s
the attention and self-discipline that character needs. Certainly the
most ascetic words of our Lord--those in which He speaks of the
necessity for cutting off or plucking out hand or eye if hand or eye
cause us to stumble, and warns us that we must be strong at the
spiritual centre of our being, before we can be free in exterior
action--are likely to come home to no one with more force than to one
who would do his duty in Church or state. Christ cannot redeem the
world without Himself passing through the temptation and the agony in
the garden. And thus St. Paul, after he has been dwelling on the
fraternal and corporate character of the Christian life, comes back at
the last to emphasize the personal spiritual struggle. To be a good
member of the body, he says in effect, you must be in personal
character a strong man, strong enough in Christ's might to win the
victory in a fearful struggle.

Against what is our spiritual struggle? It is against the weakness and
lawlessness of our own flesh. 'The spirit is willing, but the flesh is
weak.' 'Our eye and hand and foot cause us to stumble.' Or again it
is the world which is too much for us. 'We seek honour one of another
{239} and not the glory that cometh from the only God.' Quite true.
But behind the manifest disorder of our nature and the insistence of
worldly motives there are other less apparent forces; and these, in St.
Paul's mind, so overshadow the more visible and tangible ones that, in
the Biblical manner of speech, he denies for the moment the reality of
the latter. 'We wrestle not against flesh and blood,' not against our
own flesh or a visibly corrupt public, but against an unseen spiritual
host organized for evil.

It was noticed above that St. Paul has no doubt at all that moral evil
has its origin and spring in the dark background behind human
nature--in the rebel wills of devils. It has become customary to
regard belief in devils or angels as fanciful and perhaps
superstitious. Now no doubt theological and popular fancy has intruded
itself into the things it has not seen, and, instead of the studiously
vague[1] language of St. Paul, has developed a sort of geography and
ethnology for spirits good and bad which is mythological and allied to
superstition. But it has acted in the same way, and shown the same
resentment of the discipline of ignorance, in the case of even more
central spiritual realities. No {240} doubt again the belief in the