'In Jesus Christ neither circumcision availeth any
thing, nor uncircumcision, but faith which worketh
by love.'--GAL. v. 6.
It is a very singular instance of imaginative misreading of plain facts
that the primitive Church should be held up as a pattern Church. The
early communities had apostolic teaching; but beyond that, they seem to
have been in no respect above, and in many respects below, the level of
subsequent ages. If we may judge of their morality by the exhortations
and dehortations which they received from the Apostle, Corinth and
Thessalonica were but beginners in holiness. If we may judge of their
intelligence by the errors into which they were in danger of falling,
these first congregations had indeed need that one should teach them
which were the first principles of the oracles of God. It could not be
otherwise. They were but just rescued from heathenism, and we need not
wonder if their spirits long bore the scars of their former bondage. If
we wish to know what the apostolic churches were like, we have but to
look at the communities gathered by modern missionaries. The same
infantile simplicity, the same partial apprehensions of the truth, the
same danger of being led astray by the low morality of their heathen
kindred, the same openness to strange heresy, the same danger of
blending the old with the new, in opinion and in practice, beset both.
The history of the first theological difference in the early churches is
a striking confutation of the dream that they were perfect, and a
striking illustration of the dangers to which they were exposed from
the attempt, so natural to us all, to put new wine into old bottles. The
Jewish and the Gentile elements did not coalesce. The point round which
the strife was waged was not whether Gentiles might come into the
Church. That was conceded by the fiercest Judaisers. But it was whether
they could come in as Gentiles, without first being incorporated into
the Jewish nation by circumcision, and whether they could remain in as
Gentiles, without conforming to Jewish ceremonial and law.
Those who said 'No' _were_ members of the Christian communities, and,
being so, they still insisted that Judaism was to be eternal. They
demanded that the patched and stiff leathern bottle, which had no
elasticity or pliability, should still contain the quick fermenting new
wine of the kingdom. And certainly, if ever man had excuse for clinging
to what was old and formal, these Judaising Christians held it. They
held by a law written with God's own finger, by ordinances awful by
reason of divine appointment, venerable by reason of the generations to
which they had been of absolute authority, commended by the very example
of Christ Himself. Every motive which can bind heart and conscience to
the reverence and the practice of the traditions of the Fathers, bound
them to the Law and the ordinances which had been Israel's treasure from
Abraham to Jesus.
Those who said 'Yes' were mostly Gentiles, headed and inspired by a
Hebrew of the Hebrews. They believed that Judaism was preparatory, and
that its work was done. For those among themselves who were Jews, they
were willing that its laws should still be obligatory; but they fought
against the attempt to compel all Gentile converts to enter Christ's
kingdom through the gate of circumcision.
The fight was stubborn and bitter. I suppose it is harder to abolish
forms than to change opinions. Ceremonies stand long after the thought
which they express has fled, as a dead king may sit on his throne stiff
and stark in his golden mantle, and no one come near enough to see that
the light is gone out of his eyes, and the will departed from the hand
that still clutches the sceptre. All through Paul's life he was dogged
and tormented by this controversy. There was a deep gulf between the
churches he planted and this reactionary section of the Christian
community. Its emissaries were continually following in his footsteps.
As he bitterly reproaches them, they entered upon another man's line of
things made ready to their hand, not caring to plant churches of
circumcised Gentiles themselves, but starting up behind him as soon as
his back was turned, and spoiling his work.
This Epistle is the memorial of that foot-to-foot feud. It is of
perennial use, as the tendencies against which it is directed are
constant in human nature. Men are ever apt to confound form and
substance, to crave material embodiments of spiritual realities, to
elevate outward means into the place of the inward and real, to which
all the outward is but subsidiary. In every period of strife between the
two great opponents, this letter has been the stronghold of those who
fight for the spiritual conception of religion. With it Luther waged his
warfare, and in this day, too, its words are precious.
My text contains Paul's condensed statement of his whole position in the
controversy. It tells us what he fought for, and why he fought, against
the attempt to suspend union to Christ on an outward rite.
