, according to the
contemporary Jewish ideas; and the idea is, if nothing more, a
convenient metaphor for a subtle and pervading influence.) This view
of their old life, as a bondage to evil spirits, is one which would be
as easily realized by inhabitants of Asiatic cities, where men were
largely occupied in finding charms against bad spirits, as by modern
Indian converts from devil-worship. Christianity recognizes a basis of
reality in the superstition from which at the same time it delivers men.

(3) The main characteristic of this old godless life had been
lawlessness, but St. Paul here, as in his Epistle to the Romans,
associates Jews with Gentiles, 'we' with 'you,' in the same
condemnation. The spirits, or real selves of the Christians, had been,
in their former state, dominated by their appetites or their
imaginations. They were occupied in doing what their flesh or their
thoughts suggested. It is noticeable that St. Paul puts 'the mind'
side by side with 'the flesh' as a cause of sin, the intellectual {95}
side by side with the sensual and emotional nature. We often in fact,
in our age, have experience of people who are not 'sensual' in the
ordinary sense, but who live lives which have no goodness, no
perseverance, no order, no fruitfulness in them, because they are the
slaves of the ideas of their own mind as they present themselves, now
one, now another; unregulated ideas being in fact, just as much as
unregulated passions, fluctuating, arbitrary, and tyrannous. Nothing
is more truly needed to-day than the discipline of the imagination.

(4) Men living such a life of bondage are described further as 'dead
through their trespasses and sins.' St. Paul means by death to
describe any state of intellectual and moral insensibility. He would
have the Christian 'dead' to the motives and voices of the worldly and
sensual world. So in the same way he reminds the Asiatic Christians
that to all that life of God in which they were now fruitfully living,
they had at one time been insensible or dead--that is, blind to those
things which now seemed most apparent, unterrified at what would now
seem most horrible, unmoved by what now seemed most fascinating. And
if this was their state viewed in itself, in their relation to God {96}
they were, like the Jews also, 'children of wrath.' This expression is
used in our catechism to describe 'original sin,' that is to say, that
moral disorder or weakness which belongs to