Chapter I: 8-17 (6)

This 'doctrine of the law' involves both its necessary function and its failure. There can be indeed to no thoughtful mind any doubt as to its necessary function. Conscience, individual and social, is continually going to sleep. It may be taken quite for certain that if Christ were amongst us in manifest power by His Spirit to-day--as He ought to be in the Church--our society as a whole would be smitten anew with a sense of sin, and not least of social sin[7]. Our familiar excuses for our selfish indulgence of our lusts, for our weak surrenders to passion and impulse, for our commercial dishonesties, for our failures to carry righteousness into politics, for our social injustices, for our selfishness and {258} luxury, for our scamped and half-hearted work--the familiar pleas of commercial or physical necessity, or political exigencies, or lack of knowledge, or absence of responsibility, or the influence of heredity--would dry up and wither on our lips under the powerful glare of the divine 'letter'--Thou shalt, Thou shalt not. God hath not 'given any man license to sin,' He hath given no man exemption from the trouble or the suffering or the loss involved in doing right. The obligation is peremptory to be just, to be merciful, to be honest, to be self-denying, to be pure. And if we do not care to take the trouble to be so, the only alternative is to have Christ for our adversary, and find at last the horrible depth of meaning which His words contain--'Thus and thus have ye made void the word of God by your tradition.' 'Inasmuch as ye did it not, depart, ye cursed, into eternal fire!' 'It is good for thee to enter into the kingdom of God maimed or halt or with one eye, rather than having two hands or feet or eyes to be cast into hell, where their worm dieth not and the fire is not quenched.' These and the like words are metaphorical--but metaphors which are intended to teach the heart only the more vividly because they are metaphorical.

{259}

Indeed, in each age, and therefore in ours, most fertile of excuses, we need the letter to kill us; the stern, outward, unmistakable announcement of God's will to assure us that God does not change with our whims or feelings, and cannot accommodate Himself to immoral necessities. In each age, and therefore in ours, most capable of moral self-deception, we need continual and forcible reminders that a quiet conscience is no adequate guarantee of agreement with God, unless we have taken pains to keep our conscience enlightened by meditating on the divine word.

And if St. Paul's account of the function of 'the law' is true, so also is his account of its necessary failure. It is obviously true if you confine 'the law' to meaning what in the tradition of the Pharisees it had come to mean, or what in his ideal way of thinking St. Paul defined it to mean--that is, not the whole Old Testament with its anticipations in prophecy and psalm of the temper of sonship and its evangelical forecasts of the new covenant, but bare precept, expressing externally and unmistakably the will of God. Mere law, instructing men truly and searchingly as to God's requirement in thought as well as word and deed, instructing {260} men and challenging them, and doing nothing more, is so manifestly incomplete an expression of God's relation to man, quite apart from all question of its ritual elements, that it can in the nature of things serve only a temporary purpose in the conscience, by leading us to a truer knowledge of Him who terrifies indeed, but only in order to reassure, and kills but only in order to raise to life again.

ii.

At this point it is necessary to answer the two much-disputed questions--and it is possible to do it briefly--Is St. Paul, in giving this summary of moral experience, speaking 'of himself or of some other man'? and--Is the struggle described in verses 14-24 to be regarded as occurring without or within the frontiers of the regenerate state?

There is no doubt that St. Paul must be in part really describing an experience through which he passed. He was really, we may imagine, 'alive without the law once' in the sense that he was brought up a happy Jewish child, under the law but not deeply feeling the terror of its claims, until he was growing towards {261} the 'independent' period of life and found himself confronted with its requirements in detail. There need be no doubt that he is speaking of some experience of his own when he alludes, here as elsewhere, to the deceitfulness of sin; and when he describes the two stages of moral progress--the first, in which the conscience of the man is awakened to recognize that his habitual practice is not in any full sense controlled by his reason and will; and the second, in which the will is deliberately enlisted on the side of good, and the man only made thereby the more conscious that his will is in no real control of his actions, but that he is the captive of the alien power of sin. In some sense, though St. Paul does not give us the materials for saying exactly in what sense, he must have passed through these stages of experience. He must have really felt himself the slave of sin, though the sin was of a sort which left him, 'as touching the righteousness which is in the law, blameless.' He must have felt that he could not do what he ought; and the bitterness of his persecuting zeal may have been in part the reflection of this sense of impotence.

And so far as St. Paul is speaking of himself, there can be no shadow of doubt that the state {262} of conflict lay almost wholly outside his conversion and regeneration. It was 'prevenient grace'--God's dealing with him before he acknowledged Christ--that set his will so strongly to desire and approve the right; and his new personal faith in Jesus, and the might of the Spirit of Jesus to whom he became united, gave him the power to do what he had so long and so ineffectually been willing. This was his experience, and he bears witness to it. Even though he would have made no claim to sinlessness after his conversion, yet the sense of sin which possessed him so strongly, which made him call himself 'not worthy to be called an apostle,' 'less than the least of all saints,' and 'chief of sinners,' was in the main a memory of what was past. The present sense was the consciousness of power in Christ. It is inconceivable that St. Paul should describe himself, while a Christian, as 'sold under sin.' And it was an idea of human corruption quite different from St. Paul's which prevented Augustine and Calvin from recognizing that either a pious Jew, or a Gentile which had not the law, could be moved by the divine Spirit to 'rejoice in the law of God after the inner man' (ver. 22), quite independently of any knowledge of Christ.