I. The first grand principle contained in these words is that faith
working by love makes a Christian.
The antithesis of our text appears in somewhat varied forms in two other
places in the Apostle's writings. To the Corinthians he says,
'Circumcision is nothing, and uncircumcision is nothing, but the keeping
of the commandments of God.' His last word to the Galatians--the
gathering up into one strong sentence of his whole letter--is, 'In
Christ Jesus, neither circumcision availeth anything, nor
uncircumcision, but a new creature.'
Now, all these assertions embody substantially the same opposition
between the conception of Christianity as depending upon a ceremonial
rite, and as being a spiritual change. And the variations in the second
member of the contrast throw light on each other. In one, the essential
thing is regarded from the divine side as being not a rite performed on
the body, but a new nature, the result of a supernatural regeneration.
In another, the essential thing is set forth as being not an outward
act, but an inward principle, which produces appropriate effects on the
whole being. In yet another the essential thing is conceived as being
not a mere ceremonial, but practical obedience, the consequence of the
active principle of faith, and the sign of the new life. There is an
evident sequence in the three sayings. They begin with the deepest, the
divine act of a new creation--and end with the outermost, the last
result and object of both the others--deeds of conformity to God's law.
This one process in its triple aspects, says Paul, constitutes a man a
Christian. What correspondence is there between it, in any of its
parts, and a carnal ordinance? They belong to wholly different
categories, and it is the most preposterous confusion to try to mix them
up together. Are we to tack on to the solemn powers and qualities, which
unite the soul to Christ, this beggarly addition that the Judaisers
desire, and to say, the essentials of Christianity are a new creature,
faith, obedience--and circumcision? That is, indeed, sewing old cloth on
a new garment, and huddling together in grotesque chaos things which are
utterly diverse. It is as absurd bathos as to say the essentials of a
judge are integrity, learning, patience--and an ermine robe!
There would be less danger of being entangled in false notions of the
sort which devastated Galatia and have afflicted the Church ever since,
if people would put a little more distinctly before their own minds what
they mean by 'religion'; what sort of man they intend when they talk
about 'a Christian.' A clear notion of the thing to be produced would
thin away a wonderful deal of mist as to the way of producing it. So
then, beginning at the surface, in order to work inward, my first remark
is that religion is the harmony of the soul with God, and the conformity
of the life to His law.
The loftiest purpose of God, in all His dealings, is to make us like
Himself; and the end of all religion is the complete accomplishment of
that purpose. There is no religion without these elements--consciousness
of kindred with God, recognition of Him as the sum of all excellence and
beauty, and of His will as unconditionally binding upon us, aspiration
and effort after a full accord of heart and soul with Him and with His
law, and humble confidence that that sovereign beauty will be ours. 'Be
ye imitators of God as dear children' is the pure and comprehensive
dictate which expresses the aim of all devout men. 'To keep His
commandments' goes deeper than the mere external deeds. Were it not so,
Paul's grand words would shrink to a very poor conception of religion,
which would then have its shrine and sphere removed from the sacred
recesses of the inmost spirit to the dusty Babel of the market-place and
the streets. But with that due and necessary extension of the words
which results from the very nature of the case, that obedience must be
the obedience of a man, and not of his deeds only, and must include the
submission of the will and the prostration of the whole nature before
Him; they teach a truth which, fully received and carried out, clears
away whole mountains of theoretical confusion and practical error.
