Second Sunday in Lent

“I say then, Walk in the Spirit, and ye shall not fulfil the lust of the flesh, for the flesh lusteth against the Spirit, and the Spirit against the flesh: so that ye cannot do the things that ye would.”—Galatians v. 16, 17.

When I spoke to you last week on the interpretation of the words, “Give not that which is holy unto the dogs, and cast not your pearls before swine,”—my object was not merely to relieve that text of some dangerous inferences, which I thought had been drawn from it, and to reconcile it with the command, “Judge not, that ye be not judged,” which precedes it. I desired still more to fix the thought upon your minds, that there is in every one of us a holy thing,—that there is in every one of us a bestial nature,—and that we are never more likely to give up the holy thing to the bestial nature in ourselves, as well as in our brother, than when we only see the worse in him, and refuse to give him credit for the better. The lessons which that passage suggested are therefore a fitting introduction to the one I have just read to you. I know none that is more full of instruction in itself, or that belongs more strictly to this season.

Few persons, I apprehend, would justify our version of the last clause of the 17th verse. Since there is nothing in the original but the subjunctive mood of the verb ποιεῖν, preceded by the conjunction ἵνα, it is surely most natural to render the words, “So that the things which ye will (or purpose), those ye do not,” instead of “So that ye cannot do the things that ye would.” I make this remark at once, because I propose to reverse the order of the Apostle’s words, and to begin from those with which he concludes. In these he declares what is the paradox and contradiction of our lives; in the middle clause he gives an interpretation of it; in the opening sentence he tells us how we may act freely and rightly in spite of it.

I. If we retain the language of our translators, St. Paul would indeed be announcing a paradox and contradiction. But he would be declaring it to be a hopeless one. He would affirm that, by a fixed necessity, by an eternal law of the universe, our acts and our wills must be in discord, every purpose must be defeated in the attempt to execute it. A strange Gospel surely; a strange purpose to a Gospel! His object, I believe, is just the reverse of this; to show us that there is no such necessity; that the monstrous anomaly can be removed. But first of all we must state what it is, and bring it home to our consciences. We form grand conceptions; grand, but, at the same time, such as seem strictly right, such as we could not limit or reduce without giving up some principle, without falling below a standard which we have reason to think is intended for us. But when these conceptions are to bring forth acts, they are found to be addled. The results are not like them, perhaps they are positively unlike,—the one the exact contrast to the other. How has this come to pass? How have we exposed ourselves to the just ridicule of others,—to a self-contempt which is more painful and bitter than that? “Henceforth,” we say, “we will lower the pitch of our thoughts. We are of the earth, earthy; we will not talk of aspiring to the stars.” But how far down shall we go? What resolution can we make which shall be so moderate, so adapted to the humblest view of our circumstances, that the act shall match with it? There is no such point to be found. We may give up all seraphic contemplations, all dreams of doing higher and better things than the most worldly man we know of. But on his ground the same puzzle meets us. We do not avoid unfulfilled projects, unrealized speculations, because we sell ourselves to Mammon, and determine that we will have no god except him. In his kingdom we find ourselves just as we did when we were most affecting to despise him; plotting and scheming much, realizing little, only at rarest intervals doing the thing which we would. To give up willing would seem as if it were the only resource. If we can absolutely throw aside all purposes and all hopes, we may have the comfort of not seeing our purposes become abortions, our hopes ending in disappointment.

These remarks may suffice to show us that it is not only to good purposes that this experience applies. It is not only those who will to be high and noble, and accomplish brave deeds, who have to mourn themselves, and excite the scorn of others, because so little comes of their experiments. The man who meditates a crime is as often baffled. Something crosses his intention, or mars the execution of it. It may be some outward impediment; it may be something which he cannot account for in himself. But so it is. He does not the thing that he would. The world sees, if he does not see himself, that he is weak, that he has been defeated. The king is resolved to keep his slaves; but it ends with his begging them to go out in haste. The prophet is hired to curse, and has a disposition to curse; but words he does not wish come forth; he blesses in spite of himself.

II. This is the fact. What is the explanation? Evidently it cannot be satisfactory if it only tells us why our honest intentions are feeble, and not why our bad intentions are also feeble. St. Paul looks at both parts of the problem. “The flesh,” he says, “lusteth against the spirit, and the spirit against the flesh.” Two powers are struggling within us. Whichever is to be the conqueror, the battle is going on. Whichever at any time is the uppermost, the inferior is still able in manifold ways to disturb it and supplant it.

