e call our
besetting sin. Yet to break with the lower environment at all, to many,
is to break at this single point. It is the only important point at
which they touch it, circumstances or natural disposition making
habitual contact at other places impossible. The sinful environment, in
short, to them means a small but well-defined area. Now if contact at
this point be not broken off, they are virtually in contact still with
the whole environment. There may be only one avenue between the new life
and the old, it may be but a small and _subterranean passage_, but this
is sufficient to keep the old life in. So long as that remains the
victim is not "dead unto sin," and therefore he cannot "live unto God."
Hence the reasonableness of the words, "Whatsoever shall keep the whole
law, and yet offend at one point, he is guilty of all." In the natural
world it only requires a single vital correspondence of the body to be
out of order to insure Death. It is not necessary to have consumption,
diabetes, and an aneurism to bring the body to the grave if it have
heart-disease. He who is fatally diseased in one organ necessarily pays
the penalty with his life, though all the others be in perfect health.
And such, likewise, are the mysterious unity and correlation of
functions in the spiritual organism that the disease of one member may
involve the ruin of the whole. The reason, therefore, with which Christ
follows up the announcement of His Doctrine of Mutilation, or local
Suicide, finds here at once its justification and interpretation: "If
thy right eye offend thee, pluck it out, and cast it from thee: _for_ it
is profitable for thee that _one_ of thy members should perish, and not
that thy _whole body_ should be cast into hell. And if thy right hand
offend thee, cut it off, and cast it from thee: _for_ it is profitable
for thee that _one_ of thy members should perish, and not that thy
_whole body_ should be cast into hell."

Secondly, Mortification. The warrant for the use of this expression is
found in the well-known phrases of Paul, "If ye through the Spirit do
mortify the deeds of the body ye shall live," and "Mortify therefore
your members which are upon earth." The word mortify here is, literally,
to make to die. It is used, of course, in no specially technical sense;
and to attempt to draw a detailed moral from the pathology of
mortification would be equally fantastic and irrelevant. But without in
any way straining the mean