him; and life ever afterward was a progress toward becoming what Jesus had shown him he really was.

It was indeed good news to Paul. It meant liberty. He was to follow the things which he is learning to love above all else. His religion is to be a service of that which brought the noblest satisfaction. To live, to be a man after the fashion of the Master, is the one delight of all delights for which he was willing to forsake all that the old life had to offer him. All through his letters to his "brothers," as he calls them, there runs in spite of all adverse circumstances (and things went pretty hard with him) a note almost of exultation. He is here in this world not as a slave to a tyrant, but as one in whom the limitless divine which is in and through all things may voice itself.

God is no alien, far-off deity, but the very life of our life and the Father of our spirits. In him we live and move and have our being. It is indeed good news that God is the power of our Father in us, able and ready to deliver us from ignorance and our first narrow selfishness into liberty and kinship and mastery. V. Its Practical Power.

In Paul we see what a wonderful inspiration this sense of growing vitality continually was. When he started out to live this life obedient to new ideals, he lost all that friends and position could bring him. He became, as was to be expected, the enemy whom orthodoxy pursued with relentless hatred. He faced adverse circumstances from the first, and died amid bitter persecution. Yet where in all the history of mankind can we find anything so full of intensest delight and vitality as these letters of his. Behind all the dark present he sees the things which are hidden to the outer eye. The day is about to dawn. The larger life he already feels in himself is opening to men. What matters it if all that one sees in the institutions of Rome and the iron forms of authority are against it? What we see is ever passing away. What is unseen save to hope and faith shall surely come. He could look to wider horizons, and be strong in the joy of his own fuller and keener life. It is God's glory. And it is shining in his heart.

THE

FRUIT OF THE SPIRIT.

HE fruit of the Spirit is love, joy, peace, longsuffering, goodness, faithfulness, meekness, self-control: against such there is no law. And they that are of Christ Jesus have crucified the flesh with the passions and the lusts thereof. If we live by the Spirit, by the Spirit let us also walk. Bear ye one another's burdens, and so fulfil the law of Christ.

Be not deceived; God is not mocked: for whatsoever a man soweth, that shall he also reap. For he that soweth unto his own flesh shall of the flesh reap corruption; but he that soweth unto the Spirit shall of the Spirit reap eternal life.

And let us not be weary in well-doing: for in due season we shall reap, if we faint not. And as many as shall walk by this rule, peace be upon them, and mercy, and upon the Israel of God.

GALATIANS, chapters five and six.

THE FRUIT OF THE SPIRIT.

L. The Lower Life.

Although Paul's phrases, "to be carnally-minded" or "the works of the flesh," are phrases which we do not now use, the underlying fact of experience is clear. On the one hand there is the immediate life of impulse and desire from which we are moving. On the other there is the truly human life to which these are subordinate.

In its beginning, human life was close akin to the merely animal out of which it arose. Appetite - the primitive impulses, hunger, love of what is grateful to the senses are in full control. The need of the moment is almost alone. Man is only beginning to set the possible need of to-morrow over against it. The savage gorges himself to-day. Before long, he is half starving. He is little more than an animal.

As he grows, he begins to subordinate these immediate impulses to others. He makes provision for the future. He begins to see that other and higher desires, the need of those about him, the love of children, devotion to his fellow-clansmen, demand the restraint of his first savage promptings for his own comfort. There is already in some dim sense the life of the spirit striving against the life of the animal.

So in us to-day there is, first of all, the liking to have just what we want at the moment. We are, if we permit it, slaves of We think that, if we can only

our narrow, selfish happiness. get what we want, we shall be happy. Wealth seems the best thing, because it can procure for us, or promises to procure for us, the power of doing pretty much as we like and of getting what we happen to desire.

But, when we think a little more deeply, we find that the satisfaction which can come from outside us is of little value, save in relation to our power of enjoyment. You may buy fine pictures, but buying them does not give you the highest delight they can afford. To get that, you must have the faculty of appreciating them. You may own an estate; but, unless you have trained yourself to understand all that its beauty means,

is of little value. Apart from what we are, what we have is of trifling importance.

More than that, these immediate satisfactions soon tire and are exhausted. The lover of his own mere selfish comfort grows jaded and weary. Has at last to try to kill time, because little really brings him delight. The reason is that he himself has not grown. The real wealth must be within. This is the process to which Paul refers when he says, "The wages of sin is death." Serve only your base nature, and you become a base man, to whom no high delight is possible. It is an evil thing for a man to remain an animal. The man in him dies. II. Our True Manhood.

The great lesson of experience is that we may rise above appetite and the senses into that which is really human life. Plato compares the desires to fiery steeds yoked to a chariot. If we let them, they hurry us whither they will. But the real man may hold the reins, and the fiery steeds are then the driven forces which bring him to the goal of his choice.

That, in Paul's words, is the "life of the spirit." More than any selfish wish is the need that all that we do shall help us to be our true selves,-masters, not slaves; heirs of the highest and finest delight of life. As we grow toward that, we find that the best things are often those which spring from setting on one side what is merely pleasant. To love others and be able to help them is vastly finer than to set our hearts on our own ease. To use all that life brings only as opportunity by which we may grow kindly, strong, noble, quietly masters of ourselves, is the one thing to which there is no limit. We never tire of that, and in it find our true manhood. It makes for all by which life comes to its supreme satisfaction.

Man, if he realize his manhood, is like a channel through which the divine life may flow to bless and gladden the world. Only in that does he understand what manhood really means. "To be spiritually-minded is life."

III. The Law of Results.

This is not a matter of chance. It is not that in the one case God may reward and in the other God may punish. It is that always and inevitably the lower life brings only low, and the higher high and lasting satisfaction. Every time one lets a mean thought master him, he is meaner for it. The reward of seeking things that are noble is just that we have the nobility

which the search itself creates. You may live like an animal. To have lived like an animal is the only punishment. You may grow to be your best self. That in itself is your reward. The reason for determining for the one and against the other is only that in the one way you make so little and in the other so much of life. The appeal is to universal human experience, to which we find our own increasingly correspond. Low pleasures are simply not worth while when life may afford things so vastly richer and finer. To be a slave is a poor thing, indeed, when one might be a free man. You cannot live the lower life and have that which only living the higher means. Limitless possibilities are our birthright. We may "of the spirit reap eternal life." How sad it is if man fails to enter on his heritage! To have spent our years, and to remain mean, envious, selfish creatures, when we might have reached something of the ever deeper life for which Jesus stands, is the lot from which Paul would urge us to be freed.

IV. The Certainty of Success.

The result is not one for which we have to look only in some possible future state. We never choose something worthy of us but the choice brings with it its own reward. We are just by so much nearer our goal. But the road to the highest life is neither easy nor short. It is worth too much to be easy. And yet there is nothing else really worth striving for. All great teachers are perfectly frank with us. If you set before yourself only the passing gratification of the moment, your goal may be easily and swiftly attained. The work of becoming the noblest possible only begins in a lifetime. We shall often lose heart, it seems so slow. But it is no new road. All the great and good have travelled it. You never take a single step but you are that much nearer your true life. Strength, quiet self-control, kindness, the delight of noble life, come inevitably, if we keep patiently on. We are meant to be men, and behind us is the power of the universe.