Such a combat had often been described. Mythologies had embodied it in living forms; schools of philosophy had done their best to bring it under analysis; had even tried hard to extinguish one of the parties, or to make peace between them. Many had been content to call it a struggle between Reason and Appetite; where Reason often means little more than prudence, the foresight of consequences, or at best, self-control. Such a representation by no means accords with the one which St. Paul gives. He speaks of a Spirit and a Flesh, each with strong appetites; each impatient till it finds the food that will satisfy it; each willing to sacrifice the other, in its eagerness to supply its own wants. The Spirit, according to the Apostle, is anything but a cool calculator of probable results, anything but a mere overseer or dictator. It is fervent and aspiring. It is as little self-contented as its rival.

As the flesh of the glutton will subject itself to tortures rather than lose its luxuries, as the flesh of the miser will starve itself rather than lose its gold, so the spirit will lose itself in its quest after the righteousness for which it hungers and thirsts. The difference between them therefore is in the nature of their lusts, not in the moderation with which they are pursued.

That a man in whom such powers are contending should be irregular and inconsequent in a majority of his acts, that what he determines should often have the smallest possible resemblance to what he accomplishes, is surely not surprising. Suppose he allows his animal inclinations to govern him habitually, suppose a great part of his time is spent in nourishing these and stimulating them, there will come unto him, at certain moments, lusts of the spirit, a desire to be like some friend whom he knows or whom he once knew; to be the man his mother prayed that he might be; to be at least as free and faithful as the horse he rides or the dog that caresses him. Such lusts of the spirit cross and counteract the lusts of the flesh. They lead to dreams, faint and bewildered they may be, of some better state, of some other home. Apart from all the punishments which the indulgence of the flesh may be bringing after it, these instincts and yearnings break unawares on the coarsest animal existence, and make it uneasy; and when the bodily pains come, they make them sharper, binding them to thoughts of the past. Suppose, again, one whose pleasures are to a great extent intellectual, who is proud of his superiority to the mere servant of sense, who knows how much he may permit, how much he may refuse, to his appetites. A time comes when the resources for which he gives himself credit, and for which others give him credit, fail; intellectual objects are cold and abstract; he wants what is actual. He begins to seek for visible and palpable enjoyments; by little and little he finds that they are more to him than the others; the value of the others, he thinks, is chiefly that they are means to the attainment of these; the lusts of the flesh become supreme; he does not the things he once willed to do; he does not the things he wills to do now, for he cannot heartily relish what he perceived long ago to be poor and grovelling. Or again, take one who has much more deliberately overcome his bodily inclinations, because they interfere with his wish to govern his fellows. Outward things shall not pull him down to their level; he will be just as little made effeminate by any fancies or cravings of his own. How long can he maintain that position, before he discovers that to rule human beings he must sympathize with them, before the sympathy, restrained towards the mass, is directed towards some one or two, perhaps the least worthy, before it becomes subjection; before the tyrant has been turned into the slave of others and of his own desires?

Once more: a man is roused to think of his soul as something altogether different from his intellect, as something which is to be saved or lost, to live or die for ever. He cares no more for dominion over other men; the enjoyments of the flesh appear to him utterly insignificant. At first he has thought much of the struggle between the evil nature which holds him down, and that within him which cries to God for deliverance. But by degrees he acquires the title, and becomes settled into the condition, of a religious man. The lusts of the spirit he thinks he has satisfied; or he keeps that upon a regular, not very generous, diet. Then the lusts of the flesh, which were overcome by the activity of those that were opposed to them, assert their rights again. They are not content with the bare imagination of a feast. They grow by what they feed on. Soon they occupy the man almost wholly; any stray moment suffices for the others.

