the inward, and that priority
of the consecration of the man to his offering of the body is
contained in the very metaphor. For a priest needs to be consecrated
before he can offer, and we in our innermost wills, in the depths of
our nature, must be surrendered and set apart to God ere any of our
outward activities can be laid upon His altar. The Apostle, then,
does not make the mistake of substituting external for
internal surrender, but he presupposes that the latter has preceded.
He puts the sequence more fully in the parallel passage in this very
letter: 'Yield yourselves unto God, and your bodies as instruments of
righteousness unto Him.' So, then, first of all, we must be priests
by our inward consecration, and then, since 'a priest must have
somewhat to offer,' we must bring the outward life and lay it upon
His altar.

Now, of the two thoughts which I have said are involved in this great
keyword, the former is common to Christianity, with all noble systems
of morality, whether religious or irreligious. It is a commonplace,
on which I do not need to dwell, that every man who will live a man's
life, and not that of a beast, must sacrifice the flesh, and rigidly
keep it down. But that commonplace is lifted into an altogether new
region, assumes a new solemnity, and finds new power for its
fulfilment when we add to the moralist's duty of control of the
animal and outward nature the other thought, that the surrender must
be to God.

There is no need for my dwelling at any length on the various
practical directions in which this great exhortation must be wrought
out. It is of more importance, by far, to have well fixed in our
minds and hearts the one dominant thought that sacrifice is the
keyword of the Christian life than to explain the directions in which
it applies. But still, just a word or two about these. There are
three ways in which we may look at the body, which the Apostle here
says is to be yielded up unto God.

It is the recipient of impressions from without. _There_ is a field
for consecration. The eye that looks upon evil, and by the look has
rebellious, lustful, sensuous, foul desires excited in the heart,
breaks this solemn law. The eye that among the things seen dwells
with complacency on the pure, and turns from the impure as if a hot
iron had been thrust into its pupil; that in the things seen discerns
shimmering behind them, and manifested through them, the things
unseen and eternal, is the co