{263}

But if St. Paul is in a real measure autobiographical in this passage, there is no reasonable doubt that he is not merely so. He has generalized his experiences to represent the moral experiences of the race. The 'I' is the human individual in general. Thus 'alive without the law,' if it can in a certain sense describe what St. Paul had once been, describes much better the state of men--Greeks and Romans, or men all the world over 'before the law came'--who had an easy social standard and lived natural lives without any troublesome moral ideals, and were wholly unvisited by conscientious scruples or the terrors of the divine holiness. Upon such men comes the severer knowledge of the righteousness of God through the teaching of some prophet or founder of religion. It may come to men collectively in a nation or group, and result in some general movement of conscience. Or it may come to an individual through some circumstance which confronts him with a higher moral claim than he has ever faced before--through the example of a friend, through a book or a sermon. To many in St. Paul's day the synagogues, where 'Moses had in every city them that preached him,' had been the means of their awakening to the moral {264} claim of God. And whenever men are thus confronted with the divine law of righteousness, in a more or less perfect form and with more or less of impressiveness laying its prohibitions upon them--'Thou shalt not do this or that'--if they do not harden their hearts to it, they pass through the stages of experience which St. Paul has so admirably idealized. There is that in them which the prohibitions of the divine law stimulates into antagonism. They become conscious of a power which beguiles or cheats them into breaking the law; they awake to the sense of sin and failure to do God's will, and find that they are not their own masters, but are drifting under the impulse of what is not themselves. There awakens in them the conscience and will to approve and choose what is right, and with that a 'self-contempt bitterer to drink than blood,' as they realize that though they approve and choose the right they cannot do it. Thus the conviction is strengthened that their true selves are on the side of God and right, and that which holds them captive is an alien tyranny which has got its lodgement in their lower nature.

This is the psychological moment for the arrival of the gospel. The man who simply {265} desires the right and is paralyzed by his own impotence to realize it in his own strength, out of the depth of his despair learns that God is not a taskmaster and judge, but a Father; that He is not his adversary, but is on his side; that if he will simply surrender himself to the divine love, as it is made evident in Christ, all his past failures and sins are as if they had never been, and for the future God will not teach him from outside and leave him to struggle alone, but will work in him to will and to do His good pleasure. Then the sense of moral impotence may pass into the sense of power in Christ. And in proportion as any man's actual life-history, or the history of any group of men, corresponds to this ideal sketch, the period of moral struggle and failure may fall in the main outside the regeneration and new life in Christ.

But, almost from the beginnings of Christianity, and increasingly as Christianity has become popular, men have been 'christened' in infancy or in mature life without the moral issue having been defined or the moral will awakened. An ordinary Englishman, for example, is baptized in infancy. This means that he is actually regenerate and introduced into {266} the body of Christ. In rare cases he is so brought up as to realize this, and corresponds so willingly with the teaching that he lives the life of the regenerate from the first, and never, except in a very refined form, knows the sense of impotence or passes through the period of hopeless struggle. He has never found God's commandments grievous. But in most cases there is no such pains taken to enlighten the young conscience, or no such readiness of correspondence. The man lives as his surroundings suggest--a decent enough life, very likely, and more or less honourable, but never in face of the full divine law. And such an one is 'alive without the law.' For him all the experiences St. Paul describes are still to come, inside the circle of his actual regeneration. And they may be very gradual and slow, and may repeat themselves, more or less, innumerable times. St. Paul's is an ideal picture; but the intended issue is always the same. When we find ourselves saying, 'To will is present with me, but to do that which is good is not,' we may be quite certain that we are not realizing the power of our new birth. We are as men whom God has as yet only externally visited. We are conscious of our own weakness and of the {267} strength of evil; but not of the third force, stronger than either ourselves or the power of evil, which is at our disposal if we will draw upon it. What is needed is a deliberate and whole-hearted realization that we are in Christ and Christ is in us by His Spirit; an unconditional surrender of faith to Him: a practice, which grows more natural by exercise, of remembering and deliberately drawing by faith upon His strength in the moments of temptation and not merely upon our own resources. 'In the name of Jesus Christ of Nazareth I will do thus and thus.' So we too may form like St. Paul the habit of victory. We too may cry in sober earnest 'It is no longer I that live (in my naked self), but Christ that liveth in me.' 'I thank God through Jesus Christ our Lord.'

When that sense of struggle or failure which St. Paul describes occurs, as is generally the case with us traditional Christians, in the process of our awakening to the knowledge of the new birth, we may in a sense say that the struggle is part of the process of regeneration[8]; but the word 'regeneration' best describes, not a process, but a single divine act upon us and in {268} us[9], and this single divine act is consistently identified in the New Testament with our baptism, though it is only realized by our moral conversion when we awake to claim the privileges of our new life.

iii.