Religion is no dry morality; no slavish, punctilious conforming of
actions to a hard law. Religion is not right thinking alone, nor right
emotion alone, nor right action alone. Religion is still less the
semblance of these in formal profession, or simulated feeling, or
apparent rectitude. Religion is not nominal connection with the
Christian community, nor participation in its ordinances and its
worship. But to be godly is to be godlike. The full accord of all the
soul with His character, in whom, as their native home, dwell
'whatsoever things are pure, whatsoever things are lovely,' and the full
glad conformity of the will to His sovereign will, who is the life of
our lives--this, and nothing shallower, nothing narrower, is religion in
its perfection; and the measure in which we have attained to this
harmony with God, is the measure in which we are Christians. As two
stringed instruments may be so tuned to one keynote that, if you strike
the one, a faint ethereal echo is heard from the other, which blends
undistinguishably with its parent sound; so, drawing near to God, and
brought into unison with His mind and will, our responsive spirits
vibrate in accord with His, and give forth tones, low and thin indeed,
but still repeating the mighty music of heaven. 'Circumcision is
nothing, and uncircumcision is nothing, but the keeping of the
commandments of God.'
But our text tells us, further, that if we look backwards from character
and deed to motive, this harmony with God results from love becoming the
ruling power of our lives. The imitation of the object of worship has
always been felt to be the highest form of worship. Many an ancient
teacher, besides the Stoic philosopher, has said, 'He who copies the
gods worships them adequately.' One of the prophets lays it down as a
standing rule, 'The people will walk every one in the name of his God.'
But it is only in the Christian attitude towards God that the motive
power is found which makes such imitation more than an impossible duty,
even as it is only in the revealed character of God that a pattern is
found, to imitate which is to be perfect. Everywhere besides, harmony
with the gods meant discord with conscience and flagrant outrages of the
commonest moralities. Everywhere else, the task of copying them was one
lightened by no clear confidence in their love, and by no happy
consciousness of our own. But for us, the love revealed is the perfect
law, and the love evoked is the fulfilling of the law.
And this is the might and nobleness of the Christian love to God; that
it is no idle emotion or lazy rapture, no vague sentiment, but the root
of all practical goodness, of all strenuous effort, of all virtue, and
of all praise. That strong tide is meant to drive the busy wheels of
life and to bear precious freightage on its bosom; not to flow away in
profitless foam. Love is the fruitful mother of bright children, as our
great moralist-poet learned when he painted her in the House of
Holiness:
'A multitude of babes about her hung,
Playing their sport that joyed her to behold.'
Her sons are Strength and Justice, and Self-control and Firmness, and
Courage and Patience, and many more besides; and her daughters are Pity
with her sad eyes, and Gentleness with her silvery voice, and Mercy
whose sweet face makes sunshine in the shade of death, and Humility all
unconscious of her loveliness; and linked hand in hand with these, all
the radiant band of sisters that men call Virtues and Graces. These will
dwell in our hearts, if Love their mighty mother be there. If we are
without her, we shall be without them.
There is discord between man and God which can only be removed by the
sweet commerce of love, established between earth and heaven. God's love
has come to us. When ours springs responsive to Him, then the schism is
ended, and the wandering child forgets his rebellion, as he lays his
aching head on the father's bosom, and feels the beating of the father's
heart. Our souls by reason of sin are 'like sweet bells jangled, out of
tune and harsh.' Love's master hand laid upon them restores to them
their part in 'the fair music that all creatures make to their great
Lord,' and brings us into such accord with God that
'We on earth with undiscording voice
May rightly answer'
even the awful harmonies of His lips. The essential of religion is
concord with God, and the power which makes that concord is love to God.
But this text leads to a still further consideration, namely, the
dominion of love to God in our hearts arises from faith.
We thus reach the last link, or rather the staple, of the chain from
which all hangs. Religion is harmony with God; that harmony is produced
by love; and that love is produced by faith. Therefore the fundamental
of all Christianity in the soul is faith. Would this sound any fresher
and more obvious if we varied the language, and said that to be
religious we must be like God, that to be like Him we must love Him, and
that to love Him we must be sure that He loves us? Surely that is too
plain to need enlarging on.
And is it not true that faith must precede our love to God, and affords
the only possible basis on which that can be built? How can we love Him
so long as we are in doubt of His heart, or misconceive His character,
as if it were only power and wisdom, or awful severity? Men cannot love
an unseen person at all, without some very special token of his personal
affection for them. The history of all religions shows that where the
gods have been thought of as unloving, the worshippers have been
heartless too. It is only when we know and believe the love that God
hath to us, that we come to cherish any corresponding emotion to Him.
