to his death.' This is the point.
It is not enough for us to be baptized. Our baptism is evacuated of
all meaning unless we are also 'being converted,' or 'turning' from the
world to God; unless we are turning our back upon its lawless lusts,
its worldly ambitions, its graspings after money, its refusals of pain,
its selfish and unloving life. Nay: all this renunciation was already
involved in the Name spoken over us at our baptism. The Christian name
pledges us to the Christian law of living by dying, progress by
conversion. You cannot refuse the dying without repudiating the Name.
'Die and re-exist,' said Goethe, 'for so long as this is not
accomplished thou art but a troubled guest upon an earth of gloom[13].'

'Reckon ye, therefore, yourselves to be dead unto sin.' This phrase,
addressed to common Christians, supplies a magnificent instance of St.
Paul's idealism, that is to say, of his love of {218} considering
things, and his desire that others should consider things, in the light
of their central and dominant idea or principle--as they ought to be
rather than as they are. This is his continual practice: to idealize
not in the sense of thinking unreally of things, but in the sense of
thinking of them in the light of that which is most fundamental in
them. It is in this way that he thinks of 'the world,' or godless
human society, and seems to represent it as worse than it sometimes
appears, because its governing principle is radically evil. It is in
this way that he thinks of the Church, and speaks of it in terms of
glory not justified by the facts simply as they appear; because it has
that at work within it which is capable of transforming it until it not
only is, but looks like, the body of Christ, or the city of God. This
idealizing method is naturally distasteful to English common sense in
most departments of thinking, and perhaps particularly in the region of
religion. But we suffer from an over-close adhesion to the 'matters of
fact' or 'the things which do appear.' We do not think of our life,
ourselves, our church according to the divine principle which they
embody, or 'according to the pattern shown to us in the mount.' Thus
{219} we are never uplifted, enlarged, ennobled by the vision of

... The gleam,
The light that never was on sea or land.

That light never was or is manifest on the surface of actual
experience, and yet it is always latent--the touch of glory in common
things,