SERMON XXIII.  THE FLESH AND THE SPIRIT

(Eighth Sunday after Trinity.)

Romans viii. 12.  Therefore, brethren, we are debtors, not to the flesh, to live after the flesh; for if ye live after the flesh, ye shall die.

What does walking after the flesh mean?  St. Paul tells us himself, in Gal. v., where he uses exactly the same form of words which he does here.  ‘The works of the flesh,’ he says, ‘are manifest.’  When a man gives way to his passions and appetites—­when he cares only about enjoying his own flesh, and the pleasures which he has in common with the brutes, then there is no mistake about the sort of life which he will lead—­’Now the works of the flesh are manifest, which are these; adultery, fornication, uncleanness, lasciviousness, idolatry, witchcraft, hatred, variance, emulations, wrath, strife, seditions, heresies, envyings, murders, drunkenness, revellings, and such like.’  An ugly list, my friends; and God have mercy on the man who gives way to them.  For disgraceful as they are to him, and tormenting also to him in this life, the worst is, that if he gives way to them, he will die.

I do not mean that he will bring his mortal body to an untimely end; that he will ruin his own health; or that he will get himself hanged, though that is likely enough—­common enough.  I think St. Paul means something even worse than that.  The man himself will die.  Not his body merely:  but his soul, his character, will die.  All in him that God made, all that God intended him to be, will die.  All that his father and mother loved in him, all that they watched over, and hoped and prayed that it might grow up into life, in order that he might become the man God meant him to be, all that will die.  His soul and character will become one mass of disease.  He will think wrong, feel wrong, about everything of which he does think and feel:  while, about the higher matters, of which every man ought to know something, he will not think or feel at all.  Love to his country, love to his own kinsfolk even; above all, love to God, will die in him, and he will care for nothing but himself, and how to get a little more foul pleasure before he goes out of this world, he dare not think whither.  All power of being useful will die in him.  Honour and justice will die in him.  He will be shut up in himself, in the ugly prison-house of his own lusts and passions, parted from his fellow-men, caring nothing for them, knowing that they care nothing for him.  He will have no faith in man or God.  He will believe no good, he will have no hope, either for himself or for the world.

This, this is death, indeed; the death of sin; the death in which human beings may go on for years, walking, eating, and drinking; worse than those who walk in their sleep, and see nothing, though their eyes are staring wide.