n the heavens, and nourishes my body and soul to
everlasting life. Thou shalt not, under pretence of voluntary
humility and will-worship, tempt me to go and pray to angels or to
saints, or to the Blessed Virgin, because I choose to fancy them
more tender, more loving and condescending, more loving, more human,
than the Lord himself, who gave himself to death for me. If the
Lord God, the Son of the Father, is not ashamed to be man for ever
and ever, I will not be ashamed to think of him as man; to pray to
him as man; to believe and be sure that he can be touched with the
feeling of my infirmities; to entreat him, by all that he did and
suffered as a man, to deliver me from those temptations which he
himself has conquered for himself; and to cry to him in the
smallest, as well as in the most important matters--'By the mystery
of thy holy incarnation; by thine agony and bloody sweat; by thy
cross and passion; by thy precious death and burial; by thy glorious
resurrection and ascension;' by all which thou hast done, and
suffered, and conquered, as a man upon this earth of ours, good
Lord, deliver us!

SERMON XXXVI. THE BATTLE WITHIN

(Fourteenth Sunday after Trinity, 1858.)

Galatians, v. 16, 17. This I say then, Walk in the spirit, and ye
shall not fulfil the lust of the flesh. For the flesh lusteth
against the spirit, and the spirit against the flesh: and these are
contrary the one to the other: so that ye cannot do the things that
ye would.

Does this text seem to any of you difficult to understand? It need
not be difficult to you; for it does not speak of anything which you
do not know. It speaks of something which you have all felt, which
goes on in you every day of your lives. It speaks of something,
certainly, which is very curious, mysterious, difficult to put into
words: but what is not curious and mysterious? The commonest
things are usually the most curious? What is more wonderful than
the beating of your heart; your pulse which beats all day long,
without your thinking of it?

Just so this battle, this struggle, which St. Paul speaks of in this
text, is going on in us all day long, and yet we hardly think of it.
Now what is this battle? What are these things which are fighting
continually in your mind and in mine? St. Paul calls them the flesh
and the spirit. 'The flesh,' he says, 'lusts against the spirit,
and the spirit against the flesh.' They pull opposite ways. One
wants to