with lowly trust that it is true of us, 'If any man be
in Christ he is a new creature.' For the quickening of our energy and
faithful efforts we have to give heed to the command, and fulfil it in
ourselves--'Be ye renewed in the Spirit of your minds, and put on the
new man.'

IV. And, finally, the text contains the principle that the means of
appropriating this new nature is contact with the truth.

If you will look at the margins of some Bibles you will see that our
translators have placed there a rendering, which, as is not unfrequently
the case, is decidedly better than that adopted by them in the text.
Instead of 'true holiness,' the literal rendering is 'holiness of
truth'--and the Apostle's purpose in the expression is not to
particularise the quality, but the origin of the 'holiness.' It is 'of
truth,' that is, produced by the holiness which flows from the truth as
it is in Jesus, of which he has been speaking a moment before.

And we come, therefore, to this practical conclusion, that whilst the
agent of renovation is the Divine Spirit, and the condition of
renovation is our cleaving to Christ, the medium of renovation and the
weapon which transforming grace employs is 'the word of the truth of the
Gospel' whereby we are sanctified. There we get the law, and there we
get the motive and the impulse. There we get the encouragement and the
hope. In it, in the grand simple message--'God was in Christ,
reconciling the world unto Himself, not imputing their trespasses unto
them,' lie the germs of all moral progress. And in proportion as we
believe that--not with the cold belief of our understandings, but with
the loving affiance of our hearts and our whole spiritual being--in
proportion as we believe that, in that proportion shall we grow in
'knowledge,' shall we grow in 'righteousness,' in the 'image of Him that
created us.' The Gospel is the great means of this change, because it is
the great means by which He who works the change comes near to our
understandings and our hearts.

So let us learn how impossible are righteousness and holiness, morality
and religion in men, unless they flow from this source. It is the truth
that sanctifies. It is the Spirit who wields that truth who sanctifies.
It is Christ who sends the Spirit who sanctifies. But, brethren, beyond
the range of this light is only darkness, and that nature which is not
cleansed by His priestly hand laid upon it remains leprous, and he who
is clothe