I wish you to feel, from these instances, that the Apostle’s account of this struggle does not apply to a few particular cases,—that it explains what is passing in all men, however different their circumstances and states of mind may be, however little they may be conscious of a struggle at all, nay, whatever pains they may have taken that there shall be none. So long as you are conversing with human beings on this earth, so long you are encountering a flesh and a spirit which are lusting against each other, one of which will not leave the other wholly at peace. And the more this is confessed, the more each of us understands this to be his condition, and adapts himself to it, and dismisses the thought that he can take his ease or escape from this strife by one arrangement or another, the more manly and true his life becomes, the more intelligible and necessary those events and accidents seem, which at first looked to him utterly incoherent and bewildering. For then arises the question, “Whence do those lusts of the spirit come? Who awakens them in me? Whence the lusts of the flesh spring up, I can guess with tolerable accuracy. However wild or lawless they may be, they have a natural enough origin. I can trace the influences which call them forth in myself. I have no right to wonder at them in any one else. But these—who brought them into a region where they appear at first such strangers, moving about in such quaint costume, sometimes looking like modest exiles who may be safely tolerated, sometimes as troublesome inmates whom it would be prudent to expel, sometimes as lords of the soil come to assert their dominion, and to dispossess the old inhabitants? Lusts of the spirit, who sent you hither? What report can you give of yourselves?” This, at least; that but for their presence, all that makes the world a habitation fit and endurable for men would have been wanting to it. Without them there would have been no love of country, no care of children, no reverence for parents, no confidence between man and man, no tenderness and honour between man and woman. Without them, the flesh would have lusted, but would have had nothing wherewith to feed its lusts but wild fruits; since even beasts of chase would not have been hunted for, or fish drawn up in nets, far less sheep tended on the hills, or seed sown in earth that had been ploughed to receive it. Those foreigners have taught us all arts; have made us dream that there could be arts, that all is not left to the dominion of chance. It would seem as if they had more to do with our own selves, with our proper manhood, than those lusts which look so natural to us; it would seem as if we should never know what we ourselves are, till we have entertained them and got some light concerning their race and derivation.

And it is just this light which St. Paul, the Jew of Tarsus, declared that he could bring to the Gentiles of Asia and of Europe. He said he knew whence these lusts of the spirit in man came; that they came from the Spirit of God; that they were awakened in each human being by Him; that He watched over them to give them strength and victory over their enemies. He said that the Eternal Son of God was also the Son of Man; that He had taken upon Him man’s nature; that He had wrestled with man’s enemies; that He had claimed publicans and sinners as the children of His Father; that He had given them power to live and act as His children—as spiritual beings—whom the flesh and its lusts should not be able to separate from Him, and reduce again into bondage.

III. So we are brought to those first words of the Apostle, which I have taken last, “Walk in the Spirit, and ye shall not fulfil the lusts of the flesh.” This is not like that miserable “cannot” which I was speaking of just now; it sounds like a Gospel; it is full of encouragement and hope. But we have need to look carefully into the words, lest they should beguile us like so many we have heard. The man who became solicitous about his soul, and adopted a religious course for the sake of securing its salvation, might, it appeared, surrender himself at last more ignominiously even than others to the lusts of the flesh, because he supposed that they had been subdued, and was not the least aware how near they were to him. In what aspect is the Apostle’s doctrine different from that which a multitude of sad proofs daily before our eyes show to be so practically ineffectual?

It differs in this, that he never for one moment allows any man to suppose that he is safer than his neighbours from the assaults of that flesh which lusteth against the spirit. They may take different shapes at different times of his life. Lusts that belonged to youth may be burnt out in age; lusts that possess the poor may be displaced by others in the rich; lusts which the rich gratify may be never awakened, or may die from want of nourishment, in the poor. New circumstances, new acquaintances, may change the direction of the lusts, but they remain essentially the same. The easily besetting sins of childhood will often start up before the full-grown man, and astonish him with the thought of his own identity. Others will come, called forth by opportunities and a knowledge which were wanting in earlier days, and yet which have an evident family likeness, which must have the same origin. The wisdom of experience may have been gained; the wisdom too which has been learnt from books and from the failures and triumphs of other men. It may be of mighty use if it makes us more on our guard against the lusts of our flesh; it is of no use if it is a snare and danger, if it makes us think they are not there and do not need to be watched. Least of all does what is called religious wisdom offer a security that we are out of the dangers which, if it is good for anything, it will continually remind us of.

Here is one difference between St. Paul and many who have used his language and seemed to tread in his steps. Another is, that he believes there is a spirit in every man, to which he can speak, and which he can call to arise and walk, be it never so palsied and bedridden. This explanation of the facts of our condition is universal; his message to men is universal. “The flesh lusteth against the spirit, and the spirit against the flesh,” is the interpretation of a puzzle which belongs to one as well as to another. “Walk in the Spirit” can be spoken to one as well as to another. There is no respect of persons in his Gospel, because there is no respect of persons with God.

And this is the great difference of all. It is not, according to him, that men have souls which they in some way or other are to save. It is that God has created them to be spirits, and that all the course of His dealings with the race and with each individual member of it is directed to the accomplishment of this purpose, and to the overthrow of those lusts within and temptations without us which are conspiring to defeat it. When St. Paul says, “Walk in the Spirit,” he says, “Be men such as God would have you be.” He says, “Be men such as God by His Spirit is working in you continually to become.” He says, “Do not resist that mighty Will which is acting and energizing every hour upon your wills; do not set yourselves in mad strife with it. Do not thus make your own wills feeble even when they are most resolute; incapable of producing consistent acts, even when they are most impatient of all that hinders action. Live in the habitual recollection that these lusts of the spirit which you have often sought to stifle, which you have often supposed to be strange aspirations after the distant, the fantastical, the impossible, are gifts from the Father of your spirit, monitions from Him of your own glorious origin and high destiny,—pledges that He wishes you to inherit the substantial treasures of His own Truth and Goodness.”

