is horrible to think of the body rising with the marks of pain and sickness which marked it at death. 'We sow not the body which shall be.' It is sown a natural body, and it is raised a spiritual body, changed into the likeness of the body of Christ's glory.

Of the life of the world to come men have been too ready to allow their imagination to draw pictures, in many cases false and misleading, especially as to the existence of a state intermediate between death and judgment. So far as we can see, the Bible speaks of this life as the only period of our probation, nor have we a right to expect any other. But we do not pass at once after death into heaven or hell. There is a place or state of waiting, which we may believe to be rather a condition of training and educating and preparing the soul for the vision of God than a condition of pain. It is a happiness to think that God will thus prepare us to pass into His presence. Nor may we teach beyond what is written of the meaning of heaven and hell. There is the eternal and awful difference between enjoyment of the presence and vision of God, and banishment and separation from Him in outer darkness. The terrors of a material fire may be a misleading interpretation of the figurative language of Holy Scripture, but no words can exaggerate the bitterness of those who in their lost condition realise what opportunity they have lost and what love they have despised. Nor must we interpret literally all the figurative language in which the Book of Revelation describes the Holy City. But it does show us that the condition of happiness of the blessed is not one of inactive repose, but of continuous and happy service. It is the rest for the people of God, because it is no longer rendered through toil and struggle, but happily and perfectly. His servants shall serve Him, and see His face.

CHAPTER VIII

RENUNCIATION

The Enemies of the Kingdom.-Strictly speaking, there is one foe, the Devil, our ghostly or spiritual enemy, as the Catechism says. The world and the flesh are instruments which he uses in leading us astray, the influence and example of those about us, the desires which arise within us in our own bodies. These influences and desires are not necessarily bad in themselves; but they may become so, and do become so, when the Devil uses them for his own purpose.

And the Devil has a purpose. Why God permits personal beings to oppose His will and loving purpose we cannot say. The Bible says little on this point. Only in the Book of the Revelation of S. John do we read of the war in heaven between S. Michael and the Devil, and the Devil being cast out into the bottomless pit. Milton has developed this idea in the poem of 'Paradise Lost,' and a great part of our ordinary ideas on this matter are derived from Milton, and not from the Bible. But our Lord Himself and His Apostles so clearly teach the existence of personal evil spirits that we are bound to follow their teaching. Furthermore, our own experience in temptation seems to show the attack of a malignant personal enemy. The Devil represents all that is contrary to the nature of God, and schemes to overthrow all the purposes of God.

We

renounce the Devil and all his works. When we disobey God we obey the Devil, and submit our being to his rule. His servants we are to whom we obey.

The special works of the Devil are :—

1. Finding satisfaction in, or trying in any way to bring about, harm to other people. If we allow ourselves to feel satisfaction when we hear of the misfortunes of others, it is the first step towards trying to bring it about; and this is the characteristic work of the Devil. This harm we effect most surely and certainly by tempting others. We speak of the Devil by a special name, the Tempter; and as we think of our duty to leave the world better than we find it, we recognise that to leave it worse is the work of the Devil, which we renounce. This is done not only in the worst way, by deliberately leading others into wrong, but also by bad example and influence, by thoughtless words and acts, the effect of which we often do not recognise until it is too late. Furthermore, many an earnest effort and kind action is prevented or spoiled by cynical ridicule or contemptuous laughter. It is hard enough in any case to do our duty. We are too apt to think that it is not worth while, and that what we can do is not worth doing. Everything which encourages our laziness, our distrust of ourselves, our fear of being ridiculous, is the Devil's work for stopping what God is asking from us.

2. Falsehood, again, is specially the work of the Devil. He is the father of lies. He deceives us as to the value of the things we pursue and the result of our actions. It is so in the story of the Fall. He persuaded Adam and Eve that death would not be the result of disobedience. 'Ye shall not surely die.' It is the Devil's work to persuade us that unworthy things are to be pursued, and that dishonourable tricks are honest.

3. Last, come Pride and Presumption.

D

We should

notice that the three temptations of our Lord correspond to our three spiritual enemies—the flesh, the world, and the Devil; and the temptation of the Devil occurs in the form of presumption-to cast Himself down from the pinnacle of the Temple, trusting to the protection and guardianship of His Father. In Holy Scripture, side by side with the threats of God's judgments, we read the assurance of His tender mercy and His love. We are too ready to forget the former, and to presume on the latter-to trust that whatever we do, some opportunity will be found us some day, and that the sentence of God's anger upon the wicked will be averted from ourselves; that we shall not surely die. The sin of presumption leads us in this way to continue in evil practices, and to cling to evil habits, trusting that they may not have for us the consequences we know they have had for others, or that something will occur to break off the evil habit without struggle or effort of our own. Further, it leads us to tamper with evil, to enjoy the society of people we know to be vicious because they are amusing, to indulge our curiosity, and in what we read or look at, or do, especially in matters of sensual indulgence, to claim for ourselves wide liberty, and to carry the limits of what is permitted so far that we find we are swept away before we are aware of it into sins from which we should once have shrunk with horror and disgust.

The sin of pride consists in a wholly false idea of our position in the world, of what is due to us from others, and what is due to others from ourselves. By this sin fell the angels. We do not see the nature and the origin or the purpose of the gifts that we possess. There is, of course, what we call a true pride. It is no part of our duty to represent our gifts as less than they are, or if God has given us great intellectual power, to pretend

that we have no more ability than the average person. It is indeed our duty to God to reverence His gifts and to thank Him for them, to be proud of the position to which He has called us, and the opportunities of service which He has intrusted to us.

False pride consists, first, in the exaggeration of these gifts, in imagining they are greater than they really are ; secondly, in forgetting that they are gifts; thirdly, in imagining that by the mere fact of having some ability or capacity above the average we are therefore necessarily better men. It may be, and often is, just the other way. Our true self, our true character, is not affected by the possession of any gift, but by the use we make of it. A cricketer is no better man for being a cricketer; and if on the score of any superior gift we allow ourselves to become arrogant, dictatorial, and selfassertive, to claim a deference from, and to assert our superiority over, those with whom we come in contact, the gift which should have been a blessing becomes fatal to its possessor, and an offence and hindrance to other people. The highest ambition of a Christian should be to become the servant of the servants of God. And when we once recognise that all we are and all we have is the gift of God, there should not be room in our hearts for any thought except the humble confession how little we have made of it.

The World.—Three temptations seem to come to us by the direct suggestion of the spirit of evil—pride, lying, the working of injury to others. We come now to temptations which come to us (a) through the agency of those around us, the world; (b) from the natural desires of our own bodies, the flesh. It is well to understand exactly what we mean by the world. The world is exactly the opposite of the Church, and both are societies of men and women. But just as the Church consists