nor the Apostle only who have to bear the
condemnation of exaggeration, if this representation of my text be not
true to facts, but it is Jesus Christ too; for He says, 'Except ye eat
the flesh and drink the blood of the Son of Man, ye have no life in
you.' And I think that be He divine or not divine, His words about the
religious condition of men go so surely to the mark that a man must be
tolerably impregnable in his self-conceit who charges _Him_ with
narrowness and exaggeration. At all events, I am content to say after
Him, and I pray that you and I, when we accept Him as our Teacher, may
take not only His gracious, but His stern, words, assured that a deep
graciousness lies in these, too, if we rightly understand them.

Let me remind you that the phrase of my text is by no means confined to
Christian teachers, but that, in common speech, we hear from all high
thinkers about the lower type of humanity being dead to the loftier
thoughts in which they live and move and have their being. It has passed
into a commonplace of language to speak of men being 'dead to honour,'
'dead to shame,' 'dead' to this, that, and the other good and noble and
gracious thing. And the same metaphor, if you like, lies here in my
text--that men who have given their wills and inmost natures over to the
dominion of self--and that is the definition of sin--that such men are,
_ipso facto_, by reason of that very surrender of themselves to their
worst selves, dead on what I may call the top side of their nature, and
that all that is there is atrophied and dwindling away.

Unconsciousness is one characteristic of death. And oh! as I look round
I know that there are tens, and perhaps hundreds, of men and women who
are all but utterly unconscious of a whole universe in which are the
only realities, and to which it becomes them to have access. You live,
in the physical sense, and move and have your being in God, and yet your
inmost life would not be altered one hair's-breadth if there were no God
at all. You pass the most resplendent instances and illustrations of His
presence, His work, and you see nothing. You are blind on that side of
your natures; or, as my text says, dead to the whole spiritual realm.
Just as if there were a brick wall run against some man's windows so
that he could see nothing out of them; so you, by your persistent
adherence to the paltry present, the material, the visible, the selfish,
have reared up a wall against the windo