sore loss.

Paul, in his intense moral earnestness, in verse 13, bids us regard
ourselves as already in 'the day,' and shape our conduct as if it
shone around us and all things were made manifest by its light. The
sins to be put off are very gross and palpable. They are for the most
part sins of flesh, such as even these Roman Christians had to be
warned against, and such as need to be manifested by the light even
now among many professing Christian communities.

But Paul has one more word to say. If he stopped without it, he would
have said little to help men who are crying out, 'How am I to strip
off this clinging evil, which seems my skin rather than my clothing?
How am I to put on that flashing panoply?' There is but one way,--put
on the Lord Jesus Christ. If we commit ourselves to Him by faith, and
front our temptations in His strength, and thus, as it were, wrap
ourselves in Him, He will be to us dress and armour, strength and
righteousness. Our old self will fall away, and we shall take no
forethought for the flesh, to fulfil the lusts thereof.

SALVATION NEARER

'... Now is our salvation nearer than
when we believed.'--ROMANS xiii. 11.

There is no doubt, I suppose, that the Apostle, in common with the
whole of the early Church, entertained more or less consistently the
expectation of living to witness the second coming of Jesus Christ.
There are in Paul's letters passages which look both in the direction
of that anticipation, and in the other one of expecting to taste
death. 'We which are alive and remain unto the coming of the Lord,'
he says twice in one chapter. 'I am ready to be offered, and the hour
of my departure is at hand,' he says in his last letter.

Now this contrariety of anticipation is but the natural result of
what our Lord Himself said, 'It is not for you to know the times and
the seasons,' and no one, who is content to form his doctrine of the
knowledge resulting from inspiration from the words of Jesus Christ
Himself, need stumble in the least degree in recognising the plain
fact that Paul and his brother Apostles did not know when the Master
was to come. Christ Himself had told them that there was a chamber
locked against their entrance, and therefore we do not need to think
that it militates against the authoritative inspiration of these
early teachers of the Church, if they, too, searched 'what manner of
time the Spirit which was in them did signify when it testified