is for a blessed end and purpose it is that sin may be wholly cleansed
out that this tabernacle is taken down, as the leprous houses(199) were to
be taken down under the law, and as now we use to cast down pest lodges,
the better to cleanse them of the infection. It is not to prejudge him of
life, but to install him in a better life. Thus you see that it is neither
total nor perpetual, but it is medicinal and profitable to the soul,--it is
but the death of the body for a moment, and the life of the soul for ever.

Sermon XXVII.

Verse 10.--"And if Christ be in you, the body is dead because sin,"
&c.

This is the high excellence of the Christian religion, that it contains
the most absolute precepts for a holy life, and the greatest comforts in
death, for from these two the truth and excellency of religion is to be
measured, if it have the highest and perfectest rule of walking, and the
chiefest comfort withal. Now, the perfection of Christianity you saw in
the rule, how spiritual it is, how reasonable, how divine, how free from
all corrupt mixture, how transcending all the most exquisite precepts and
laws of men, deriving a holy conversation from the highest fountain, the
Spirit of Christ, and conforming it to the highest pattern, the will of
God. And, indeed, in the first word of this verse, there is something of
the excellent nature of Christianity holden out, "if Christ be in you,"
which is the true description of a Christian,--one in whom Christ is, which
imports the divine principle and the spiritual subject of Christianity.
The principle is Christ in a man,--Christ by his Spirit dwelling in him.
This great apostle knew this well in his own experience, and, therefore,
he can speak best in this style "I live, yet not I, but Christ in me,"
Gal. ii. 20 importing, that Christ and his Spirit is to the soul what the
soul is to the body,--that there is a living influence from heaven that
acts and moves the soul of a Christian as powerfully yet as sweetly and
pleasantly, as if it were the natural motion of the soul, and truly it is
the natural motion of the soul. It is that primitive life which was most
connatural to the soul of man, which sin did deprive us of. All the
powerful constraint and violence that Christ uses in drawing the souls of
men to him, and after him, is as kindly unto them, and perfects them as
much, as that impulse by which the soul moves and turns the body, a sweet
compulsion and ble