93

VII.

THE BODY OF DEATH.

O wretched man that I am! who shall deliver me from the body of this death? I thank God, through Jesus Christ our Lord.-ROMANS vii. 24, 25.

I

Do not suppose that S. Paul in thus exclaiming was thinking with any fear of death-of the dissolution of "the earthly tabernacle." It is easy to see that he had no dread of that. Indeed, toil-worn and heart-wearied as he was, bowed down with "the care of all the churches," troubled with "the thorn in the flesh," which to him was as "a messenger of Satan, sent to buffet him," he often would have been glad to die, had it been the Lord's will; for he felt assured that for him to be absent from the body would be to be present with the Lord, and that to depart and be with Christ was far better" than to remain in this troublesome world. It was not death he feared. It was something that to a mind like Paul's was worse than death. It was the dominion of the carnal nature

which strove in him, as in all, to over-rule the spiritual. The body of sin was to him "the body of death"-the body of sin through which temptations assailed him, which often was so weak to resist-whose nature seemed constantly at war with the higher nature of the spirit which he felt within-who should deliver him from this? Who should come to him in his conflict and pain, and too often baffled struggle, and give him the victory? That was the cry of S. Paul-of that intense nature which was his, profoundly conscious of God, of the Infinite, of the Eternal-of the mystery of life-of the awful power of sin, of sin as an evil, as it were an embodied adversary against whom he must wage a constant warfare, or yield in hopeless and ruinous submission.

Now, is the feeling from which such a cry as Paul's proceeds a real feeling, a noble feeling, the feeling of a high and upward nature, or is it the mere outcry of ignorance and superstition? There are not wanting those who would say it was the mere outcry of ignorance and superstition.

"Why trouble ourselves," says one of these apostles of the new religion of science, "about matters of which, however important they may be, we do know nothing, and can know nothing?" (these matters you must observe being all that can be included under the head of religious truth or religious thought). "We live in a world which is full of misery and ignorance; and

the plain duty of each and all of us is to try and make the little corner he can influence somewhat less miserable and ignorant, than when he entered it. To do this effectually, it is necessary to be possessed of only two beliefs; that we can learn as much as we can possibly take in of the order of nature; and second, that our own will has a considerable influence on the course of events."

That is all that we need attend to-the order of nature and our own will. Any idea of a God in nature and a moral law related to our own will belongs to cloudland, and takes its place among the vague notions that cannot be verified, with which priests women and fanatics have to do, but which will not stand the calm investigations of philosophy. But is there not an instinct within us which rebels against this cool and passionless way of setting aside everything in the order of nature that cannot be seen or handled, or weighed in the balance, or proved by mathematics? And is that instinct a low and mean one, akin to the instinct of the brute? or is it the instinct of minds that are high and noble, and that come nearest to what you would call divine?

Which is the higher type of man-which do you feel has got the firmer grip of the realities of life-the man calmly bending over the facts of outward nature, exploring the laws of the visible universe, and exercising the power of his own will to discover these, and to

secure, as far as he can, conformity to them: or, the man, like Paul, conscious of a mysterious conflict within himself between the forces of evil and of good, knowing nothing of the laws of nature, understanding nothing of the order of the universe, but believing that there was above him "Eternal in the Heavens," a moral law of which he had fallen short, a divine order with which he was not in harmony-unable to lose his faith in this, and yet unable to set himself right with it, tortured by the vision of a good he cannot attain to, and the consciousness of an evil which he ought to shun-good and evil, light and darkness, God and the devil, being to him the tremendous realities of life-his soul being the battle-field of a war between them, in the agony and shock of which conflict he is constrained to cry out for a higher than human help, and for a strength and righteousness that are not in himself. Which is the higher type of man-which do you feel has laid the tightest hold on the realities of life? I should say the man in the storm and stress of the spiritual battle; and I should say that to deny the reality of the sense of such a conflict-to say that the idea of it was the mere offspring of ignorance and superstition, nursed by priestcraft, and tending to mental slavery and darkness—was to deny facts of human nature which are as obvious to the spiritual intelligence as the fact that two and two make four is to the ordinary reason—and was to malign facts which

are as much higher and nobler than any mere fact of science, as the life of man is higher and nobler than the life of rocks or seas.

Minds wholly engrossed with engrossing pursuits, intellectual or selfish, may, while the pursuit continues to engross them, be unconscious of this conflict-may even disbelieve its existence in other minds. So may minds that have reached that stage which the apostle elsewhere describes as "dead in sin," in which, through long disuse or long abuse, the powers of the endless life have been at last quenched, and before whose vision, as far as one can judge, there is no spiritual future at all; but to other minds which do not stand at either of these extremes, minds within which conscience still lives, within which exclusive devotion to one thought or interest has not obliterated every other to the minds of the great mass of men, under all conditions of life, of knowledge or ignorance, of poverty or possession, of rank or obscurity, this conflict is a stern reality. The consciousness of it is a living consciousness-slumbering sometimes, it may be, through a long and barren winter of the soul, yet ever waking up again to startle and dismay. Who that has lived a life with any spiritual element in it at all, and higher than the mere animal's or worldling's, has not known that consciousness, and known its terror and power of darkness when it was roused into active life? Who has not known

G