There are two smaller points which claim notice.

We are reminded by the way in which St. Paul speaks of sin, in this and other passages--as a force or power greater than the individual man, which possesses him and dominates him through his lower nature--and especially by the consciousness which he betrays of its 'beguiling' power, that he believed in personal agencies of evil. 'Our wrestling is not against flesh and blood (merely), but against the principalities, against the powers, against the world-rulers of this darkness, against the spiritual hosts of wickedness in the heavenly places[10].' Particularly it is in the deceitfulness of sin that St. Paul realizes what one must call the personal character of the evil power[11]. He is profoundly conscious that {269} there makes itself heard in temptation a voice as of a person which lies to us, as it lied to Eve, as to the true character of the suggested action; and when we have been deceived and seduced, and have done the deed, and its real character has become apparent, 'the tempter' turns round upon us with the grin of unmasked malevolence. Is there any one who can really dissociate from his own spiritual experience this idea of the tempter and the deceiver?

We do well to remember in reading this passage the meaning of the recurring word 'law.' In modern English it has come to mean the principle or method observable in anything. Such and such a thing, we say, exhibits such and such a law, i.e. acts constantly in such and such a way. It is natural therefore for us to read this meaning into the word in verse 21, as in the Authorized Version, 'I find then a law, that, when I would do good, evil is present with me,' i.e. I find that this is what constantly happens. But the Greek word, as used in the Old and New Testaments, does not bear any meaning like this[12]. It means always the {270} injunction or set of injunctions imposed by a law-giver. In this passage it is used seven times of the divine (Mosaic) law. When the will accepts this law and would impose it on the lower nature, it becomes 'the law of the mind,' i.e. the law which the mind enjoins (verse 23). With this conflicts 'the law of sin,' 'the different law,' which sin or the evil one would impose and which has gained actual sway 'in our members.' We must then interpret verse 21 in harmony with this use, and taking the sentence to be a broken one, translate, as the margin of the Revised Version, 'I find then, in regard of the law, that, to me who would do good, evil is present.'

[1] 'I was myself in both [flesh and spirit], but more myself in what I approved than in what I disapproved.'--Augustine, _Confessions_, viii. 5.

[2] Rather, as margin, 'I find then in regard of the law': see below, p. 269.

[3] Cf. 1 Cor. xv. 56; Gal. iii. 10; 2 Cor. iii. 6; Rom. iii. 20; iv. 15; v. 20.

[4] See J. B. Mayor in _The Epistle of St. James_ (ii. 10), p. 86.

[5] Gal. v. 3.

[6] Phil. iii. 6.

[7] It is disappointing, I think, that the grave appeal to the Church as regards social duty, made by the bishops assembled at Lambeth last year in commending to the notice of us all the report of their Committee on Industrial Problems, has received such scant attention, except from a certain group of Churchmen who were already occupied with the problem. It might have been expected that this solemn appeal would have vastly widened the area of attention.

[8] 'Inter regenerandum.' St. John will not speak of a wilful sinner as truly 'begotten of God,' 1 John iii. 9; v. 18, &c.

[9] See Dale, quoted in Ephesians, p. 86.

[10] Eph. vi. 12.

[11] Cf. 2 Thess. ii. 9-11: 'The working of Satan with all ... deceit of unrighteousness ... a working of error, that they should believe a lie.' 2 Cor. xi. 14: 'Satan fashioneth himself into an angel of light.' 1 Tim. ii. 14: 'The woman being beguiled hath fallen into transgression.' Cf. Heb. iii. 13: 'The deceitfulness of sin.'

[12] It never appears to be used, as in classical Greek, for 'custom,' either in LXX or N.T.

{271}

DIVISION III. Sec. 7. CHAPTER VIII. 1-11.

_Life in the Spirit._

If we were to represent the Epistle to the Romans as a _bas relief_, there would be two passages which would have to stand in the highest relief--the end of the third chapter, in which St. Paul speaks of that free justification which is given to all men on the equal basis of faith in Christ the propitiation for their sins; and this eighth chapter, in which he speaks of the triumph which belongs to the life of the justified, lived in the power of Christ's Spirit.

