other maxim of Jesus which has such a combined stress of evidence for it, and may be taken as so eminently his. And no wonder. For the maxim contains his secret, the secret by which, emphatically, his gospel 'brought life and immortality to light.'[1] Christ's method directed the disciple's eye inward, and set his consciousness to work; and the first thing his consciousness told him was, that he had two selves pulling him different ways. Till we attend, till the method is set at work, it seems as if 'the wishes of the flesh and of the current thoughts'[2] were to be followed as a matter of course; as if an impulse to do a thing must mean that we should do it. But when we attend, we find that an impulse to do a thing is really in itself no reason at all why we should do it; because impulses proceed from two sources, quite different, and of quite different degrees of authority. St. Paul contrasts them as the inward man, and the man in our members; the mind of the flesh, and the spiritual mind.[3] Jesus contrasts them as life, properly so named, and life in this world.[4] And the moment we seriously attend to conscience, to the suggestions which concern practice and conduct, we can see plainly enough from which source a suggestion comes, and that the suggestions from one source are to overrule those from the other.
But this is a negative state of things, a reign of check and constraint, a reign, merely, of morality. Jesus changed it into what was positive and attractive, lighted it up, made it religion, by the idea of two lives. One of them life properly so called, full of light, endurance, felicity, in connexion with the higher and permanent self; and the other of them
- ↑ II Tim. i, 10.
- ↑ Τὰ θελήματα τῆς σαρκὸς καὶ τῶν διανοιῶν.—Ephesians, ii, 3.
- ↑ Rom., chap. viii.
- ↑ John, xii, 25. The strict grammatical and logical connexion of the words ἐν τῷ κόσμῳ τούτῳ is with ὁ μισῶν, but the sense and effect is as given above.
