Such being the general picture, we note the fact which underlies the whole representation; namely, that every life is a definite whole which has a fixed end.  Jesus said, ’We must work the works of Him that sent Me, while it is day:  the night cometh.’  Paul uses the opposite metaphors in these verses.  But, though the two sayings are opposite in form, they are identical in substance.  In both, the predominant thought is that of the rapidly diminishing space of earthly life, and the complete unlikeness to it of the future.  We stand like men on a sandbank with an incoming tide, and every wash of the waves eats away its edges, and presently it will yield below our feet.  We forget this for the most part, and perhaps it is not well that it should be ever present; but that it should never be present is madness and sore loss.

Paul, in his intense moral earnestness, in verse 13, bids us regard ourselves as already in ‘the day,’ and shape our conduct as if it shone around us and all things were made manifest by its light.  The sins to be put off are very gross and palpable.  They are for the most part sins of flesh, such as even these Roman Christians had to be warned against, and such as need to be manifested by the light even now among many professing Christian communities.

But Paul has one more word to say.  If he stopped without it, he would have said little to help men who are crying out, ’How am I to strip off this clinging evil, which seems my skin rather than my clothing?  How am I to put on that flashing panoply?’ There is but one way,—­put on the Lord Jesus Christ.  If we commit ourselves to Him by faith, and front our temptations in His strength, and thus, as it were, wrap ourselves in Him, He will be to us dress and armour, strength and righteousness.  Our old self will fall away, and we shall take no forethought for the flesh, to fulfil the lusts thereof.

SALVATION NEARER

   ’...  Now is our salvation nearer than
   when we believed.’—­ROMANS xiii. 11.

There is no doubt, I suppose, that the Apostle, in common with the whole of the early Church, entertained more or less consistently the expectation of living to witness the second coming of Jesus Christ.  There are in Paul’s letters passages which look both in the direction of that anticipation, and in the other one of expecting to taste death.  ‘We which are alive and remain unto the coming of the Lord,’ he says twice in one chapter.  ’I am ready to be offered, and the hour of my departure is at hand,’ he says in his last letter.