nature" within responds favourably to the temptations of Satan without. When the believer would do good, evil is present with him. It is to be feared that the majority of Christians are living in the seventh chapter of Romans instead of the sixth and the eighth. The tendencies to evil are so strong within them, and the contest with the flesh so distressing as to extort the cry continually, "O wretched man that I am! who shall deliver me from the body of this death?" But the seventh chapter of Romans was never designed to be a representation of the ideal Christian life; it is rather a portrayal of the struggles of a convicted sinner seeking justification by the deeds of the law. The ideal Christian life is described in the sixth chapter, "Knowing this, that our old man is crucified with Him, that the body of sin might be destroyed, that henceforth we should not serve sin." Here we are taught that the purpose of the crucifixion of the old man is that the body, “in so far as it is a sin body" (Meyer), might be destroyed, “annihilated" (Cremer), done away" (R.V.). “But now, being made free from sin, and become servants to God, ye have your fruit unto holiness, and the end everlasting life."

The commandment is, "Crucify the flesh with its affections and lusts." "If ye do mortify the deeds of the body, ye shall live." To crucify and to mortify mean to put to death. The old man is not to be merely held down, but to be crucified until he is quite dead. Repressive power is nowhere in the New Testament ascribed to the blood of Christ, but rather purifying efficacy. When St. Paul said that he kept his body under and brought it into subjection, he made no

allusion to the flesh, the carnal mind, but to his innocent bodily appetites. God does not propose to destroy our natural appetites, propensities and affections, but to take the sin out of them that they may be exercised rightly and properly, and always for His glory.

When John Wesley asked the German Arvid Gradin for his definition of full salvation he replied as follows:-"Repose in the blood of Christ, a firm confidence toward God and persuasion of His favour, the highest tranquillity, serenity and peace of mind, with a deliverance from every (inordinate) fleshly desire and cessation of all even inward sins." To every word of this hundreds can subscribe. It is not our mere theory, but our experience. While conscious of many errors, ignorances, infirmities and defects which every moment need the merit of Christ's death, we claim by faith the rest from sin which the great poet of Methodism thus beautifully describes:— “All the struggle now is o'er,

And wars and fightings cease,
Israel now need sin no more,

But dwell in perfect peace.

"All his enemies are gone,

Sin shall have in him no part,
Israel now shall dwell alone,

Astronomers

With Jesus in his heart.'

tell us that there is a point between the earth and the moon where the action of gravitation changes, and if we could hurl a missile with sufficient force that it would reach that point, instead of coming back to

earth, in the superior attraction of the moon, it would rush on with increasing velocity to meet it. This illustrates human experience when "the law of the Spirit of life in Christ Jesus hath made us free from the law of sin and death." The natural tendency in us towards sin (the law of sin and death) is not only neutralised when Christ our life is fully apprehended (the law of the spirit of life) but under the more powerful operation of the latter law the soul now gravitates upward, every aspiration is Godward, and His service is a luxury and a delight.

CHAPTER XVI.

Christ's Legacy to the Church.

M

ATTHEW HENRY says "that when Christ died He left a will, in which He bequeathed His soul to His Father, his body to Joseph of Arimathea, His clothes fell to the soldiers, His mother He gave to John, but to His disciples, who had left all for Him, He left not silver and gold, but something that was infinitely better-His peace." "My peace I give unto you." Elsewhere this peace is described as the peace of God, because He is its source and origin. It is the peace which Christ had with the Father from the beginning, the peace in the heart of the Eternal, the stillness of eternity entering the spirit, causing a waveless, breathless calm. It lies not in the emotions, nor in the absence of the emotions. It is a peace not springing up in the course of nature, but handed down from heaven, and implanted in the believing soul.

Nothing for a moment broke the serenity of Christ's life on earth. Tempest and tumult met Him everywhere, until outwardly His life was one of the most

troubled that was ever lived. But the inner life was a sea of glass. The highest tranquillity, serenity, and peace of mind were always there. It was at the very time when the bloodhounds were dogging Him in the streets of Jerusalem, that He turned to His disciples and offered them, as a last legacy, “My peace." If the meagreness of human language fails to convey to a blind man the vastness of that ocean which lies in the hollow of the Creator's hand, how much more is its poverty seen when it attempts to set forth, in an inexperienced soul, all that is meant by God's perfect peace.

All Christians have peace with God, but this peace of God transcends every mind, every attempt of the strongest intellect, to realise its qualities and to describe it. Like the love of Christ, it "passeth knowledge," or, as the apostle says in writing to the Philippians, it "exceeds all understanding." Drummond describes it as "the perfect poise of the soul; the absolute adjustment of the inward man to the stress of outward things; the preparedness against every emergency; the external calm of an invulnerable faith; the repose of a heart set deep in God."

It is the deep tranquillity of a soul resting wholly upon God, in contrast with the unrest and anxiety engendered by a self-centred and worldly spirit. Jesus called it "My peace," in contrast with the hollowness of what the world calls peace. The world's peace is determined by outward things, and is as changeable as external conditions. But the peace of God changes not. It is not fitful and transient, but an abiding and ever-increasing reality. Ecstatic joy

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