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believe in Christ, and to keep God's commandments. And here St. Paul tells us, that if we live after the flesh, instead of renouncing it, we shall die, but that if we do renounce it, if we through the Spirit do mortify the deeds of the body, we shall live. And again he says in the text, "If Christ be in you, the body is dead because of sin; but the spirit is life because of righteousness.' Words, it may be, not plain at the first hearing, but which evidently intend to give us a test whether Christ be in us or no; that is, whether we have kept our baptismal vows or no; for no doubt the idea of baptism is a union with Christ, and if we have fulfilled its meaning we are in union with Him; we dwell in Him and He in us.

If Christ be in us, our body is dead because of sin. We perceive what is meant by comparing other passages of this epistle. "In that he died, he died unto sin once." Christ died once because of our sins, which He took upon Him as though they had been His own, and because of these sins He was pleased to die. If Christ then be in us, there is in us death because of sin. That is, there is in us a sense of and an image of sin's working death. Sin there is in us we well know, and that sin must have worked death; we, though alive, must in some sort be dead. Observe the strength of the expression which St. Paul uses more than once; we must in some sort be dead though alive,

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and the more dead the more alive; for says St. Paul, "I am crucified with Christ, nevertheless I live; yet not I, but Christ liveth in me." I am crucified with Christ, he says; that is, I am in part dead; or as it is in the text, the body is dead because of sin, even the body of sin which must be destroyed, or the flesh, which is not and cannot be subject to God's law; for these expressions all mean the same thing, they all declare that if Christ is in us, a great part of our original nature with which we were born must be dead.

Now do we think that St. Paul used all this language merely to express what might have been put in plain words thus: if Christ is in you, you cannot be living in sin? No doubt this is true, and St. Paul's language contains this truth; but it contains, I think, something more, and that which it contains more is the very thing which we have such need to remember. He uses the expressions, dead unto sin, being crucified with Christ, the body must be dead because of sin, and the like,— in order to show us that what he means is very great; that he speaks of a great change in us, a change not to be wrought in an instant, nor by any means to be effected without our feeling it, like the various processes of our bodily growth and nourishment, which go on unconsciously within us.

But no man, we may well believe, ever died un

consciously. To be dead may indeed be conceived to be a state of rest, but not to die. He who is dead to sin is the happiest of human beings; in him, indeed, all would be peace; but how can he be dead without first dying? There must be a struggle before there comes the final rest, and this struggle cannot be unfelt in its earliest stages if not in its latest; in its latest if not in its earliest; in some, if not in all.

Now then for those who are going to be confirmed, for those who have been confirmed,—for all of us, young or old alike, here is the question: Have we died to sin, or are we dying? We must know, full surely we must know, if we are the one or the other. For as certainly as no man ever passed from full bodily health to death without knowing it in some part of the process or another, so surely we cannot unconsciously have passed from that state in which sin was in full vigour within us, to the state in which sin is dead; there is now in us, or there must have been, a struggle; we may be quite sure, if we neither feel nor remember any such, that as yet our body is neither dead because of sin, nor yet dying.

Look at the process of natural death; it is not the same in all, but most various. Sudden death happens sometimes, but is the exception; in most cases we die not all at once but gradually; in some instances death is working for several months to

gether, and his last stroke is gentle, because so much of his work has been done before. So it is with spiritual death. I do not deny that here too death sometimes does his work suddenly, with a mighty power of fear and of remorse, tearing down as in an instant the whole body of sin in its full vigour. But this is most rare; most commonly, much the most commonly, spiritual death, like natural, does its work gradually; with many an ebb and flow, with many a struggle of the natural sin to stand against it, struggles which it reduces but cannot quite put down; so that for years and years of life we may be said to be dying daily. And oftentimes, too, the work begins and is fatally interrupted; death begins its work, but the strength of sin baffles it; and so the body of sin is not dead, but remains alive and vigorous, and its life is our eternal death.

But still, although the struggle be not over, although we may not be dead to sin, yet the great question still remains, are we dying to it? Depend upon it, that it is not to die to sin if we at certain times, as before the communion, or before our confirmation,-if we at certain times only look into ourselves, and say some prayers more than usual, and read some serious books which we do not commonly read, and make some good resolutions, and then think that our work is done. This many of us, it is likely, may have done, may

be doing now, or meaning to do it, yet we cannot say that they are dying to sin. What they have done, has been done perhaps very deliberately; they did these things as thinking it right to do them, and when they were over they were well pleased with themselves for having done them; but where was the struggle within them which announces the work of death, the fear of God's anger, the painful sense of sin, the praying with the earnestness of men in extremest peril that Christ who had shed his blood for us would now deliver us? Where was the leaving off old habits, painful almost as the actual dissolution of the body? Where was the consciousness of the sin that generally cleaves to our whole nature, not only in this or that particular act, but in our hearts altogether, which Christ's grace must destroy no less generally, and the destruction of which, so wholly has it engrossed us, seems to be no less than the destruction of our own selves?

If all this seems perfectly strange to us, strange to our experience, extravagant to our notions, then we may be very sure that we have not died to sin, nor yet begun to die to it; that sin rather is alive within us, and that it is ourselves rather that are perishing. Assuredly the great work is yet to do; we are still living after the flesh, living after our own evil nature, and therefore we cannot please God.

What I have said would then have its proper

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