of God is continuing on the higher plane into which it was uplifted at the Incarnation.  The work of the Spirit is to form within the members of Christ’s Body, that Body which is constituted by His indwelling, the Mind and the Life of God Incarnate.  “He shall take of Mine and shall show it unto you.”  So we get

5.  The work of the Spirit of Christ within the Church, extending the Incarnation.

“He,” writes St. Paul, “gave Him [Christ] as Head over all to the Church, which is His Body, the

fulness of Him Who at all points in all men is being fulfilled.”

The application of this to our present subject is as follows.  The animal life in us, and the Divine life in us, are both alike due to the indwelling God, both alike are manifestations of His Presence.  But they are manifestations at two different levels of being.  What follows?

The animal nature is good; the moral and spiritual nature is good.  What do we mean in this connexion by “good”?  We mean, they are the results of the action of Him Whose Will is essential goodness.

The peculiarity of human life is, however, the conflict between these two elements of man’s nature—the lower and the higher.  Neither as yet, from the human standpoint, is good or bad.  Moral attributes belong only to the will, which we may provisionally call the centre of man’s personality.  For man is a personal being, and as such stands apart from God.

God, Whose power brought man into being,
Stands as it were a handsbreadth off, to give
Room for the newly made to live,
And look at Him from a place apart,
And use His gifts of mind and heart.

Man alone can bring into existence the morally good or the morally bad.  And the materials of his choice are presented by the co-existence within him of the lower and the higher.  Sin is the choice by the will of the lower, when that is felt to be in conflict

with the higher.  It is the resolution, previous to any action, to satisfy the desires of the animal, when these are known to contradict the dictates of the moral and spiritual nature.

Here we pause to notice a point of great importance for clear thinking on this subject.  The conflict we have spoken of is that described by St. Paul as between the flesh and the spirit.  Now the flesh is not equivalent to the body.  The works of the flesh are by no means necessarily sensual sins; they include strife and envy.  The flesh, the animal within us, is not to be identified with our physical organisation.

Now we are drawing near to the very heart of the matter.  What is it which distinguishes the lower nature from the higher, the animal from the Divine in us, the flesh from the spirit?  The distinction lies in the objects to which the desires of each of these natures are directed.

The animal, predominantly, desires the good of self: the Divine, the good of others.

This we must now expand.  There is nothing morally wrong in the self-seeking of the animal.  Moral evil—sin—only arises when two conditions are fulfilled.

The self-seeking desire must be felt to be in contradiction to the unselfish dictates of the higher nature.

The will, having this knowledge more or less

clearly before it, chooses to give effect to the lower rather than to subordinate it to the higher.  We may express the same truth somewhat more accurately.

The material of human sin is the co-existence of the animal nature and the Divine Nature within us.

The occasion of sin is the conflict between the two.

The conditions of sin are two—knowledge and freedom; knowledge of the antagonism between the desires of the two natures, and freedom to give effect either to the one or to the other.

The actual fact of sin is the movement of the will, making its choice in favour of the lower in opposition to the higher.

These two corollaries follow:—(i) Sin belongs only to the will, not to the nature.  “There is nothing good in the world save a good will.”  And the converse is true: there is nothing sinful in the world save a sinful will.

(ii)  Sin does not lie in the act, but in the movement of the will, of which the act is but the outward symbol.  We must carefully distinguish between sin and temptation.  No temptation is sinful, however strong and however vividly presented to the mind.  Sin only comes in when the will makes the choice of the worse alternative.  A sin in thought is an act of inward choice, the deliberate indulgence of, the dwelling with pleasure upon, the temptation presented

to us.  But if I am only prevented by circumstances or by fear from embodying the wrong choice of my will in action, I have, in the sight of God, committed that sin.  If I have made the wrong choice, and am deterred by the faintest of moral scruples, as well as, perhaps, by other considerations, from carrying it out, I am really, although in a less degree, guilty.

Now we can fall back upon our main thought.  The animal matter is essentially self-regarding.  This is not (a) the same thing as to say that all actions of all animals are self-regarding.  I see no difficulty in believing that there may be adumbrations of the moral and spiritual in animals below man, if the animal life is the manifestation, on a lower plane, of the same Word Who is the Life of nature and the Light (the higher reason and spiritual life) of man.  Nor (b) is it the same thing as to say that the desires of the animal nature are selfish.  For selfishness is a moral term and, as we have seen, moral attributes are inapplicable except to a wrong choice of the will.

These self-regarding impulses of the animal nature are due to the fact, that that nature is the result of the age-long struggle for existence.  These impulses have secured the survival and the predominance of man.

But man is more than a successful animal.  He is made in the image of God.  In him, the Word is

revealed, not as life only, but as light.  In an altogether higher sense than can be predicated of any part of creation below man, he is a sharer in the Divine life.

Now that Divine life is the very life of Him Whose very essence and being is Love.  God is Love.  What does this mean?  It has never been better expressed than in the following words: “God is a Being, not one of Whose thoughts is for Himself. . . . Creation is one great unselfish thought of God, the bringing into existence of beings who can know the happiness which God Himself knows” (Dr. Askwith).  What happiness is that?  It is explained, by the same writer, as the happiness which is found in the promotion of the happiness, that is, in the largest sense, the well-being of others.

We can now see the reason of the antagonism between the animal and the Divine in ourselves, the real meaning of the Pauline antithesis between the flesh and the Spirit, the old man and the new.