(1) Where does the fight begin ? Where did it begin with St. Paul ? Within. Here are his words : " I see a different law in my members, warring against the law of my mind." "The flesh lusteth against the spirit, and the spirit against the flesh, so that ye may not do the thing that ye would." Here and there we come upon a passage that surprises and comforts us in the flashes of autobiography that light up St. Paul's writings, as : "I keep under my body, and bring it into subjection ; lest that by any means when I have preached to others, I myself should be a castaway." We hardly knew that he had a body ; he seemed a man composed of mind and spirit ; but we see by the light of that passage a man at war with that which is seeking to be master, and which must be kept in the place of a servant, if life is not to be entirely spoilt^ It may not have been that he was in danger of yielding to those coarser cravings which belong to the flesh, but rather that his body cried out for rest and ease and comfort, and against the labour and hardship which his spirit demanded-; and what we have is a man who realizes that no outward victory could be won worthy of the name unless and until the inner
2 TIMOTHY IV. 6-8 235
victory was achieved. The Christian life ia not the passive, reclining, restful experience that some have thought, sitting at Jesua' feet, leaning on His breast. There is that side; but the battle is to get there, and to keep there. " Believe me," wrote Samuel Rutherford to the Earl of Lothian, "I find it hard wrestling, to play fair with Christ and to maintain a course of daily communion with Him." It takes the whole of a man the whole of his time to be a Christian. The world, the flesh, and the devil are all real enough to the earnest soul, and must be faced and fought in the pathway to spiritual success. The New Testament does not deceive anybody on this score. The strait gate, the narrow way, the much tribulation, the cross of which it speaks, as well as the hosts of darkness — all point to a strenuous conflict as the very condition of Christian life.
(2) And although the battle must begin within, it by no means ends there. There is a cause of Christ in the earth as well as in a man's own heart ; and if we take St. Paul as a model in any way, we see him the champion of truth and purity and liberty. Fighting against legalism in the Galatian letter, against impurity and sectarianism in the Corinthian letter, against idle- ness in the Thessalonian letter, and much more ; till we find him in the Ephesian letter, the letter of the heavenlies, charging people to take unto them the whole armour of God, that they may stand and withstand in the Christian life. yOf course, men can avoid the battle by making terms with the enemy both as far as the inward strife is concerned and the great moral struggles that are going on in the world. They can say, "These are no concern of mine, and I will not adventure myself in them." But that is not living the Christian life as St. Paul understood it. It is rather the way in which a man loses his soul.
Tl In some quarters it is taught that there is not now the same opportunity for arduous action and painful sacrifice in the cause of personal and public righteousness as existed in primitive days. Lecky writes : " The more society is organized and civilized, the greater is the scope for the amiable and the less for the heroic qualities." We cannot think so. Our age is indeed different from that of St. Paul, but it does not less demand heroic qualities. Only as we strive and suffer for right and purity as against the baser elements have we any part or lot in the glory of the future.^ ^ W. L. Watkinson, Tliemesfor Hours of Mediiation, 202.
236 THE CROWN OF RIGHTEOUSNESS
(3) But the fight, be it within or without, is pre-eminently a good fight. If we will let the Apostle give us the full meaning of this word in English, he will tell us that it is a noble, a beautiful contest. Timothy may be shrinking from it ; Demae has given it up ; but it is the one fight in the world worth waging. Everybody is fighting, some for wealth, some for place and power. Many a pitiful contest is being waged in the world. Here is the one noble conflict in which the honest warrior will ultimately triumph, and in which completest satisfaction will be his. Never is man so noble in the sight of God and His holy angels as when he is fighting against the base within him and without, striving for goodness, purity, truth, and love, fighting the good fight of faith, striving to lay hold on eternal life.
^ She went on to develop this idea of God as Law in relation to human fate, and to those problems of " free will and necessity " which Milton thought to be inscrutable mysteries, and around which metaphysicians and logicians have for ages disputed. She found her ultimate solution in a hypothesis which Mr. Mill told her that he had at one time tried but abandoned — the hypothesis of " a Being who, willing only good, leaves evil in the world solely in order to stimulate human faculties by an unremitting struggle against every form of it " ; a Perfect Being who created a Perfect- ible one, and so ordered the world that its course should be a constant struggle towards perfection. Miss Nightingale did not blink the fact that her hypothesis left mysteries unexplained. " It is evident," she wrote, "that creation is a mystery, but God's end and object (in creating) need not be a mystery. Everybody tells us that the existence of evil is incomprehensible, whereas I believe it is much more difScult — it is impossible — to conceive the existence of God (or even of a good man) without evil." Good and evil are relative terms, and neither is intelligible without the other.^