filthiness of the spirit," "seducing
spirits," "corrupt minds," "mind and conscience defiled,"
"reprobate mind," showing plainly that the spirit was sometimes
regarded as guilty and morally dead. The apostle writes, "I pray
that your whole spirit and soul and body may be preserved
blameless." The scriptural declarations now cited teach explicitly
that both the body and the soul may be subjected to the perfect
law of God, or that both may abide in rebellion and wickedness,
the latter state being called, metaphorically, "walking after the
flesh," the former "walking after the spirit," that being sin and
death, this being righteousness and life.

An explanation of the origin of these metaphors will cast further
light upon the subject. The use of a portion of them arose from
the fact that many of the most easily besetting and pernicious
vices, conditions and allurements of sin, defilements and clogs of
the spirit, come through the body, which, while it is itself
evidently fated to perish, does by its earthly solicitations
entice, contaminate, and debase the soul that by itself is invited
to better things and seems destined to immortality. Not that these
evils originate in the body, of course, all the doings of a man
spring from the spirit of man which is in him, but that the body
is the occasion and the aggravating medium of their manifestation.
This thought is not contradicted, it is only omitted, in the words
of Peter: "I beseech you, as strangers and pilgrims, abstain from
fleshly lusts, which war against the soul." For such language
would be spontaneously suggested by the fact that to be in bondage
to the baser nature is hostile alike to spiritual dignity and
peace, and to physical health and strength. The principles of the
moral nature are at war with the passions of the animal nature;
the goading vices of the mind are at war with the organic
harmonies of the body; and on the issues of these conflicts hang
all the interests of life and death, in every sense the words can
be made to bear.

Another reason for the use of these figures of speech,
undoubtedly, was the philosophy of the ineradicable hostility of
matter and spirit, the doctrine, so prevalent in the East from the
earliest times, that matter is wholly corrupt and evil, the
essential root and source of all vileness. An old, unknown Greek
poet embodies the very soul of this faith in a few verses which we
find in the Anthology. Literally rendered, they run th