mething that you get, but
it is something that you become. The teaching of this letter, and of the
whole New Testament, is that the profoundest and most precious of all
the gifts which come to us in Jesus Christ, and which in their totality
are summed up in the one word that has so little power over us, because
we understand it so little, and know it so well--'salvation'--is a
change in a man's nature so deep, radical, vital, as that it may fairly
be paralleled with a resurrection from the dead.

Now, I venture to believe that it is something more than a strong
rhetorical figure when that change is described as being the creation of
a new man within us. The resurrection symbol for the same fact may be
treated as but a symbol. You cannot treat the teaching of a new life in
Christ as being a mere figure. It is something a great deal more than
that, and when once a man's eye is opened to look for it in the New
Testament it is wonderful how it flashes out from every page and
underlies the whole teaching. The Gospel of John, for example, is but
one long symphony which has for its dominant theme 'I am come that they
might have life.' And that great teaching--which has been so vulgarised,
narrowed, and mishandled by sacerdotal pretensions and sacramentarian
superstitions--that great teaching of Regeneration, or the new birth,
rests upon this as its very basis, that what takes place when a man
turns to Jesus Christ, and is saved by Him, is that there is
communicated to him not in symbol but in spiritual fact (and spiritual
facts are far more true than external ones which are called real) a
spark of Christ's own life, something of 'that spirit of life which was
in Christ Jesus,' and by which, and by which alone, being transfused
into us, we become 'free from the law of sin and death.' I beseech you,
brethren, see that, in your perspective of Christian truth, the thought
of a new life imparted to us has as prominent and as dominant a place as
it obviously has in the teaching of the New Testament. It is not so
dominant in the current notions of Christianity that prevail amongst
average people, but it is so in all men who let themselves be guided by
the plain teaching of Christ Himself and of all His servants. Salvation?
Yes! And the very essence of the salvation is the breathing into me of a
divine life, so that I become partaker of 'the divine nature.'

Now, there is another step to be taken, and that is that this new life
is re