T[ You have struggled for personal purity against all the temptations of the flesh; you have fortified the castle of your will with every worldly bulwark — respectability, shame, ambition, health ; you have struggled and you have conquered. But has not something better often hovered before you as a possibility, when, in a new spiritual-mindedness, purity should not be the
1 F. D. Huntington.
398 THE CARNAL AND THE SPIRITUAL
poor, half -vital, fluttering thing that you have brought out of your conflict, but strong and luxuriant, full of life and peace ? As that picture has come out before you, you have dreamed of heaven, where purity shall not be a struggle of the will, but a delight and passion of the soul. Ah, yes, it must come in heaven. It cannot come till heaven come. Only remember that spiritual- mindedness is heaven, come when it will; and if it come here and now, then here and now purity may catch this holier light, and be the perfect thing that it will be in the heaven that is to come.1
For what is freedom but the unfettered use Of all the powers that G-od for use has given? But chiefly this, — Him first, Him last, to view Through meaner powers and secondary things Effulgent, as through clouds that veil His blaze.
iii. Life.
" Life ' and " peace " are two words which certainly express the best desires of the best men. To be alive, to have all one's powers in full activity; and to be at peace, to be free from distress and tumult and uncertainty — give a man both of these, and what is there left for him to desire ? St. Paul tells us that the door to this perfect existence is spiritual-mindedness.
1. Israel had a full share of the natural and spontaneous life of antiquity. It lasted long, and it revived once and again after times of decline. But the life of Israel was lived in the presence of the Lord G-od ; it was always subordinate to obedience and faith towards One above. He was always known as walking among the trees of man's garden, a joy and glory to the worshipper, a terror to the transgressor. The sense of life which Israel enjoyed was, however, best expressed in the choice of the name " life " as a designation of that higher communion with God which grew forth in due time as the fruit of obedience and faith. The psalmist or wise man or prophet, whose heart had sought the face of the Lord, was conscious of a second or Divine life of which the first or natural life was at once the image and the foundation ; a life not imprisoned in some secret recess of his soul, but filling his whole self, and overflowing upon the earth around him. It
1 Phillips Brooks.
ROMANS viii. 6 399
did not estrange him from the natural life which he shared with other men or with lower creatures, and which he was taught to regard as proceeding from God's own breath or spirit. But it withheld him from seeking satisfaction within the lower life alone : and it made itself known not as a Divinely ordained substitute for life, for the sake of which life must be forgone ; but as itself a life indeed, the crown of all life.
Tf Among the most intensely spiritual lives in England in our time 1 should certainly put Euskin and Tennyson and Browning. What did these men live for ? They lived to spiritualize the conception of life, to break down the power of vulgar materialist ambitions. What is the keynote of Buskin's social reform ? Just this : that man is a spirit, not a mere body, nor a machine, but a spirit — a being with Divine life in him, and destined for high ends. By the needs of man's spiritual nature Euskin would arrange his daily work and his wages ; his political economy was a protest against the materialization of that science, and a plea for making it the science of man instead of a science of mere external wealth. You might almost sum up Euskin's teaching in the words of Jesus : " A man's life consisteth not in the abundance of the things which he possesseth." l
2. What is St. Paul's conception of Life ?
(1) In many passages he uses " life " in the more or less collo- quial sense of existence in the world : e.g. 1 Cor. xv. 19, " If in this life only we have hoped in Christ."
(2) At the other extremity, life has for him the definite sense of a future reward or boon which God will bestow. This may be designated as its " eschatological " usage. In this sense, life is generally qualified by the adjective eternal. The phrase invariably denotes life looked at in prospect, in its complete realization. Thus in Eom. ii. 7, life is the recompense of perseverance in righteous conduct and of the quest for glory and immortality; in Eom. v. 21, it is the goal and aim of the reign of grace through Jesus Christ; in Eom. vi. 22, it expresses the end or climax of the life of freedom from sin and bondage to God, and hence it is further defined as the gift of God (in contrast with the wages of sin) in Christ Jesus.