the ancient Greeks, the philosopher Plato. And it carries with it the corollary which Plato, at least, did not shrink from, that sin is ignorance and that the panacea for it is education. By all means let us have all the education possible, and that too, of the best-we who love our schools will no forget that-but let us face the facts. And the facts are that education without reference to man's supernatural end leads sooner or later to disaster; and that man's supernatural end is not discerned except by the gift of the Holy ghost. Others say that we are translated in to the Kingdom of Heaven by Conversion. God give us more and more conversion! But conversion is not regeneration. Conversion is the turning of the mind and the will to embrace the new relationships into which we have been re-begotten by his living and abiding Word. We are regenerated once for all by his sovereign act in Baptism; but we need to be converted-is it not true?-each week, each day. But already we are on the threshold of the true answer. We are made heirs of the Life Eternal, we are privileged with the new and heavenly relationships, by God's own free gift of grace bestowed in Baptism. That is "the laver of regeneration." wherein all that unfits us by nature for the heavenly kingdom is washed away, and we are incorporated in the risen and ascended Christ, the First-born of the New Creation. Irenæus describes it by a fine metaphor when, echoing St. Paul, he compares it to the grafting of a wild olive on a fruitful one. The wild graft is not destroyed nor lost: but the strong, new life of the fruitful olive flows into it and changes it, so that it too bears fruit. What is given to the graft is a new relationship; and there issue new potentialities. So when the soul is baptized into Christ, and made a partaker of the covenant which was established in his Blood and of the life which flows from his Resurrection, it too is revitalised and given new potentialities from the world of grace abounding, into which it is re-born.

Yet we must be careful, Natural analogies hold good of spiritual things; but they never go all the way. Graft the wild olive on the fruitful one and Nature does the rest. Man is more than a child of Nature. Is not the error of magic just this-that it reduces him to that;-that it proceeds as though his reason and his power of choice were negligible in the ultimate issues? No, Bible and Church alike insist that for the acceptance of the heavenly gift he himself must co-operate: he must have Faith It is all in the story of Philip and the Ethiopian. and as they went on their way, they came unto a certain water: and the eunuch said, See, here is water; what doth hinder me to be baptized? And Philip said, If thou believest with all thine heart, thou mayest. And he answered and said, I believe that Jesus Christ is the Son of God. And he baptized him.

I expect that may-perhaps most-in this hall this afternoon are god-parents. I want to ask, What are you doing about it? Do you realise that God accepted your faith at the font on your god-child's behalf, as Jesus himself accepted the centurion's faith for the healing of his son? We speak of fencing the altar: do we not need to fence the font? Is it not time that the choice of sponsors ceased to be a matter of social amenity and become a matter of faith? I appeal for a public opinion which will demand a greater reality and a sterner scrupulousness in the administration of this holy Sacrament, and which will bear in mind all the implications of the Prayer-Book requirement that sponsors should attend the Confirmation of their god-children.

And then we come back to the solemn and tremendous thought of our own regeneration, our own baptism, our own promises to renounce, to believe, and to obey. Nowhere in the New Testament is the moral appeal of Christianity more stirring than in the first chapter of St. Peter's First Epistle, where he approaches his readers with the reminder of their supernatural calling. Not only are they begotten anew unto a living hope by the resurrection of Jesus Christ from the dead, but they are kept by the power of God through faith unto salvation. In that salvation-that new relationship-they find a constant source of joy, even though they find life full of temptations and trials. For they look beyond the trial to One whom they seek to glorify by the way they bear it: whom they love though they have never seen him: whom they cling to in faith, and are made happy. Then he tells them how their very conflict and victory is the central mystery of the whole world; how it is bound up-your battle and mine-with our Lord's Passion and victory, which the prophets long ago foretold, and over which still the angels stoop in tender, vigilant gaze. And finally he turns to them with words of encouragement and exhortation. Be sober, he says, in your thoughts, be disciplined in your faith, keep before you the hope of blessedness at the last. Holy your calling: in holiness live. A great cost has gone to your redemption-even the precious blood of Christ, your Sacrifice and your Saviour: think of that. Think of it to its glorious issue in his risen and ascended life, so thinking, centre your hope and faith in God: and then go out into the world and let your faith be made perfect, as alone it can be, in pure, fervent, and unfeigned love of the brethren.

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