The note of this chapter is struck in the words 'no condemnation' at the beginning--'There is therefore now no condemnation to them that are in Christ Jesus.' St. Paul knew so well what it was to be conscious of being under condemnation. He had never been what we should call a sinner. He had always been a man who, according to the standards of the {272} Pharisaic righteousness, was pre-eminently righteous; he had always been a man who did much for religion. But he had known, in a form in which it is known to very few of us, what it was to be conscious of being under God's condemnation. God had been to him as a taskmaster over against him, breaking in upon his life with continual and searching warnings as to the divine requirements, with continual threatenings and continual terrors; and he had been as one standing over against God with the consciousness that, do as he might, he could never satisfy, or climb up to the level of, the requirements of the righteous God. There was always the haunting sense that he fell short--always the haunting sense that he was on his trial, and on that trial was condemned. But now all had been changed; and that by a process which in a certain sense was as simple as possible, but than which nothing could be more fundamental and deep. All was changed because the relation had begun at the other end. No longer was there a climbing up of man to God, no longer the effort of a Saul to commend himself to God. The relationship had begun at the other end, at God's end. Or rather, what had begun was the realization on the man's {273} part of the true order. For God had been beforehand with Saul all along. All the time that he was striving, working, slaving to commend himself to a God whose righteousness he could never attain to, God was waiting there for him to find out his mistake--waiting to reveal Himself as no hard taskmaster, but as the Creator, the Father of his spirit. The process had now begun anew from the other side. God had simply of His own pure initiative manifested His love. He had sent His Son out of His own essential being into this world as it was, not asking whether it was a fit world for the Son to enter into; but taking it simply as it was, because it appealed to the divine compassion by the very multitude of its sins and the very vastness of its need, God had sent forth His only begotten Son out of the bosom of His love and of His pure initiative; had sent Him to take this nature of ours upon Him, in it to make atonement for us with God, and in it, raised from death and glorified, to be the source of a new and spiritual life, such as should triumph over sin in all who will believe in Him. That is the great point. It was all purely God's doing: a pure disclosure and act of God, who showed Himself ready to take {274} men as they were, to forgive them and entrust them with the divine Spirit, if they would only trust Him. God is no longer the taskmaster over against men, with His threats and His terrors. He is the Father who has given His Son, who has given men a sacrifice whereby He can forgive their sins, and has given them the Spirit of His Son into their hearts. God is on their side, and they are on God's side. That is the great change. And the object of it all is that what formerly seemed so unattainable might now be the very thing that proved itself practicable--to live according to God; that the requirement of the law might be no longer an impossible claim over us, terrorizing us with its perpetual threats, but that by the power of the new life in which we live, 'the righteousness of the law might be fulfilled in us, who walk not after the flesh, but after the spirit.'

The following is a paraphrase of the passage we are now to study:--

The result then of all that has been said is that the divine verdict of guilty, which went forth over men on account of their sins--that 'disclosure of divine wrath' which St. Paul had so profoundly felt and interpreted--hangs no longer over those who have passed into the new {275} life in Christ Jesus. In the old life, sin with its attendant death held sway over us and gave the law to our actions. But we were freed from that despotism in passing under a new and stronger authority. It is the divine Spirit, by whom we have been brought into the life in Christ, who now controls us. Of old the Mosaic law was powerless to help us. It could inform us of God's will, but it could not enable our poor weak human nature to keep His requirements. But God has provided an effective remedy for this state of things. He has sent His own Son to take our nature upon Him, and come in among our sinful race without any apparent difference between us and Him. He put Him simply among us and in our position, to be the sacrifice for sin; and thereby did for us what we had so failed to do for ourselves--passed effective sentence of condemnation on sin, and that in our own nature. [Do we ask how sin was condemned? The answer is, it stood condemned by the perfect sacrifice of reparation for sin, which the sinless Man made to the divine character on our behalf, when at the requirement of obedience He shed His blood. It stood condemned, still more fully, by the fact that God raised Him from the dead and exalted {276} Him far beyond the reach of sin, to the glory of His right hand, and made Him the head of a redeemed manhood, and poured forth His Spirit to be the new life of all that believe in Him][1]. And the object of this mission of the Son, and this judgement on sin in His person, was the creation of that new humanity to which we belong, which lives not under the control of human appetite, but under the control of Spirit: and because it so lives, in the life of Another, succeeds in the one point where man had hitherto failed, in keeping the righteous requirements of the divine law. Our new way of life, therefore, is contrasted with the old in its whole tone. For just as, if we live in fact under the control of our weak manhood with its wants and appetites, our mind and conscious aim is directed to minister to its purposes, so in the same way if our life is in fact controlled by Spirit, our conscious aim also is directed to spiritual purposes. And the two lives are contrasted no less markedly in their prospects. {277} The mind controlled by human appetites is under the doom of death, temporal and eternal. The mind controlled by the Spirit is in a state of life, so far as concerns itself, and of peace towards God. The mind controlled by human appetites is under the doom of death because it is at war with God. It does not, it cannot, keep His commandments. Those therefore who so live in their own strength merely, cannot please Him. But that is not now our state. We now live in the power of Spirit, since the Spirit of God and Christ--that is, Christ Himself--dwells in us. To have Him is the very meaning of being a Christian. Not to have Christ's Spirit, that is Himself, dwelling in us, is not to belong to Him. But if He does dwell in us, then, though the body must still pay the debt of death, because of sin to which it has belonged--nay though it is already as good as dead--yet the Spirit within us is a superior principle of life, because of the divine righteousness which it bestows upon us. And this life shall triumph over death in our case, as in Christ's. For God, who raised up Christ from the dead, shall also by the working of the divine Spirit which dwells in us, give life again even to our bodies, though now they are subject to death.