Our love is secondary, His is primary; ours is reflection, His the
original beam; ours is echo, His the mother-tone. Heaven must bend to
earth before earth can rise to heaven. The skies must open and drop down
love, ere love can spring in the fruitful fields. And it is only when we
look with true trust to that great unveiling of the heart of God which
is in Jesus Christ, only when we can say, 'Herein is love--that He gave
His Son to be the propitiation for our sins,' that our hearts are
melted, and all their snows are dissolved into sweet waters, which,
freed from their icy chains, can flow with music in their ripple and
fruitfulness along their course, through our otherwise silent and barren
lives. Faith in Christ is the only possible basis for active love to
God.
And this thought presents the point of contact between the teaching of
Paul and John. The one dwells on faith, the other on love, but he who
insists most on the former declares that it produces its effects on
character by the latter; and he who insists most on the latter is
forward to proclaim that it owes its very existence to the former.
It presents also the point of contact between Paul and James. The one
speaks of the essential of Christianity as faith, the other as works.
They are only striking the stream at different points, one at the
fountain-head, one far down its course among the haunts of men. They
both preach that faith must be 'faith that worketh,' not a barren assent
to a dogma, but a living trust that brings forth fruits in the life.
Paul believes as much as James that faith without works is dead, and
demands the keeping of the commandments as indispensable to all true
Christianity. James believes as much as Paul that works without faith
are of none effect. So all three of these great teachers of the Church
are represented in this text, to which each of them might seem to have
contributed a word embodying his characteristic type of doctrine. The
threefold rays into which the prism parts the white light blend again
here, where faith, love, and work are all united in the comprehensive
saying, 'In Jesus Christ neither circumcision availeth anything, nor
uncircumcision, but faith which worketh by love.'
The sum of the whole matter is this--He who is one in will and heart
with God is a Christian. He who loves God is one in will and heart with
Him. He who trusts Christ loves God. That is Christianity in its
ultimate purpose and result. That is Christianity in its means and
working forces. That is Christianity in its starting-point and
foundation.
II. But we have to consider also the negative side of the Apostle's
words. They affirm that in comparison with the essential--faith, all
externals are infinitely unimportant.
Paul's habit was always to settle questions by the widest principles he
could bring to bear upon them--which one may notice in passing is the
very opposite to the method that has been in favour with many Church
teachers and guides since, who have preferred to live from hand to
mouth, and to dispose of difficulties by the narrowest considerations
that would avail to quiet them. In our text the question in hand is
settled on a ground which covers a great deal more than the existing
dispute. Circumcision is regarded as one of a whole class--namely, the
class of outward rites and observances; and the contrast drawn between
it and faith extends to all the class to which it belongs. It is not
said to be powerless because it is an Old Testament rite, but because it
is a rite. Its impotence lies in the very nature which it has in common
with all external institutions, whether they be of the Old Testament or
of the New, whether they be enjoined of God or invented by men. To them
all the same characteristic cleaves. Compared with faith they are of no
avail. Not that they are absolutely useless. They have their place, but
'_in Christ Jesus_' they are nothing. Union to Him depends on quite
another order of facts, which may or may not exist along with
circumcision, or with baptism, or with the Lord's Supper. However
important these may be, they have no place among the things which bind a
soul to its Saviour. They may be helps to these things, but nothing
more. The rite does not ensure the faith, else the antithesis of our
text were unmeaning. The rite does not stand in the place of faith, or
the contrast implied were absurd. But the two belong to totally
different orders of things, which may co-exist indeed, but may also be
found separately; the one is the indispensable spiritual experience
which makes us Christians, the other belongs to a class of material
institutions which are much as helps to, but nothing as substitutes or
equivalents for, faith.
