O God." And the more we assimilate to Him, the more will our adorning be "not the outward adorning of plaiting the hair, and of wearing of gold, or of putting on of apparel, but the hidden man of the heart, in that which is not corruptible, even the ornament of a meek and quiet spirit, which is in the sight of God of great price." (1 Pet. iii. 3, 4.) All this, dear friends, is of great present interest,—as bearing, in the very letter of it, upon the vain and gaudy apparel in which, in this present evil day, the creature soon to lie in corruption, or changed into glory, is arrayed. Alas! such is but the outward sign of how the heart attaches itself to everything here, instead of living in the power of being crucified to the world, and the world unto us. The sight of death, His death on the cross, in rejection; and of glory, His glory in the presence of the Father, like which we are soon to be, is that which alone has power in closing our poor eyes to all that is here. It is in the presence of such death and of such glory, we become DEAD TO THE WORLD,

and THE WORLD IS DEAD TO US. As we

sing :

"Dead to the world, with Him who died,

To win our hearts, our love,

We, risen with our risen Head,
In spirit dwell above.

By faith His boundless glories there
Our wond'ring eyes behold-
Those glories which eternal years
Can never all unfold.

This fills our hearts with deep desire,

To lose ourselves in love;

Bears all our hopes from earth away,
And fixes them above."

The third requirement is in ver. 6, viz: “He shall come at no dead body"—that touching the corpse even of his father, or his mother, or his brother, or his sister, when they die, the vow is broken, and he is unclean. Was there any harm, beloved, in this of itself? Was it not natural that a child should take a last embrace of a loved mother in death, or of a loved father, ere their remains are put under the clod of the valley? None certainly! But this was God's way of teaching separation, of

habituating man not to touch. And as death represents sin, self, corruption, God would instruct us in practical holiness, in a whole-hearted separation from them.

Doctrinally, if I touch self, as giving me any ground of hope, I deny the Lord that bought me; or if I touch sin I am defiled; even ordinances, when put in the place of Christ, as the Galatians put them, involve a separation from the Nazarite vow. They were "bewitched;" they had begun in the Spirit; but had gone into the flesh-the only remedy was the Nazarite one-"Touch not, taste not, handle not." The true way of this non-association with evil, is to be occupied with the Lord; in such occupation, sin, which is still in you, lies a dead letter, and other things are in abeyance. There is nothing that deadifies more than the habit of not minding. A person, for example, who is seeking association with you. He calls, but you are occupied; he calls again, and you are occupied ; he repeats his call, still you are occupied. He knows you prefer being occupied to him, and he is

mortified the energy which first marked him is broken. Thus is it with the flesh; to be spiritually minded is life and peace; minding the things of the Spirit, being occupied with them, becomes a practical mortification-a deadifying process to the flesh. This I believe is the power of a true personal holiness-separation unto God being the greatest power in separation from evil.

Now Samson is our illustration in all these, for he, alas is too much the picture of what many are in these perilous times, in which saints have lost the power for resisting the inroads of evil around them. Would that Joseph, or Daniel, or better still, the blessed Nazarite Himself-the Lord-were the one to whom we could refer as being the standard, according to which they may favorably compare. We have all in Christ, as we shall see; but, alas! is it not that we are too like other men. Now Samson, as we have seen, was a Nazarite by birth-he did not come into it by attainment. We do not come into all we have in Christ by attainment. He had all power-a lion

Oh,

or a bear was nothing to him-he could rend them as easily as he could a thread. We are born, beloved, as children of God, into all the unsearchable riches which are in Christ, into a participation of the divine nature; filled out of the fulness that is in God. One with Christ, all that He has, communicable, is ours. "All things are ours." how vast! how blessed! who knows the height, or depth, or length, or breadth of that love of God, which in association with His Son has put us into this. No effort of ours could ever have attained it; we have it, beloved, by birth-we are born into it, born to know it; that as Adam could, as it were, instinctively tell all the names of lamb, or lion, or dove in the garden, at his will; so we, with the open eye given us of God, through such truth as Ephesians or Colossians, are able to "comprehend with all saints, what is the breath, and length, and depth, and height, and to know the love of Christ which passeth knowledge." If we have not this power, we have no defence. If we lose the consciousness of it, we may well infer that the Nazarite vow has