{278}

There is therefore now no condemnation to them that are in Christ Jesus. For the law of the Spirit of life in Christ Jesus made me free from the law of sin and of death. For what the law could not do, in that it was weak through the flesh, God, sending his own Son in the likeness of sinful flesh and _as an offering_ for sin, condemned sin in the flesh: that the ordinance of the law might be fulfilled in us, who walk not after the flesh, but after the spirit. For they that are after the flesh do mind the things of the flesh; but they that are after the spirit the things of the spirit. For the mind of the flesh is death; but the mind of the spirit is life and peace: because the mind of the flesh is enmity against God; for it is not subject to the law of God, neither indeed can it be: and they that are in the flesh cannot please God. But ye are not in the flesh, but in the spirit, if so be that the Spirit of God dwelleth in you. But if any man hath not the Spirit of Christ, he is none of his. And if Christ is in you, the body is dead because of sin; but the spirit is life because of righteousness. But if the Spirit of him that raised up Jesus from the dead dwelleth in you, he that raised up Christ Jesus from the dead shall quicken also your mortal bodies through his Spirit that dwelleth in you.

1. St. Paul declares that the Father sent His own Son to redeem us in 'the likeness of the flesh of sin.' The word 'likeness' is the same as that used in the similar passage[2], where we are told that the eternal Son in love for us 'emptied Himself' so far as to take the 'form,' {279} or essential characteristics, of our servile human nature; nor only its essential characteristics, but also the outward conditions or 'likeness' of common men as they are. The point is that Christ, who Himself as man 'knew no sin[3],' appeared amongst us under all the circumstances of sin, and with no outward or apparent difference between us and Him--'in all points like as we are' with the single exception of sin in the will or in the nature.

2. In verse 3 the Authorized Version, and the margin of the Revised, translating the Greek literally, give us, 'God sending His own Son ... _for sin_.' But the phrase 'for sin' is continually used in the Greek of the Old Testament for the sin-offering, and in the New Testament always has the sacrificial meaning attached to it[4]; and accordingly its meaning here must be so defined.

3. The flesh of man, considered as a material thing, is not evil. It was that which the Son took, and it was 'in the flesh' so assumed that He pronounced sentence on sin--in that very flesh which was sin's domain; as, in the Epistle {280} to the Ephesians[5]. He is said to have 'abolished the enmity in his flesh.' The flesh as such then is not evil; but when, as in our fallen state, the proper order of our complex manhood has been reversed, and the flesh has become the predominant partner, having the mastery of the spirit, then it becomes a 'flesh of sin.' To live 'in the flesh,' or 'according to the flesh,' is to let the flesh have its way and be the master instead of the slave. Then the whole life becomes carnal--a carrying out 'the works of the flesh'--and even the rational faculty becomes a 'carnal mind.' What our redemption effects is to restore the right order and make the flesh again the instrument of the spirit--of the human spirit, that is, empowered by the divine Spirit, without which it cannot hold its ground. Then the whole life, with all its bodily faculties, becomes spiritual and carries into effect 'the works of the Spirit.'

In the passage we have been considering, the Revised Version distinguishes, by the use of capital letters, between the divine Spirit[6] and the human[7], or spirit in general; but the fact that the divine Spirit is what liberates and restores the human spirit is so much in St. Paul's {281} mind that it seems better to make the primary reference to the divine Spirit throughout.

It is of the greatest practical moment to grasp that, to St. Paul, the change in human life which comes about through our conversion and new birth is a change in order. What was managed from below is now controlled from above. That is the point on which we need to examine ourselves. Where do we begin from? Are we in the position of men struggling to manage their own lives, and commend themselves according to some standard more or less right, which either their personal pride or their social circle or the divine law has set up? If so, God is over against us, our taskmaster, our adversary, our stern judge, and our life is 'according to the flesh.' It is managed from below. It is ruled on its own level, and it fails. But there is another life which begins at once from the thought of God. God has made us, and therefore He is responsible for us. He has made me because He loves me. Therefore He is bound to make the best of me. If I will only put myself into His hands He is pledged, simply because He created me, therefore to redeem me, to save me, to glorify me. He takes that responsibility upon Himself. He has shown His {282} love by the sending and the sacrifice of His Son and by the gift of His Spirit. And His Spirit I have received. At a definite moment He came upon me. He entered into my life, as into those first Christians to whom St. Paul wrote, at baptism and by the laying-on of hands. This is the fact then. God is on my side. He makes Himself responsible for my being. If I will only entrust myself to Him with the cordial return of trustful love, then all that He has ever breathed into my heart of human possibility He will realize and bring to perfection. The requirement of the law shall be fulfilled in us who walk not after the flesh but after the Spirit.--This is a point of view upon which it is worth while reflecting deeply, and over and over again. Unless we are continually practising ourselves in this conception of life, we find ourselves falling back again into the attitude of one standing over against God with God for his taskmaster. And that is the false and always ruinous idea.

