fallen into the habit of so speaking of the action of the
Son in dying and rising as habitually to leave out of sight the truth
that His action, as Son, is and {224} must always be the Father's
action through Him; and that reversely our worship of the Son must
always be really, and ought to be in our habitual consciousness, the
worship of the Father through Him.

'_Our old man was crucified with him_.' As Shelley said that, when
Adonais died, ''tis death is dead, not he,' so in an infinitely deeper
sense St. Paul says that what was killed upon the cross was (he does
not say 'instead of Christ,' but 'with Christ') sin and the 'old man.'
The 'old man' means the old way of living, or rather the old way of
living considered as having been appropriated by the sinful individual
and thus made his own self. Thus it was the old self that was put to
death on the cross, and a new self came to life, which was the same in
unchanged personality and yet so practically different in all its
relationships, that it could assert and claim exemptions from the
obligations contracted by the 'old man.'

'_That the body of sin might be done away_.' The identification of sin
with the individual had been specially with his body. His bodily
appetites and impulses and parts had been so used to the ways of sin as
to become a 'body of sin,' and this, St. Paul says, has to be 'done
away' or {225} annulled. It is not that we are to harm the body
itself: for the body itself is good, and is to be offered, with all its
members, to become the weapon of Christian warfare. There is indeed no
material thing as such that is evil. The 'body of sin' means exactly
'the body considered as having become the receptacle of sin': as when
our Lord speaks of the 'mammon of unrighteousness[17],' He means money
which has become the instrument of unrighteousness, but which the
children of light are to convert to profitable uses. 'To annul the
body of sin' means, therefore, almost the same as 'to annul sin in the
body' and leave the body free; but it emphasizes the fact that sin has
got such hold of the body that to annul sin involves annulling the
body: as St. Paul says elsewhere, 'I buffet' (or 'distress') 'my body
and bring it into bondage[18].'

[1] See Gal. v. 13: 'Only use not your freedom for an occasion of the
flesh.' Cf. 2 Pet. iii. 16, and the implications of St. James' Epistle.

[2] 1 Thess. iv. 14.

[3] The meaning of ver. 4 is interpreted in v