conflict; it would bring back
unity by the excision of all our natural appetites, and all the
desires and feelings which we have by nature. But when the apostle
Paul comes forward to proclaim the will of God, he says it is not by
the crushing of the body, but by the sanctification of the body: "I
pray God your whole spirit and soul and body be preserved blameless
unto the coming of our Lord Jesus Christ."

In this my Christian brethren, there is one of the deepest of all
truths. Does a man feel himself the slave and the victim of his lower
passions? Let not that man hope to subdue them merely by struggling
against them. Let him not by fasting, by austerity, by any earthly
rule that he can conceive, expect to subdue the flesh. The more he
thinks of his vile and lower feelings, the more will they be brought
into distinctness, and therefore into power; the more hopelessly will
he become their victim. The only way in which a man can subdue the
flesh, is not by the extinction of those feelings, but by the
elevation of their character. Let there be added to that character,
sublimity of aim, purity of affection; let there be given grandeur,
spiritual nobleness; and then, just as the strengthening of the whole
constitution of the body makes any particular and local affection
disappear, so by degrees, by the raising of the character, do these
lower affections become, not extinguished or destroyed by excision,
but ennobled by a new and loftier spirit breathed through them.

This is the account given by the apostle. He speaks of the conflict
between the flesh and the spirit. And his remedy is to give vigour to
the higher, rather than to struggle with the lower. "This I say then,
Walk in the spirit, and ye _shall not_ fulfil the lust of the flesh."

Once more; the apostle differs from the world in this, that the world
would restore this unity, and sanctify man simply from the soul. It is
this which civilization pretends to effect. We hear much in these
modern days of "the progress of Humanity." We hear of man's invention,
of man's increase of knowledge; and it would seem in all this, as if
man were necessarily becoming better. Brethren, it always must be the
case in that state in which God is looked upon as the Supreme Being
merely, where the intellect of man is supposed to be the chief
thing--that which makes him most kindred to his Maker.

The doctrine of Christianity is this--that unity of