Keep firm hold of the positive principle with which we have been dealing
in the former part of this sermon, and all forms and externals fall as a
matter of course into their proper place. If religion be the loving
devotion of the soul to God, resting upon reasonable faith, then all
besides is, at the most, a means which may further it. If loving trust
which apprehends the truth, and cleaves to the Person, revealed to us in
the Gospel, be the link which binds men to God, then the only way by
which these externals can be 'means of grace' is by their aiding us to
understand better and to feel more the truth as it is in Jesus, and to
cleave closer to Him who is the truth. Do they enlighten the
understanding? Do they engrave deeper the loved face carven on the
tablets of memory, which the attrition of worldly cares is ever
obliterating, and the lichens of worldly thoughts ever filling up? Do
they clear out the rubbish from the channels of the heart, that the
cleansing stream may flow through them? Do they, through the senses,
minister to the soul its own proper food of clear thought, vivid
impressions, loving affections, trustful obedience? Do they bring Christ
to us, and us to Him, in the only way in which approach is
possible--through the occupation of mind and heart and will with His
great perfectness? Then they are means of grace, precious and helpful,
the gifts of His love, the tokens of His wise knowledge of our weakness,
the signs of His condescension, in that He stoops to trust some portion
of our remembrance of Him to the ministry of sense. But in comparison
with that faith which they cannot plant, though they may strengthen it,
they are nothing; and in the matter of uniting the soul to God and
making men 'religious,' they are of no avail at all.
And such thoughts as these have a very wide sweep, as well as a very
deep influence. Religion is the devotion of the soul to God. Then
_everything_ besides is not religion, but at most a means to it. That is
true about all Christian ordinances. Baptism is spoken about by Paul in
terms which plainly show that he regarded it as 'nothing' in the same
sense, and under the same limitations, as he thought that circumcision
was nothing. 'I baptized some of you,' says he to the Corinthians; 'I
scarcely remember whom, or how many. I have far more important work to
do--to preach the Gospel.' It is true about all acts and forms of
Christian worship. These are not religion, but means to it. Their only
value and their only test is--Do they help men to know and feel Christ
and His truth? It is true about laws of life, and many points of
conventional morality. Remember the grand freedom with which the same
Apostle dealt with questions about meats offered to idols, and the
observance of days and seasons. The same principle guided him there too,
and he relegated the whole question back to its proper place with, 'Meat
commendeth us not to God; for neither if we eat are we the better,
neither if we eat not are we the worse.' 'He that regardeth the day,
regardeth it unto the Lord; and he that regardeth not the day, to the
Lord he doth not regard it.' It is true, though less obviously and
simply, about subordinate doctrines. It is true about the mere
intellectual grasp of the fundamental truths of God's revelation. These,
and the belief of these, are not Christianity, they are helps towards
it.
The separation is broad and deep. On one side are all externals, rites,
ceremonies, politics, Church arrangements, forms of worship, modes of
life, practices of morality, doctrines, and creeds--all which are
externals to the soul: on the other is faith working through love, the
inmost attitude and deepest emotion of the soul. The great heap is fuel.
The flame is loving faith. The only worth of the fuel is to feed the
flame. Otherwise it is of no avail, but lies dead and cold, a mass of
blackness. We are joined to God by faith. Whatever strengthens that
faith is precious as a help, but is worthless as a substitute.
III. There is a constant tendency to exalt these unimportant externals
into the place of faith.
