There are two points of contact between the Pauline presentation of truth on this subject, and that which we have found in our Lord's teaching, which require to be emphasized. (1) There is in both the same outlook to immortality ; the spirit in Paul which makes men children of God is also the earnest of a life which vanquishes death (Ro 811, 2 Co ;3«-, Eph lisf). Indeed the new life is often identified with the resurrection life of Jesus in such a way that the present spiritual experience of it seems rather a deduction from that tran- scendent possession than something having an independent existence of its own. This applies, e rj., to Ro 61-11, Eph 21-^. In the Gospel, and in the experience of the Christian, there is the revela- tion at once of fwT? and a<pdap(Tla (2 Ti fi"). (2) There is in both our Lord and St. Paul the same idea that the new life is entered on through a death. ' Our old man was crucified with Christ' (Ro (J-*), and it it is through that crucifixion that the new man comes into being (compare what is said above, § 1 ad fin.). It is one process, one experience, in man, in which the Adam dies and the Christ comes to be. In Paul the process is normally connected with bap- tism, and in view of Ro B'-*-, Col 2ii-i3, it is not easy to maintain that Paul could not have written ' the laver of regeneration, and of renewing wrought by the Holy Spirit' (TitS^). No doubt it is again.st the Pauline origin of the last phra.se that it intro- duces the figure of regeneration which is so con- spicuously wanting in the undoubted Epistles. When St. Paul spoke of baptism, however, as in- volving men in the death and resurrection of Jesus, — making them mysteriously participant in all that was meant by both, a death to sin and a life to God, with the assurance of immortality at the heart of it, — he was not thinking of baptism as a sacrament which produced these effects as an opus operatiim. He could only thinlv of it as he knew it, that is, as an ordinance administered to people
confessing their sins and accepting the love of God in Christ, — an ordinance that gathered into it the whole meaning of Christianity, and in a high and solemn hour raised to its height the Christian's sense of what it is to be a Christian. He says ex- pressly in Col 2i'5 that in this ordinance we are raised with Christ ' throtigh faith in the lonrking of God V)ho raised him from the dead.'' The same holds of Ro C-ff-. Baptism there is a picture of what is meant by the faith which looks to a dead, buried, and risen Saviour as its one object ; in faith we identify ourselves with Christ in all these aspects, and so are taken out of the region to which sin belongs : this is wliat baptism shows even to the malignant or unintelligent persons who carped at Paul's gospel of salvation by faith alone. The sacrament, as St. Paul was accustomed to it, shut the mouth of anybody who denied that the Christian life rested on a death to sin ; and in guarding this fundamental truth it gtiarded (as we have seen) one of the primary teachings of Jesus. It is an immediate inference from all this that when we ask whether any particular passage in Paul — say Ro 7^-^'^"j — applies to the regenerate or the unregenerate man, we are asking a question which the Apostle himself does not formally enable us to answer. He does not think of his experience in terms of regenerate and unregenerate. He can speak of the old man and the new, of the natural and the spiritual, of being under law and under grace, in Adam and in Christ, dead to sin and alive to God, and so on ; but the distinction between the states is moral rather than metaphyi5ical, and it is in doctrine rather than experience that it is abso- lute. One personality subsists through all ex- periences, all changes of state ; nature, or the old man, is not extinct even in those who are in Christ and have the earnest of the Spirit ; and though St. Paul, like all religious teachers, often speaks absolutely, not telling his converts to be what they .should be, but to be what as Christians they are, he does not allow the religious interest to engiilf the moral. It is to men dead in Christ, whose old man has been crucified with Him, that he says, ' Put to death your members that are on the earth ' (Col 35), '^ Beckon yonrselves to be deadunto sin' (R06II). Experience is not a quantum but a process, and in the life of a spiritual being it cannot be dated ; the things that in a sense happened twenty years ago are also present experiences, and it may be only now that we are discovering their real meaning. This holds especially of such generalized experi- ences as are embodied in the passage referred to. Only the new man, who by becoming such has learned what the life of the old man meant, could have written it, but it is unreal to say that it is the experience of either, to the exclusion of the other. The new man understands it better than anybody, but the fact that everybody understands it in some degi'ee is the evidence that all men are capable of the experience it describes.