We must also take careful note of what St. Paul means by 'spiritual' and 'carnal.' 'Carnal' does not mean made of flesh, and 'spiritual' does not mean immaterial. That is carnal which is ruled by the flesh, ruled from {283} below. That life is carnal in which our spirit, meant for God, is dragged at the chariot-wheels of our lower life; and that is spiritual which is ruled and mastered by the Spirit. We must not suppose that we shall make our religion spiritual by disparaging external acts or bodily exercises of worship. No; that is spiritual which is ruled by the Spirit. The worship in 'spirit and in truth,' for us men who belong to the religion of the Incarnation, must be a worship in body. But it will be spiritual if it is full of spiritual intention. Secular business again is spiritual if it is ruled by the divine Spirit according to the law of righteousness. Politics are spiritual, commercial and municipal life are spiritual, art and science are spiritual, and everything that develops our faculties is spiritual, if we will allow the divine Spirit to rule in all according to the law of righteousness, truth, and beauty. For the whole of our being, with all its sum of faculties, is made by God and meant for God. What a mistake it is then, when people speak, as they so often do, as if sin were really natural, as if lust and worldliness were natural, and as if spirituality were something unnatural, belonging to another world. It is exactly the opposite. The only _natural_ position for us is when our {284} flesh is ruled by the spirit. It is an unnatural usurpation when the spirit is dragged at the chariot-wheels of the flesh, when our life is dominated by lusts or appetites. That is the very overthrow of nature. And grace does but restore to us the true order of our being, when the flesh and all the faculties of our body are again controlled by the spirit, so that our whole being expresses a spiritual purpose and obeys a spiritual law. The same external acts are spiritual or carnal, natural or unnatural, according as they express or do not express the mind of the Spirit. The same physical facts are the basis of true married love, and of the wildest licentiousness. In the latter case they are carnal because they express no spiritual purpose; in the other case they are spiritual because, consecrated in the family life, they become the organ and the vehicle of the divine Spirit. God will be responsible for our whole life, our politics, our commerce, our marriage, the workings of our intellect, the workings of our emotions, all the parts of our nature. He will raise our nature up through death; He will consecrate it to life immortal in the divine city; He will sanctify it here and now: if only, and in all things, we will believe that He who made our {285} life is capable of making the best of it, and show ourselves ready to entrust it to His disposal.

4. We must notice what is implied in this passage about the Holy Trinity. St. Paul speaks[8] of 'the Spirit of God' (the Father), 'the Spirit of Christ,' 'Christ,' and then again, the 'Spirit of Him that raised up Christ,' as if all these expressions were identical; as elsewhere[9] he prays that the Father will strengthen men by His Spirit, in order that Christ may dwell in their hearts, and they be filled with the fullness of God. All which language means that where the Spirit is, Christ is, and where Christ is, God the Father is. So in St. John, our Lord speaks of the Holy Spirit as 'another' advocate who is to come 'in his name' from the Father; and yet adds that in the Spirit's coming He Himself will come; and with Him the Father--'we will come[10].' The sacred 'persons' are spoken of as distinct--personally distinct--and yet as so mutually involved in the action one of another that the coming of one is the coming of all. So truly is God one in three. We find something like this in human personalities under the influence of love. Each single personality is not {286} self-contained and exclusive. Love, to a real degree, fuses persons; and thus the husband and wife and child (to take the highest example) may be said to live and act in one another and through one another's influence. But this is only to a limited extent. We are also mutually exclusive. Our responsibility and actions remain individual and impermeable. What I am doing, I am doing, and not another. But with God the mutual interpenetration of Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, is represented in the inspired language as far more complete. The Godhead is a fellowship and relationship of perfect love 'in three persons.' But God is not three separate individuals. What each 'person' does the others do. The action of one involves all. God is inseparably one in His being and in His action. If the Father creates, He creates through the Son and by the Spirit. If the Son redeems, the redemption proceeds from the Father and is effected in the Spirit. If the Spirit sanctifies, it is from and in the Father and the Son. Thus when the Spirit came forth at Pentecost out of the uplifted manhood of the Son to impart to us all His richness, He came not merely to supply His absence, but to accomplish His presence. He makes Christ present within us, and also the {287} Father: so that God, three in one, dwells in the hearts of His people.

5. 'The requirement of the law is to be fulfilled in us.' Do we ask how we are to keep the whole of that terrible law? It is by obeying the commandment to love our neighbours as ourselves, in which the whole law is 'briefly comprehended[11].'

6. If in the last verse of this passage we read 'through His Spirit,' and not (as the margin) 'because of His Spirit,' then the Holy Spirit is expressly spoken of as the agent of our resurrection and, by implication, of the resurrection of Christ. And this is the natural function for the 'Giver of Life': indeed 'Spirit' means nothing else than 'breath'--the 'breath of life from God[12].'

[1] The passage in brackets expands the sense in which St. Paul conceives the Father to have passed sentence of condemnation on sin, in the person and through the sacrifice of Christ, in accordance with such passages as vers. 21-24; iv. 25; Phil. ii. 8-10; Eph. i. 15 ff.

[2] Phil. ii. 7.

[3] 2 Cor. v. 21.