The whole purpose of the Gospel may be described to be our deliverance
from the dominion of sense, and the transference of the centre of our
life to the unseen world. This end is no doubt partly accomplished by
the help of sense. So long as men have bodily organisations, there will
be need for outward helps. Men's indolence, and men's sense-ridden
natures, will take symbols for royalties, bank-notes for wealth. The
eye will be tempted to stay on the rich colours of the glowing glass,
instead of passing through them to heaven's light beyond. To make the
senses a ladder for the soul to climb to heaven by, will be perilously
likely to end in the soul going down the ladder instead of up. Forms are
sure to encroach, to overlay the truth that lies at their root, to
become dimly intelligible, or quite unmeaning, and to constitute at last
the end instead of the means. Is it not then wise to minimise these
potent and dangerous allies? Is it not needful to use them with the
remembrance that a minute quantity may strengthen, but an overdose will
kill--ay, and that the minute quantity may kill too? Christ instituted
two outward rites. There could not have been fewer if there was to be an
outward community at all, and they could not have been simpler; but look
at the portentous outgrowth of superstition, and the unnumbered evils,
religious, moral, social, and even political, which have come from the
invincible tendency of human nature to corrupt forms, even when the
forms are the sweet and simple ones of Christ's own appointment. What a
lesson the history of the Lord's Supper, and its gradual change from the
domestic memorial of the dying love of our Lord to the 'tremendous
sacrifice,' reads us as to the dangerous ally which spiritual
religion--and there is no other religion than spiritual--enlists when it
seeks the help of external rites!
But remember that this danger of converting religion into outward
actions has its root in us all, and is not annihilated by our rejection
of an elaborate ceremonial. There is much significance in the double
negation of my text, 'Neither circumcision nor uncircumcision.' If the
Judaisers were tempted to insist on the former, as indispensable, their
antagonists were as much tempted to insist on the latter. The one were
saying, 'A man cannot be a Christian unless he be circumcised.' The
other would be in danger of replying, 'He cannot be a Christian if he
is.' There may be as much formalism in protesting against forms as in
using them. Extremes meet; and an unspiritual Quaker, for instance, is
at bottom of the same way of thinking as an unspiritual Roman Catholic.
They agree in their belief that certain outward acts are essential to
worship, and even to religion. They only differ as to what these acts
are. The Judaiser who says, 'You must be circumcised,' and his
antagonist who says, 'You must be uncircumcised,' are really in the same
boat.
And this is especially needful to be kept in mind by those who, like the
most of us, hold fast by the free and spiritual conception of
Christianity. That freedom we may turn into a bondage, and that
spirituality into a form, if we confound it with the essentials of
Christianity, and deny the possibility of the life being developed
except in conjunction with it. My text has a double edge. Let us use it
against all this Judaising which is going on round about us, and against
all the tendency to it in our own hearts. The one edge smites the
former, the other edge the latter. Circumcision is nothing, as most of
us are forward to proclaim. But, also, remember, when we are tempted to
trust in our freedom, and to fancy that in itself it is good,
_uncircumcision is nothing_. You are no more a Christian for your
rejection of forms than another man is for his holding them. Your
negation no more unites you to Christ than does his affirmation. One
thing alone does that,--faith which worketh by love, against which sense
ever wars, both by tempting some of us to place religion in outward
acts and ceremonies, and by tempting others of us to place it in
rejecting the forms which our brethren abuse.
IV. When an indifferent thing is made into an essential, it ceases to be
indifferent, and must be fought against.
Paul proclaimed that circumcision and uncircumcision were alike
unavailing. A man might be a good Christian either way. They were not
unimportant in all respects, but in regard to being united to Christ, it
did not matter which side one took. And, in accordance with this noble
freedom, he for himself practised Jewish rites; and, when he thought it
might conciliate prejudice without betraying principle, had Timothy
circumcised. But when it came to be maintained as a principle that
Gentiles _must_ be circumcised, the time for conciliation was past. The
other side had made further concession impossible. The Apostle had no
objection to circumcision. What he objected to was its being forced upon
all as a necessary preliminary to entering the Church. And as soon as
the opposite party took that ground, then there was nothing for it but
to fight against them to the last. They had turned an indifferent thing
into an essential, and he could no longer treat it as indifferent.
