The liberty here intended, it may be unnecessary to say, is not that essential liberty—­freedom from sin, but the completing of the redemption of the spirit by the redemption of the body, the perfecting of the greater by its necessary complement of the less.  Evil has been constantly at work, turning our house of the body into a prison; rendering it more opaque and heavy and insensible; casting about it bands and cerements, and filling it with aches and pains.  The freest soul, the purest of lovers, the man most incapable of anything mean, would not, for all his mighty liberty, yet feel absolutely at large while chained to a dying body—­nor the less hampered, but the more, that that dying body was his own.  The redemption of the body, therefore, the making of it for the man a genuine, perfected, responsive house-alive, is essential to the apostle’s notion of a man’s deliverance.  The new man must have a new body with a new heaven and earth.  St Paul never thinks of himself as released from body; he desires a perfect one, and of a nobler sort; he would inhabit a heaven-made house, and give up the earth-made one, suitable only to this lower stage of life, infected and unsafe from the first, and now much dilapidated in the service of the Master who could so easily give him a better.  He wants a spiritual body—­a body that will not thwart but second the needs and aspirations of the spirit.  He had in his mind, I presume, such a body as the Lord died with, changed by the interpenetrating of the creative indwelling will, to a heavenly body, the body with which he rose.  A body like the Lord’s is, I imagine, necessary to bring us into true and perfect contact with the creation, of which there must be multitudinous phases whereof we cannot now be even aware.

The way in which both good and indifferent people alike lay the blame on their bodies, and look to death rather than God-aided struggle to set them at liberty, appears to me low and cowardly:  it is the master fleeing from the slave, despising at once and fearing him.  We must hold the supremacy over our bodies, but we must not despise body; it is a divine thing.  Body and soul are in the image of God; and the lord of life was last seen in the glorified body of his death.  I believe that he still wears that body.  But we shall do better without these bodies that suffer and grow old—­which may indeed, as some think, be but the outer cases, the husks of our real bodies.  Endlessly helpful as they have been to us, and that, in a measure incalculable, through their very subjection to vanity, we are yet surely not in altogether and only helpful company, so long as the houses wherein we live have so many spots and stains in them which friendly death, it may be, can alone wash out—­so many weather-eaten and self-engendered sores which the builder’s hand, pulling down and rebuilding of fresh and nobler material, alone can banish.