e
triumphed in proclaiming to be the gift of every believing soul. The
other member of the contrast, 'flesh,' is similarly not to be taken as
equivalent to body, but rather as meaning the whole human nature
considered as apart from God and kindred with earth and earthly things.
The flesh, in its narrower sense, is no doubt a predominant part of this
whole, but there is much in it besides the material organisation. The
ethics of Christianity suffered much harm and were degraded into a false
and slavish asceticism for long centuries, by monastic misunderstandings
of what Paul meant by the flesh, but he himself was too clear-sighted
and too high-toned to give his adhesion to the superficial notion that
the body is the seat and source of sin. We need look no further than the
catalogue of the 'works of the flesh' which immediately follows our
text, for, although it begins with gross sins of a purely fleshly kind,
it passes on to such as hatred, emulations, wrath, envyings and
suchlike. Many of these works of the flesh are such as an angel with an
evil heart could do, whether he had a body or not. It seems therefore
right to say that the one member of the contrast is the divine Spirit of
holiness, and the other is man as he is, without the life-giving
influence of the Spirit of God. In Paul's thought the idea of the flesh
always included the idea of sin, and the desires of the flesh were to
him not merely rebellious, sensuous passion, but the sinful desires of
godless human nature, however refined, and as some would say,
'spiritual' these might be. We do not need to inquire more minutely as
to the meaning of the Apostle's terms, but may safely take them as, on
the one hand, referring to the divine Spirit which imparts life and
holiness, and on the other hand, to human nature severed from God, and
distracted by evil desires because wrenched away from Him.

The text is Paul's battle-cry, which he opposed to the Judaising
disturbers in Galatia. They said 'Do this and that; labour at a round of
observances; live by rule.' Paul said, 'No! That is of no use; you will
make nothing of such an attempt nor will ever conquer evil so. Live by
the spirit and you will not need a hard outward law, nor will you be in
bondage to the works of the flesh.' That feud in the Galatian churches
was the earliest battle which Christianity had to fight between two
eternal tendencies of thought--the conception of religion as consisting
in outward obedie