e
become its manacles and fetters. But St Paul is not at the moment
thinking either of the metaphysical notion of liberty, or of its
religious realization; he has in his thought the birth of the soul's
consciousness of freedom.

'And not only so'--that the creation groaneth and travaileth--'but
ourselves also, which have the first fruits of the spirit, even we
ourselves groan within ourselves, waiting for.... the redemption of our
body.'--We are not free, he implies, until our body is redeemed; then
all the creation will be free with us. He regards the creation as part
of our embodiment. The whole creation is waiting for the manifestation
of the sons of God--that is, the redemption of their body, the idea of
which extends to their whole material envelopment, with all the life
that belongs to it. For this as for them, the bonds of corruption must
fall away; it must enter into the same liberty with them, and be that
for which it was created--a vital temple, perfected by the unbroken
indwelling of its divinity.

The liberty here intended, it may be unnecessary to say, is not that
essential liberty--freedom from sin, but the completing of the
redemption of the spirit by the redemption of the body, the perfecting
of the greater by its necessary complement of the less. Evil has been
constantly at work, turning our house of the body into a prison;
rendering it more opaque and heavy and insensible; casting about it
bands and cerements, and filling it with aches and pains. The freest
soul, the purest of lovers, the man most incapable of anything mean,
would not, for all his mighty liberty, yet feel absolutely at large
while chained to a dying body--nor the less hampered, but the more, that
that dying body was his own. The redemption of the body, therefore, the
making of it for the man a genuine, perfected, responsive house-alive,
is essential to the apostle's notion of a man's deliverance. The new man
must have a new body with a new heaven and earth. St Paul never thinks
of himself as released from body; he desires a perfect one, and of a
nobler sort; he would inhabit a heaven-made house, and give up the
earth-made one, suitable only to this lower stage of life, infected and
unsafe from the first, and now much dilapidated in the service of the
Master who could so easily give him a better. He wants a spiritual
body--a body that will not thwart but second the needs and aspirations
of the spirit. He had in his mind, I presume, su