but "because they felt the need of
self" That is so good that it going into battle with an undivided would bear preaching from for a "week of Sundays.' es; to go out into life with a divided self, to meet its temptations, we are as much lost as going out to war with a divided self, it ends-in defeat. So man has wanted to get over this split in his nature, and get himself united with himself. What ways are there? Paul has a great deal to say about the Law. Put the bad self under rules, and codes of ethics. No doubt this helps. David loved the Jaw of God, as we see in Psalm CXIX. And none of us can dispense with some law. But Paul found that while it helped, it didn't extirpate the evil. The "law of sin," as he calls it would get the better of the "law of God."
And we find all kinds of modifications of the Law, which Paul found ineffective used by all kinds of earnest souls to end the conflict. There are morals. The moral law is called in to heal the breach in the soul of man. We are so weak in resistance to evil that we need all the moral power that we can get into us., There was, or is still a Mr. Salter of Chicago, the head di: ce with the way of the Gospel. of an Ethical School. He seems to sins his faith on the value of statements like this: The taking of the law of the social ideal and making it the law of business." I fear that the self that "grins" at its sins, as this poet says would decline to be extirpated, by a mere windy abstraction like that. Try it on the Chinese tuchuns, who, according to common report, milk the revenues of China dry. Tell them, 'My dear brethren, you are violating the law of the social ideal!' I wonder whether we should find it Jead to conversion. No. Mere abstract principles will never cleanse the heart. The way of denial, of asceticism, has been well tried. It has been thought by people of all religions, that if they starve and reduce the body, the soul will get its own back. But on the whole, the proverb comes true: "Nature driven out by the door, comes in at the window." Mediaeval saints thought themselves attacked by demons. Really, the demons were the product of an empty stomach and emaciated body. Sin originates in the spiritual] nature, not in the bodily nature.
What then is the way to unity in the soul of man? There is none like the Christian way, let them say what they like about it being}. supernatural. Of course it is. The natural had every chance of showing what it could do to end the conflict between the "inward man" and the outer and lower man. And it made a ghastly failure of it. And the Christian way is a new begins ning; "ye must be born again." All other ways are mere makeshifts," pills to cure earthquakes. "The need of reinforcement to man in this distracted state of his nature was so great that we believe God himself, in Jesus Christ, took the whole tragedy of man in hand, and came down to save us. We believe nothing Jess than that. We be lieve that in Jesus Christ the whole saving, healing, reconciling grace of God is concentrated. And any soul, feeling itself helpless in this-eternal fight between his own two selves, has but to cast himself on the Son of God, and be saved. There will be lapses. Victory is not given at once; there will be stumble ing, but there will be risings again, till at last, the faithful soul comes to "the full stature of the perfect. man in Christ Jesus."
Text read from the printed page and cleaned; old type leaves the occasional error.