to an old one. Thus the dying is always made
to appear to be in order to a living. The end is always the life. 'I
came that they may have life,' our Lord had said, 'and have it
abundantly.'

{213}

The phrases about dying in order to live have their root in our Lord's
teaching, as St. John represents it[8], but belong most
characteristically to St. Paul. The principle which they enforce
belongs only to a fallen world, for it is only the sin within us and
about us that has to be put to death, or to which we have to die. But
it finds its highest exemplification in the case of Christ who, sinless
Himself, came into a world of sin and lived under its conditions.
Therefore He had to 'die' to sin and selfishness in the world in order
to 'live' in His own proper life to God. And this dying to sin--this
refusing it and repudiating it--is summarily represented in His death
upon the cross. The worldly world killed Him because He would have
none of its selfishness and sin. He, by voluntarily dying sooner than
surrender to the demands of this world, made a final separation of
Himself from sin. Thus He lived His life to God at the cost of dying.
And this law of Christ's life is to be the law of ours. We must die to
sin--not on a visible cross, but by a repudiation of it as thorough and
real: nor to sin outside us only, but to sin in ourselves. It is only
to express this attitude toward sin in ourselves in other {214} words,
to say that we have to mortify and crucify our own carnal and selfish
selves.

And just as Christ summed up His attitude towards the world by His
death upon the cross, so the Christian's attitude to the world was
summed up in his baptism. At that moment he died to the world of
sin[9]. This state of deadness to sin has to be constantly renewed, or
again and again recovered. But it was in that sacramental moment
realized in principle and symbolically represented. The convert who
was immersed beneath the baptismal waters and emerged again, realized
easily that this 'bath of regeneration' was, what the early Christians
called it, 'his grave and his mother.' All the circumstances of his
baptism forced it upon him that he had passed out of an old life into a
new--that he died to one state of things and came to life in another.
The Christians of St. Paul's churches, like newly-made Christians in
Central Africa or India to-day, were very often highly imperfect; but
they knew--they could not but know--