or self-mortification that will do anything but drive the evil below
the surface, there to do a still more subtle work, winding down out
of reach. The roots will only strike deeper and the sap flow stronger
for the few leaves trimmed off here and there. If self sets to work
to slay self it will only end in rising hydra-headed from the
contest. How is the deliverance to come?

The annuals give us the secret. Look back at the vetch seed-vessels.
Why is it that the leaves which used to stand firm and fresh like
those of the flowering clover, have begun to shrivel and turn yellow?
It is because they have acquiesced wholly now in the death sentence
of their new birth, and they are letting the new life live at the
expense of the old. Death is being wrought out by life.

And the same triumphant power of the new life is set free as we come
to accept to its utmost limits the sentence of Calvary, that "our old
man was crucified with Him," in its sum-total, seen and unseen, root
and branch. Christ is our Life now--our only Life--and we begin to
find that He is dealing with the old creation, we hardly know how. We
only know that as we bring the judgment, the motive, the aim that
were ours, not His, into contact with Him, they shrivel and wither
like the dying leaves. The impulses and the shrinkings of the flesh
perish in His Presence alike. The new life wrecks the old. "If ye
through the Spirit do mortify the deeds of the body ye shall
live"--that is what the withering leaves say. We are "saved by His
life."

The great North African aloe plant shows this very strikingly. It is
like our annuals on a large scale, for it flowers and seeds but once
in its career, though that numbers more years than these can count
weeks.

Up till then its thick hard leaves look as if nothing could exhaust
their vigour. The flower stalk pushes up from a fresh sheaf of
them--up and up twelve or fourteen feet--and expands into a
candelabra of golden blossom, and not a droop comes in the plant
below. But as the seed forms, we see that life is working death,
slowly and surely; the swords lose their stiffness and colour and
begin to hang helplessly, and by the time it is ripe, every vestige
of vitality is drained away from them, and they have gone to limp,
greyish-brown streamers. The seed has possessed itself of everything.

And the meadow plants that we have been watching follow, on their
small pattern, the same law.

All gives way to the ripen