[4] See Heb. x. 6, cf. 18, 26; xiii. 11; 1 Pet. iii. 18; 1 John ii. 2; iv. 10.

[5] ii. 15.

[6] Verses 2, 9, 11.

[7] Verses 4, 5, 6, 9, 10.

[8] Verses 9-11.

[9] Eph. iii. 14-19.

[10] John xiv. 16, 18, 23, 26.

[11] Rom. xiii. 9.

[12] Ezek. xxxvii. 9; Rev. xi. 11.

{288}

DIVISION III. Sec. 8. CHAPTER VIII. 12-17.

_The life of sonship._

We are now in the Spirit. The divine Spirit dwells within us, and restores our nature to its proper balance by giving us control over our lower nature. The moral meaning and obligations of such a condition are plain, and St. Paul proceeds to enforce them. When our impulses and appetites solicit us to let them have their own way, we must give them to understand that they are making a claim which we cannot recognize and which, if we did, would lead us the way of death. On the contrary, it is these merely physical tendencies--the practices of the body when left to itself--that we must put to death by the power of the Spirit. And if we do this we are on the way of life. Why so certainly? Because we are sons of God--nothing less. Those who thus act under the Spirit's guidance are all of them sons of God. Further, {289} if we ask ourselves what sort of spirit we received when we became Christians, we know that it was not a spirit appropriate to slaves and calculated to bring us again into a condition of terror under a law. It was a spirit appropriate to those who have been adopted for sons of God, and it is in the power of that spirit that we cry out to God by the name of Abba, Father, in our familiar supplication. We have thus in our own spirits the sense that we are sons; and behind that and reinforcing it, the divine Spirit, by putting the word Father into our lips, bears the same witness. Well then, if we are thus children of God, we have the child's prospect of entering into our inheritance. Christ, our elder brother, has already entered into it, and we shall enter into it with Him, if we are content to take the Christian maxim for true, and suffer with Him on this side of death, that we may share His glory beyond.

So then, brethren, we are debtors, not to the flesh, to live after the flesh: for if ye live after the flesh, ye must die; but if by the spirit ye mortify the deeds of the body, ye shall live. For as many as are led by the Spirit of God, these are sons of God. For ye received not the spirit of bondage again unto fear; but ye received the spirit of adoption, whereby we cry, Abba, Father. The {290} Spirit himself beareth witness with our spirit, that we are children of God: and if children, then heirs; heirs of God, and joint-heirs with Christ; if so be that we suffer with him, that we may be also glorified with _him_.

There are several phrases in this passage which we shall do well to notice.

1. _If by the spirit ye mortify the deeds of the body, ye shall live_. Mortification is absolutely necessary, and at every stage of the Christian life. It is the carrying into effect in detail of the fundamental law of our new life--the law which the baptismal ritual was intended to teach--life by means of death. For the body had gained the upper hand: it had come to control the weakened spirit. Therefore the reinvigorated spirit must react upon the body and its impulses. It must make its government felt, and the physical tendencies must be checked, pruned, cut back. This is the Christian circumcision. And as Christ was first born, then circumcised the eighth day; so each new birth in Christ must be followed by a like circumcision of the luxuriance of animal appetites. We learn the lesson when we are children: we expect to be restrained and curbed: and unless we are very foolish we learn the lesson only more deeply in later life. There {291} is no single faculty or function of our being which can escape this law. No friendship can be cemented without mutual self-denial. No marriage, however founded on affection, can be blessed without the mutual pain of self-repression and concession. No art or science can be mastered by mere intelligence without moral discipline. No gift can be consecrated in its natural luxuriance. 'Every branch in Christ that beareth fruit, He pruneth it that it may bring forth more fruit.'

2. _As many as are led by the Spirit of God, these are sons of God_. The New Testament language would have us regard all the baptized as regenerate and sons of God, but it will not let us mistake the meaning of this teaching. In any effective sense it is they, and only they, who are really _controlled by_ the divine Spirit who can call themselves sons. As St. John says, freedom from sin is the only test of divine birth[1]. And the best way to make our new birth effective is to meditate on the gift which we, when we became Christians, did actually receive. We who, like the first Christians, received baptism with the laying-on of hands, did then and there receive (such is the implication {292} of St. Paul's language)[2] a spirit proper not to slaves but to sons of God, qualifying us to call on God as our father, and to co-operate in the purposes of His kingdom. It remains for us to claim these powers and privileges of our sonship, and to claim them to the full. Yet how many anxious-minded Christians of our day would appear to have received nothing more nor less than the spirit of slaves! They realize their religion as a restraint, a responsibility, a cause of fear. And such a servile religion is no doubt better than a hypocritical sense of sonship unaccompanied by the fear of sin. The wise man remarks that 'a servant that dealeth wisely shall have rule over a son that causeth shame, and shall have part in the inheritance among the brethren[3].' But the spirit of the slave is not what we are called to. If we had more religion, if we would give it freer course, if we would consent to think less of our circumstances and more of God and His gifts, there would be less fear and more joy both in our work and our prayer.

