Nor is it only the ground on which our sacrifice is accepted, but it is the great motive by which our sacrifice is impelled. There is the difference between the Christian teaching, ’present your bodies a sacrifice,’ and the highest and noblest of similar teaching elsewhere.  One of the purest and loftiest of the ancient moralists was a contemporary of Paul’s.  He would have re-echoed from his heart the Apostle’s directory, but he knew nothing of the Apostle’s motive.  So his exhortations were powerless.  He had no spell to work on men’s hearts, and his lofty teachings were as the voice of one crying in the wilderness.  Whilst Seneca taught, Rome was a cesspool of moral putridity and Nero butchered.  So it always is.  There may be noble teachings about self-control, purity, and the like, but an evil and adulterous generation is slow to dance to such piping.

Our poet has bid us—­

  ’Move upwards, casting out the beast,
  And let the ape and tiger die.’

But how is this heavy bulk of ours to ‘move upwards’; how is the beast to be ‘cast out’; how are the ‘ape and tiger’ in us to be slain?  Paul has told us, ‘By the mercies of God.’  Christ’s gift, meditated on, accepted, introduced into will and heart, is the one power that will melt our obstinacy, the one magnet that will draw us after it.

Nothing else, brethren, as your own experience has taught you, and as the experience of the world confirms, nothing else will bind Behemoth, and put a hook in his nose.  Apart from the constraining motive of the love of Christ, all the cords of prudence, conscience, advantage, by which men try to bind their unruly passions and manacle the insisting flesh, are like the chains on the demoniac’s wrists—­’And he had oftentimes been bound by chains, and the chains were snapped asunder.’  But the silken leash with which the fair Una in the poem leads the lion, the silken leash of love will bind the strong man, and enable us to rule ourselves.  If we will open our hearts to the sacrifice of Christ, we shall be able to offer ourselves as thankofferings.  If we will let His love sway our wills and consciences, He will give our wills and consciences power to master and to offer up our flesh.  And the great change, according to which He will one day change the body of our humiliation into the likeness of the body of His glory, will be begun in us, if we live under the influence of the motive and the commandment which this Apostle bound together in our text and in his other great words, ’Ye are not your own; ye are bought with a price, therefore glorify God in your body and spirit, which are His.’

TRANSFIGURATION

   ’Be not conformed to this world; but be ye transformed by
   the renewing of your mind, that ye may prove what is that
   good, and acceptable, and perfect will of God.’—­ROMANS xii. 2.