ife of Christ is constantly imparted to us, that life will prevail
within us. That life is absolutely sinless, as incapable of defilement
as the sunbeam which has its fount and origin in the sun. In
proportion to the closeness of our abiding in him will be the
completeness of our deliverance from sinning. And we doubt not that
there are Christians who have yielded themselves to God in such
absolute surrender, and who through the upholding power of the Spirit
have been so kept in that condition of surrender, that sin has not had
dominion over them. If in them the war between the flesh and the
spirit has not been forever ended, there has {118} been present victory
in which troublesome sins have ceased from their assaults, and "the
peace of God" has ruled in the heart.

But sinning is one thing and a sinful nature is another; and we see no
evidence in Scripture that the latter is ever eradicated completely
while we are in the body. If we could see ourselves with God's eye, we
should doubtless discover sinfulness lying beneath our most joyful
moments of unsinning conduct, and the stain of our old and fallen
nature so discoloring our whitest actions as to convince us that we are
not yet faultless in his presence. Only let us gladly emphasize this
fact, that as we inherit from Adam a nature incapable of sinlessness,
we inherit from Christ a nature incapable of sinfulness. Therefore, it
is written: "Whosoever is born of God cannot sin, for his seed
remaineth in him." It is not the nature of the new nature to sin; it
is not the law of "the law of the Spirit of life" to transgress. For
the new-born man to do evil is to transgress the law of his nature as
before it was to obey it. In a word, before our regeneration we lived
in sin and loved it; since our regeneration we may lapse into sin but
we loathe it.

3. _The Spirit of Glory: Our Transfiguration_. "The Spirit of glory
and of God resteth upon you," writes Peter (1 Peter 4: 14). Let us
recall this apostle's habit of dividing the stages of redemption into
these two, "the sufferings of Christ and the {119} glory that should
follow," in which he seems to conceive of our Lord's mystical body, the
church, as passing through and reproducing the twofold experience of
its Head, in humiliation and in subsequent exaltation. Even in the
time of her humiliation she has the Spirit of glory abiding on her, as
the cloud of glory rested down upon the tabernacle in the wilderne