ire
and seeks merely personal benefit, honor, pride and pleasure. The
apostle calls that a worldly life where the Word of God is lacking, or
at least is disregarded, and where the devil has rule, impelling to
all vices.

Paul would say: Ye must be dead to a worldly life of this sort, a life
striven after by the heathen, who disregard God's Word and suffer the
devil to have his way with them. Ye must prove the resurrection of
Christ in you to be something more than vain words. Ye must show there
is a living power manifest in you because ye are risen, a power which
makes you lead a different life, one in obedience to the Word and will
of God, and called the divine, heavenly life. Where this change does
not take place, it is a sign ye are not yet Christians but are
deceiving yourselves with vain fancies.

10. Under the phrase "things that are upon the earth"--worldly
things--Paul includes not only gross, outward vices, sins censurable
in the eyes of the world, but also greater immoralities; everything,
in fact, not in accordance with the pure Word of God, faith and true
Christian character.

SPIRITUAL AND CARNAL WORLDLINESS.

11. In order to a better understanding of the text, we shall adopt
Paul's customary classification of life as spiritual and carnal. Life
on earth is characterized as of the spirit, or spiritual; and of the
flesh, or carnal. But the spiritual life may be worldly. The worldly
spiritual life is represented by the vices of false and self-devised
doctrine wherein the soul lives without the Word of God, in unbelief
and in contempt of God; or, still worse, abuses the Word of God and
the name of Christ in false doctrine, making them a cover and ornament
for wicked fraud, using them falsely under a show of truth, under
pretense of Christian love.

This is worldly conduct of the spiritual kind. It is always the worst,
ever the most injurious, since it is not only personal sin, but
deceives others into like transgression. Paul refers, in the epistle
lesson for Easter, to this evil as the "old leaven" and the "leaven of
wickedness." And in Second Corinthians 7, 1, he makes the same
classification of spiritual and carnal sin, saying, "Let us cleanse
ourselves from all defilement of flesh and spirit." By defilement of
the spirit he means those secret, subtle vices wherewith man pollutes
and corrupts his inner life in the sight of God; his sins not being
manifest to the world, but deceiving human reason and