And then, he says, “you shall not fulfil the lusts of the flesh.” Be as intellectual, as determined, as religious as you please,—if the intellect, the determination, the religion mean something that is yours, something that sets you above your neighbours,—you will fulfil the lusts of the flesh; they will be too strong for you; if you cast out one kind of evil, seven that are worse will take its place. But to walk in the spirit is to be dependent, self-distrustful, seeking help and satisfaction in One Who has all that you want. A spirit must be ascending above itself; it becomes devilish when it sinks into itself. Therefore is the spirit rightly described as desiring or lusting; therefore is communion with a higher Spirit the only way of appeasing its lusts. By such communing it wins a victory over these other lower lusts. God reduces them to order and submission when we put ourselves into His hands, and ask Him Who knows what we want, to give us that; Who knows what is not good for us, to keep us from that.

Such a walk in the spirit must be silent, deep, unknown to others. Yet all the open and public ordinances of God impart strength for it, and show the man that it is not a solitary walk because it is an invisible one. There cannot be a more fatal error than that, nor one from which God in His mercy has done more to protect us. It is the servant of his own impulses, the victim of fleshly lusts, who is of necessity alone; working for himself, seeking others as his tools, not as his fellows. The spirit in its inmost exercises is establishing a fellowship with multitudes unseen, unborn; entering into their temptations, bearing their burdens. It is always breaking through the shell which shuts each creature from every other, through the bristles which make each creature formidable to the other, to find that which is social, responsive, communicative. Therefore those ordinances which give to each man most the sense of his own distinct and personal relation to God, are those which most denote His equal relation to all. “Child, I baptize thee with this name, which shall denote thee henceforth, in the Universal Name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost.” “Take and eat this bread, for Christ died for thee;” this is the formula of our participation with each other in the death which was for the whole world.

And so, when I say that this lesson which we have been learning this afternoon about the flesh and the spirit is especially a Lenten lesson, I mean that it is so, because the forty days of Lent explain the three hundred and sixty-five days of the year; I mean that it is so, because I know that you are not going to pass this Lent, or any other, in closets or hermitages, but in the dust and noise of the world, in the midst of professional business and party strifes. In these you have to be taught—by these most assuredly you will be taught—that St. Paul was not telling his dreams, when he spake of a flesh that is fighting against the spirit. That part of the doctrine you will get by heart, if you have not got it by heart already. Every day that you mix with your fellow-men of any class, of any school, of any vocation, will tell you how much there is in them that is fleshly, ignoble, selfish, and that may be made more fleshly, more ignoble, more selfish, by your arts and solicitations. Oh! will you not profit by the other side of the truth likewise? Will you not believe that in every poor voter at an English hustings, there dwells a spirit for which the Son of God poured out His life, that it might not be sold to corruption and falsehood, that it might be capable of all true desires, that it might be like His Father, and not the father of lies? Will you not believe that every candidate who does anything to degrade that spirit, to make it more insincere by the use of canting phrases, more incapable of higher lusts, by stirring up those which are of the flesh, and which are destroying that, must meet with a righteous recompense in the loss of whatever is sincere and pure in himself, besides all the evil that he lays up for his country, now and in the days to come, by the habits which he has cultivated in the rulers and the ruled? Is it hard and wrong for us to utter such warnings, if these are not our special temptations; if there are others as great to which we may and do yield? Oh, brethren, warn us of them; set them before us as earnestly as you can; tell us how they have injured you; how they have lowered your standard; how they have furnished excuses for your deflections. Do not let us think it is a mercy in a fellow-creature to withhold the most solemn denunciations of wrongdoing, because it is his duty to abstain from judging the wrong-doer. Let us believe that the more our consciences are probed, the better it is for us. So the All-Merciful deals with us; so the Judge of the whole earth prepares us, that we may not be ashamed to stand before Him when He appears. He shows us how mighty the lusts of the flesh are in us, that we may ask Him to keep alive the higher lusts in us, and to fulfil them. He gives us repentance for having lived as if we were only a higher kind of animals, doomed to eat and drink and die, that we may walk in the spirit, and assert for ourselves and for all that higher life which is ours, if we remember in manhood the words we were told in infancy, that we are members of Christ and inheritors of the kingdom of Heaven.