3. _Abba, Father_. Our Lord, speaking in {293} Aramaic, the vernacular of Palestine, is recorded by St. Mark in His hour of agony to have said _Abba_. And even in the Greek-speaking churches of St. Paul's day, that sacred word was still used side by side with its Greek equivalent, according to the witness of this and the parallel passage, Gal. iv. 6. St. Paul appears to be referring to some occasion on which the Church was in the habit of calling on God with the Aramaic and Greek words side by side, and it is more than likely[4] that he is making a definite reference to the Lord's Prayer, as recited by the Roman and Galatian Christians in the form prescribed for us in St. Luke's version[5], beginning 'Father.' The retention by Greek Christians of an Aramaic word in a familiar religious formula, is like the later retention by the Latins of the Greek prayer, _Kyrie eleison_, or the retention by us of the names _Te Deum, Magnificat_, &c. St. Paul's meaning would come home to us better if we were to read--'whereby we cry _Our Father_.'

4. '_The Spirit himself beareth witness with our spirit, that we are children of God_.' This is a very {294} important passage for showing that St. Paul did not in any way confuse the divine Spirit and the human, and that in his belief the divine indwelling did not in any way annihilate the human personality. Even in the closest union God remains God and man man. But the passage is at least as important as opening up a special avenue of insight into St. Paul's conception of Christian worship and spiritual life generally. He speaks first of a witness of the individual spirits of Christians to the fact of their divine sonship; and he distinguishes from it something greater, a witness of the divine Spirit, supporting the human. What exactly does he mean by this witness of the divine Spirit as distinct from the consciousness which--under the leading of the divine Spirit--Christians are led themselves to form? How are we to distinguish the Spirit's witness from the witness of our own hearts inspired by Him? Is it merely[6] that the 'consciousness (of the individual) is analyzed, and its _data_ are referred partly to the man himself, partly to the Spirit of God moving and prompting him?' I do not think that a closer examination will lead us to be satisfied with this.

{295}

The witness of the divine Spirit is apparently fixed by the context to consist in the supply to us of the phrase 'Abba, Father[7]'. It is the Spirit 'in whom we cry' (or, as the passage in the Galatians says, 'who Himself comes into our hearts crying) Abba, Father,' who thus, by suggesting this cry to us, bears witness with our own spirits that we are sons of God. Thus the supporting witness of the Spirit lies especially in a certain mode of address to God or formula of prayer which He supplies. But this 'cry' or prayer the Spirit supplies to the hearts of the Church as a whole. The whole Church, and not the individual soul only, is the Spirit's home. 'Know ye not that ye are (corporately) a temple of God, and the Spirit of God dwelleth in you'[8]? The witness of the Spirit is thus a witness borne in the whole Church, which supports and sustains the witness of the individual soul. This is a thought full of consolation. The life of the individual Christian reposes upon, and is infolded by, the larger life of the whole body. Behind his own spiritual consciousness, with all its vicissitudes, lies the inspired consciousness of the whole body, the witness of the Spirit; and this in part expresses itself in inspired {296} formulas--the Lord's Prayer, the psalms, the creeds of the divine name, the Church's worship; and these formulas, representing our best self, are to sustain us in our fluctuations of feeling, and carry us over our periods of dryness and insensibility. 'The Spirit Himself beareth witness with our spirit.'

5. 'The inheritance' of the children of God, which in the Old Testament begins by meaning the Holy Land, was spiritualized into meaning the kingdom of the Messiah. 'They shall inherit the land for ever[9]': 'the meek shall inherit the earth[10].' And this kingdom of the Messiah is an eternal kingdom: 'they shall inherit eternal life[11]'--that is to be our inheritance as the chosen people of the Lord. And it is an inheritance not only incorruptible but inexhaustible: all share in it to the full of their capacities, and the abundance of those who share diminishes nothing from the richness that remains.

And into that inheritance Christ is 'the way.' His life shows the law by which it is to be won. It was a current Christian saying--'a faithful saying'--'if we died with Him, we shall also live with Him; if we endure, we shall also reign {297} with Him[12].' And whenever we are inclined to complain at anything we may have to suffer, there is one thought capable at once of quenching all murmuring, because of its indisputable reasonableness--'It is enough for the disciple that he be as his Master.'

[1] 1 John iii. 9.

[2] 'Ye received' (at a particular time), not 'ye have received'; cf. above, p. 214, note 1.

[3] Prov. xvii. 2.

[4] See Chase, _Lord's Prayer in the Early Church_ ('Texts and Studies,' Cambridge), p. 23. Cf. Hort on 1 Pet. i. 17.

[5] xi. 2.

[6] S. and H., _in loc._

[7] Cf. Vaughan and Gifford, _in loc._

[8] 1 Cor. iii. 16.

[9] Isa. lx. 21.

[10] Matt. v. 5.

[11] Matt. xix. 29.

[12] 2 Tim. ii. 11.

{298}

DIVISION III. Sec. 9. CHAPTER VIII. 18-30.

_The hope of the creation._