fer also with Him, and be put to death after
the flesh as He was. Yet God has taught us, that they are alive in
the spirit and yet dead in the flesh, as He afterwards says. But are
we a sacrifice with Him? Then, as He dies, so we are to die according
to the flesh; as He lives spiritually, so do we also live in the
spirit.

_Being put to death in the flesh, but quickened by the spirit._ The
word _flesh_ is common in Scripture, as is also the word spirit, and
the Apostles usually present the two in contrast. The sense is this:
that Christ, through His sufferings, is taken out of this life that
consists in flesh and blood, as a man on earth who lives by flesh and
blood,--walks and stands, eats, drinks, sleeps, wakes, sees, hears,
grasps, and feels,--and, in brief, whatever the body does while it is
sensible; to all this Christ has died. This is what St. Paul calls a
natural body,--that is, the animal life. _In the flesh_, not _after_
the flesh,--that is, in the natural functions which the body
exercises, to such life is He dead: so that this life has now ceased
with Him, and He is now removed to another life and quickened after
the spirit, passed into a spiritual and supernatural life, that
comprises in itself the whole life that Christ now has in soul and
body. So that he has no more a fleshy body, but a spiritual body.

Thus shall it be with us at the last day, when spiritual life shall
succeed to flesh and blood; for my body and yours will live without
food and drink,--will not procreate, nor digest, nor grow wanton, and
the like, but we shall inwardly live after the spirit,--and the body
shall be purified even as the sun, and yet far brighter, while there
probably will be no natural flesh and blood, no natural or corporeal
labor.

This is the language of St. Paul thereon, I. Cor. xv.: "The first man
Adam was made in natural life, and the last in spiritual life." And
it follows, "As we have the image of the natural man, so shall we
also bear the image of the spiritual man." From Adam we derive all
our natural functions, so far as concerns our unreasoning animal
nature as to the fine senses. But Christ is spiritual,--flesh and
blood not according to the outward sense; He neither sleeps nor
wakes, and yet knows all things, and is present in the ends of the
earth. Like Him shall we be also, for He is the first fruits, the
earnest and first born (as Paul says) of the spiritual life; that is,
He is the first who has ri