Now, this is the purpose for which holy sacraments have been given to us. They are the means whereby that movement, which was given to our nature at large when Christ took manhood, may be extended to you and me for our individual welfare. When St. Paul reminds the Galatians of their calling in Christ, He speaks to them as “my little children, of whom I travail in birth again, until Christ be formed in you.” And so it must be with each one of us. The act whereby Christ joins Himself to every believer is as truly a birth from above, it is really the bestowing a new and divine life, as was His miraculous conception in the virgin’s womb. When Christ took our nature, this work was done once for all on behalf of all mankind; when Christ gives Himself to each single believer, it is done separately for his individual benefit. But, it depends upon the same gracious power, that which gives, to each of us, a new birth into grace[, which] is Christ bestowing Himself upon us by actual union, even as He gave Himself to the open world by that miraculous birth of which this season of Advent reminds us. Some people look upon the new birth into Christ as depending only on their inward feelings and as wrought entirely by meditation within their own minds. Inward feeling is necessary, but it cannot have its full effect unless Christ truly comes to us from without, with that same divine power with which He appeared, of old time, on the mount or in the Temple.
From: “The Great Example,” a sermon on Romans 13:14, in Sermons on the New Birth of Man’s Nature by Robert Isaac Wilberforce (Philadelphia: H. Hooker, 1850), pp. 67-68.
Robert Isaac Wilberforce (1802-1857) was a son of the great British parliamentarian and abolitionist, William Wilberforce (1759-1833). He took Anglican orders as a young man. However, sometime after his father’s death, he converted to Roman Catholicism.
