showed that man might nobly live in a human body, by living in a human body Himself; wherever any man has tried to worship God by slavery to form, instead of making forms only the utterances of his own spiritual life-there has been a repetition of the corrupt Christianity in Colosse, fantastic and unhealthy.

There is a constant tendency to depart from the truth of the Gospel on two sides. On one side men say that religion is too spiritual; that there is not enough for our hands to do, not enough practical duties. These objectors would reduce Christianity down to a scheme of duties which might be written on tables and hung up on a wall. On the other side men say that religion is not spiritual enough. They ask us to see how it busies itself with things of this world, and ties itself to bodily conditions. We are bidden to look above the world, to leave our bodies behind, to mortify them until they have no power to hinder us from going to the heavens and dwelling with the angels. Far and wide on both sides of the great religion these departures extend. Some men would have all that is supernatural to be rejected. Others, like the Docetæ, would have us all the time revelling in thought among the things that belong to the skies.

What St. Paul brought to meet the corruptions of the Church in Colosse must be brought wherever formalism, asceticism, and contempt for the body creep into a church; wherever men dare to think

It

that Christianity despises instead of honouring and exalting the body and all that belongs to it. was perfectly clear that there was one great power which, if it could be brought to bear, would turn this fantastic religion out of doors and bring a natural religion into the Colossian Church. And that was the truth that Christ is the fulness of God; that the spiritual world is not peopled with multitudes of beings with whom we have to do; that we have not to go roaming about, asking after angels whose very existence is in our imagination -for Christ is "the fulness of the Godhead bodily". Whatever utterances are waiting, possibly, to be heard some time, the one great sufficient utterance is Jesus Christ, who came into the very centre of this life, and who not merely did not despise, but took possession of the human body, not merely in its best condition, but went with it to the Cross. Christ, the clear, palpable, distinct Christ, the child of Bethlehem and the man of Galilee-Christ crucified on Calvary, He is the redemption from all this mysticism and vagueness. Christ wrought in the midst of a human body, sanctified it by occupying it, and so treated it that, by-and-by, the Apostle could say, "Know ye not that your bodies are the temples of the Holy Ghost?" He sanctified everything that belongs to the body, breaking the bread which men love to eat, drinking the wine which men love to drink, weeping by the tomb where a body was buried, blessing the marriage

where the children of men united themselves in the family life, declaring the thing to be done in this world was the redemption, and not the destruction, of this dear, familiar, human body.

There is a lesson in this for our own time. Jesus brought God down here, instead of flinging us into universal being to find God. Men are not to cast aside humanity and become misty angels. God calls on men and women to be men and women still, and to open their lives that they may be filled with the Deity. There are two great principles in the Gospel-liberty and light. "Live in liberty and light, not in slavery and darkness," is the perpetual exhortation of the Epistle to the Colossians. Live in liberty, using forms always as means, and not ends. Be ready to cast away forms as soon as they cease to secure the ends for which they were ordained. Look always behind the prohibition or injunction to that which the prohibition or injunction was intended to produce.

One striking instance, where the Apostle is made to teach a thing he intended to disown, is brought to our notice in the second chapter: "Wherefore if ye be dead with Christ from the rudiments of the world, why, as though living in the world, are ye subject to ordinances (touch not: taste not: handle not: which all are to perish with the using), after the commandments and doctrines of men?" How many times do we hear this repeated, as if it were an injunction of the Bible, given somewhere—very few, I suppose,

know that it comes from Colossians-whereas it is this very injunction which St. Paul is disowning. He is calling the people away from distinct, positive injunctions, such as this. He is urging them to live in freedom, by their own free will, since the world is not under law, but under grace. "Touch not, taste not, handle not," St. Paul would have them understand, are injunctions from which, as injunctions, as commands laid upon them from outside, as mere rules of life, the Christian soul is free. Christianity replaces restraints like those by a nobler law. The soul which does not hear, ringing down from heaven, restraints against indulgences, by-and-by finds itself putting its own hand against the indulgence, by its own free will, and saying, "I will not touch, will not drink, will not handle". Here is liberty, here is true spiritual abstinence.

Liberty cannot live without law, unless the soul is permitted to reason. Liberty and light are more than twin sisters; they are one gracious whole, the outward and the inward, the visible and the invisible powers by which the true soul lives. One of the efforts made everywhere in the New Testament is to lift man up and bring him to recognise this fair liberty, and to learn to do all things for their reasons. This is the education of the soul into the real activity of its spiritual nature.

What a revelation this Epistle must have been to many faithful, earnest, conscientious people in Colosse, who were trying to bend themselves to

the new ritualism, to starve themselves, to mortify this troublesome body! What a relief! How it must have cleared away the fantastic clouds brooding over that poor church! What a great, clear light must have come in!

What God wants is that we shall be more fully men and women because we are Christians. We are to take our nature, and consecrate it to Him, and find it, for the first time, full of its own proper enjoyments. We are to look upon our bodies as sacred things. Forms and ordinances are to be used as servants, and not as masters, of the soul. Religion must not separate us from the duties of to-day, from the bodies given us for our souls to inhabit, from the friendships and intimate associations of this world.

It is a good deal harder to lead the life of St Paul than to live the life of the Colossians. It is harder to act in the light and liberty of the Gospel than to get a book of laws and refer to it, or to get a confessor, and go to him, and ask, in every puzzle, what to do. To carry in ourselves the intense love of Jesus Christ, to find in Him the perpetual corrective of our actions, to do duty, not under the lash, but under the impulses of the soulthat is the hardest life, but the most blessed life a man or woman can undertake.

And if we struggle on in this imperfect life, we shall catch increasing glimpses of that coming time when we shall live perfectly in heaven.