So whenever parties or Churches insist on external rites as essential,
or elevate any of the subordinate means of grace into the place of the
one bond which fastens our souls to Jesus, and is the channel of grace
as well as the bond of union, then it is time to arm for the defence of
the spirituality of Christ's kingdom, and to resist the attempt to bind
on free shoulders the iron yoke. Let men and parties do as they like, so
long as they do not turn their forms into essentials. In broad freedom
of speech and spirit, which holds by the one central principle too
firmly to be much troubled about subordinate matters--in tolerance of
diversities, which does not spring from indifference, but from the very
clearness of our perception of, and from the very fervour of our
adherence to, the one essential of the Christian life--let us take for
our guide the large, calm, lofty thoughts which this text sets forth
before us. Let us thankfully believe that men may love Jesus, and be fed
from His fulness, whether they be on one side of this undying
controversy or on the other. Let us watch jealously the tendencies in
our own hearts to trust in our forms or in our freedom. And whensoever
or wheresoever these subordinates are made into things essential, and
the ordinances of Christ's Church are elevated into the place which
belongs to loving trust in Christ's love, then let _our_ voices at least
be heard on the side of that mighty truth that 'in Jesus Christ neither
circumcision availeth anything, nor uncircumcision, but faith which
worketh by love.'
'WALK IN THE SPIRIT'
'Walk in the Spirit, and ye shall not fulfil the
lust of the flesh.'--GAL. v. 16.
We are not to suppose that the Apostle here uses the familiar contrast
of spirit and flesh to express simply different elements of human
nature. Without entering here on questions for which a sermon is
scarcely a suitable vehicle of discussion, it may be sufficient for our
present purpose to say that, as usually, when employing this antithesis
the Apostle means by Spirit the divine, the Spirit of God, which he
triumphed in proclaiming to be the gift of every believing soul. The
other member of the contrast, 'flesh,' is similarly not to be taken as
equivalent to body, but rather as meaning the whole human nature
considered as apart from God and kindred with earth and earthly things.
The flesh, in its narrower sense, is no doubt a predominant part of this
whole, but there is much in it besides the material organisation. The
ethics of Christianity suffered much harm and were degraded into a false
and slavish asceticism for long centuries, by monastic misunderstandings
of what Paul meant by the flesh, but he himself was too clear-sighted
and too high-toned to give his adhesion to the superficial notion that
the body is the seat and source of sin. We need look no further than the
catalogue of the 'works of the flesh' which immediately follows our
text, for, although it begins with gross sins of a purely fleshly kind,
it passes on to such as hatred, emulations, wrath, envyings and
suchlike. Many of these works of the flesh are such as an angel with an
evil heart could do, whether he had a body or not. It seems therefore
right to say that the one member of the contrast is the divine Spirit of
holiness, and the other is man as he is, without the life-giving
influence of the Spirit of God. In Paul's thought the idea of the flesh
always included the idea of sin, and the desires of the flesh were to
him not merely rebellious, sensuous passion, but the sinful desires of
godless human nature, however refined, and as some would say,
'spiritual' these might be. We do not need to inquire more minutely as
to the meaning of the Apostle's terms, but may safely take them as, on
the one hand, referring to the divine Spirit which imparts life and
holiness, and on the other hand, to human nature severed from God, and
distracted by evil desires because wrenched away from Him.
The text is Paul's battle-cry, which he opposed to the Judaising
disturbers in Galatia. They said 'Do this and that; labour at a round of
observances; live by rule.' Paul said, 'No! That is of no use; you will
make nothing of such an attempt nor will ever conquer evil so. Live by
the spirit and you will not need a hard outward law, nor will you be in
bondage to the works of the flesh.' That feud in the Galatian churches
was the earliest battle which Christianity had to fight between two
eternal tendencies of thought--the conception of religion as consisting
in outward obedience to a law, and consequently as made up of a series
of painful efforts to keep it, and the conception of religion as being
first the implanting of a new, divine life, and needing only to be
nourished and cared for in order to drive forth evils from the heart,
and so to show itself living. The difference goes very far and very
deep, and these two views of what religion is have each their adherents
to-day. The Apostle throws the whole weight of his authority into the
one scale, and emphatically declares this as the one secret of victory,
'Walk in the Spirit, and ye shall not fulfil the lusts of the flesh.'