t Himself within us.

So, dear friends, test your faith by these two tests, what it grasps
and what it does. If it grasps a whole Christ, in all the glory of His
nature and the blessedness of His work, it is genuine; and it proves its
genuineness if, and only if, it works in you by love; animating all your
action, bringing you ever into the conscious presence of that dear Lord,
and making Him pattern, law, motive, goal, companion and reward. 'To me
to live is Christ.'

If so, then we live indeed; but to live in the flesh is to die; and the
death that we die when we live in Christ is the gate and the beginning
of the only real life of the soul.

THE EVIL EYE AND THE CHARM

'Who hath bewitched you, that ye should not obey
the truth, before whose eye Jesus Christ hath been
evidently set forth, crucified among you?'--GAL.
iii. 1.

The Revised Version gives a shorter, and probably correct, form of this
vehement question. It omits the two clauses 'that ye should not obey the
truth' and 'among you.' The omission increases the sharpness of the
thrust of the interrogation, whilst it loses nothing of the meaning.

Now, a very striking metaphor runs through the whole of this question,
which may easily be lost sight of by ordinary readers. You know the old
superstition as to the Evil Eye, almost universal at the date of this
letter and even now in the East, and lingering still amongst ourselves.
Certain persons were supposed to have the power, by a look, to work
mischief, and by fixing the gaze of their victims, to suck the very life
out of them. So Paul asks who the malign sorcerer is who has thus
fascinated the fickle Galatians, and is draining their Christian life
out of their eyes.

Very appropriately, therefore, if there is this reference, which the
word translated 'bewitched' carries with it, he goes on to speak about
Jesus Christ as having been displayed before their eyes. They had seen
Him. How did they come to be able to turn away to look at anything else?

But there is another observation to be made by way of introduction, and
that is as to the full force of the expression 'evidently set forth.'
The word employed, as commentators tell us, is that which is used for
the display of official proclamations, or public notices, in some
conspicuous place, as the Forum or the market, that the citizens might
read. So, keeping up the metaphor, the word might be rendered, as ha