acknowledged and its counterpart in God's
dealings with mankind is set forth. The struggle between the spiritual
faculty asserting its due supremacy, and the lower passions and
appetites, impulses and inclinations, is so described by Saint Paul that
none have ever since questioned his description with any effect. And our
Lord's teaching of our absolute dependence on God and helplessness
without Him; and Saint John's teaching that the whole world, outside
Christ, 'lieth in the wicked one,' lay down the same truth. And as the
mystery of moral evil in mankind is thus set forth, so too the mystery
of the remedy for that evil. In the love of God shown in the Cross of
Christ, in our union with God through that same Death upon the Cross is
the power which conquers evil in the soul and carries a man ever upward
to spiritual heights. And as all profounder thinkers have confessed the
truth of the account thus given of the internal contradiction of man's
moral nature, so have all believers borne witness (and only they could
bear witness) to the account thus given of the solution of that
contradiction and the renovation of that nature. Millions have lived and
died in the Christian faith since the teaching recorded in the New
Testament was given, and among them have been the purest, the justest,
the most self-sacrificing, the most heavenly-minded of mankind. And they
all concur in saying that the one stay of all their spiritual lives has
been communion with God through Christ.
Thirdly, the New Testament affirms with a clearness previously unknown
the immortality of the soul and the future gift of that spiritual body
which shall in some way spring from the natural body as the plant grows
from the seed. There had grown up, no doubt quite naturally,
anticipations of this doctrine and ever stronger and more deeply-rooted
persuasion that it must be true. But it is revealed in the New Testament
as it is taught nowhere else, and it is sealed by the Resurrection of
our Lord, ever since then the historical centre of the Christian Faith.
How exactly it harmonises with the teaching of the spiritual faculty I
have pointed out before.
And, lastly, the New Testament not only tells us what never was told
before of man's nature as a spiritual being and of his destiny
hereafter; it tells also what was never told elsewhere of the nature of
God and of the relations between Him and His creature man. The unity and
spirituality of the Godhead so stre
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