ferent
is the painful, often defeated and monotonous attempt to suppress our
nature by main force, and to tread a mill-horse round! The joyous
freedom and buoyant hope taught us in the gospel way of salvation have
been cramped and confined and all their glories veiled as by a mass of
cobwebs spun beneath a golden roof, but our text sweeps away the foul
obstruction. Let us learn the one condition of victorious conflict, the
one means of subduing our natural humanity and its distracting desires,
and let nothing rob us of the conviction that this is God's way of
making men like angels. 'Walk in the Spirit, and ye shall not fulfil the
lusts of the flesh.'

THE FRUIT OF THE SPIRIT

'But the fruit of the Spirit is love, joy, peace,
long suffering, gentleness, goodness, faith, 23.
Meekness, temperance'--GAL. v. 22, 23.

'The fruit of the Spirit,' says Paul, not the fruits, as we might more
naturally have expected, and as the phrase is most often quoted; all
this rich variety of graces, of conduct and character, is thought of as
one. The individual members are not isolated graces, but all connected,
springing from one root and constituting an organic whole. There is
further to be noted that the Apostle designates the results of the
Spirit as fruit, in strong and intentional contrast with the results of
the flesh, the grim catalogue of which precedes the radiant list in our
text. The works of the flesh have no such unity, and are not worthy of
being called fruit. They are not what a man ought to bring forth, and
when the great Husbandman comes, He finds no fruit there, however full
of activity the life has been. We have then here an ideal of the noblest
Christian character, and a distinct and profound teaching as to how to
attain it. I venture to take the whole of this list for my text, because
the very beauty of each element in it depends on its being but part of a
whole, and because there are important lessons to be gathered from the
grouping.

I. The threefold elements of character here.

It is perhaps not too artificial to point out that we have here three
triads of which the first describes the life of the Spirit in its
deepest secret; the second, the same life in its manifestations to men;
and the third, that life in relation to the difficulties of the world,
and of ourselves.

The first of these three triads includes love, joy, and peace, and it is
not putting too great a stra