threatening the health of his
own Christian life, or as tyrannising over the lives of others, the
sword of the Spirit is the best weapon.

We are not to take the rough-and-ready method, which is so common among
good people, of identifying this spirit-given sword with the Bible. If
for no other reason, yet because it is the Spirit which supplies it to
the grasp of the Christian soldier, our possession of it is therefore a
result of the action of that Spirit on the individual Christian spirit;
and what He gives, and we are to wield, is 'the _engrafted_ word which
is able to save our souls.' That word, lodged in our hearts, brings to
us a revelation of duty and a chart of life, because it brings a loving
recognition of the character of our Father, and a glad obedience to His
will. If that word dwell in us richly, in all wisdom, and if we do not
dull the edge of the sword by our own unworthy handling of it, we shall
find it pierce to the 'dividing asunder of joints and marrow,' and the
evil within us will either be cast out from us, or will shrivel itself
up, and bury itself deep in dark corners.

Love to Christ will be so strong, and the things that are not seen will
so overwhelmingly outweigh the things that are seen, that the solemn
majesty of the eternal will make the temporal look to our awed eyes the
contemptible unreality which it really is. They who humbly receive and
faithfully use that engrafted word, have in it a sure touchstone against
which their own sins and errors are shivered. It is for the Christian
consciousness the true Ithuriel's spear, at the touch of which 'upstarts
in his own shape the fiend' who has been pouring his whispered poison
into an unsuspicious ear. The standard weights and measures are kept in
government custody, and traders have to send their yard measures and
scales thither if they wish them tested; but the engrafted word,
faithfully used and submitted to, is always at hand, and ready to
pronounce its decrees, and to cut to the quick the evil by which the
understanding is darkened and conscience sophisticated.

III. The manner of its use.

Here that is briefly but sufficiently expressed by the one commandment,
'take,' or perhaps more accurately, 'receive.' Of course, properly
speaking, that exhortation does not refer to our manner of fighting with
the sword, but to the previous act by which our hand grasps it. But it
is profoundly true that if we take it in the deepest sense, the
pos