and so prepared and made fit to be raised again as a spiritual body, a member in a perfect personal life in heaven.

And one word in conclusion. Christ insists that the body shall be a yokefellow of the spirit in the same sense in which Christians are now insisting that trade and commerce and the other institutions of society shall be made amenable to the ordinary principles of morality. It is sin which makes the body independent of the spirit, or business transactions independent of morality. Business has its spiritual side, from which it cannot be divorced without ruin and degradation. The body-the busy, active, outward and visible body-must be ruled and regulated by the soul. But Christians who aim at such a purification of business, in points where purification is still required, may start the work on a smaller scale and nearer home. Let us see to it that our own bodies are in harmony with the promptings of the soul; that no sectarian independence is allowed to the animal nature, but that the spiritual is supreme throughout. Then we can go out with clean hands and a pure heart to take part in the larger work outside; to insist that social institutions, which are "body" on a larger scale, shall likewise be regulated by spiritual and moral principles, and that the kingdoms of this world shall throughout and in every department be the kingdoms of God and of His Christ.

LOSING THE SOUL TO SAVE IT.

BY THE

REV. PREBENDARY EYTON,

Rector of Holy Trinity, Upper Chelsea.

66 Whosoever will save his life shall lose it: and whosoever will lose his life for My sake shall find it.”—MATT. xvi. 25.

AGAIN and again in the New Testament is this paradox forced on our notice in praise of unselfishness. Where the life or soul (for the word is the same in the Greek) of man is concerned, we are told that the words losing and gaining, keeping or flinging away, saving or abandoning, become inverted. There is a saving which is losing, and a losing which is the only lasting saving.

So

And this way of speaking is not meant to puzzle us. There is nothing in the New Testament which is merely intended to startle or to be used for sensational effect; every surprising statement has an object which cannot be attained in any other way. Christ's words here are not meant merely to make us experience an emotion, but to make us think, ponder, and consider. What is that losing which is a saving? That is our question.

There was a day when the answer was easy; circumstances made it easy to the first disciples and their converts; there would be no difficulty then in understanding what kind of losing the soul or life

that was which would save it. There was a losing which often came very near them, and their willingness to lose their life or soul in that fashion, whenever tested, admitted of no doubt or hesitation. There was suffering and shame, the stake and the sword, on the one hand; and on the other, immunity and comfort. To them the choice was simple: would they choose death that they might live the only life worth living-the life of faith and of holiness; or would they choose life that they might die the worst of deaths-the inward death of the apostate and the coward.

Then the alternative was simple and easy to understand; the paradox ceased to puzzle; it became full of lucidity. And so now sometimes there is an application of the words which so far corresponds to that one, that the difficulty is not felt, at any rate, seriously. There is sometimes an apparent losing of the life by honesty, or truth, or honour, by preferring these to self-interest, and gain, and falsehood, which is felt to be the only real keeping, just as there is a keeping of life by dishonesty or concession of principle, which is felt to be, owned to be, the most absolute loss.

The man who buys ease with dishonesty, or popularity by giving up his principles, as certainly loses his real life in trying to save it, as the man who sets his face like a flint, and refuses to hear the voice of the charmer, assuredly keeps it. There is no difficulty here; when we take the paradox out into actual life, we see how imperative it is that man should often seem to lose his soul by self-abandonment and by self-conquest, if he is really to save it.

But go a little further, and the difficulty recurs, the paradox begins to baffle again. Here is the religious man of a certain type; he is nervous and anxious about himself; either he has got a taint of

the dark side of Puritanism in his blood, or he has inherited from a succession of pious forefathers their view of God, that He is a hard master, only to be propitiated by a rigorous round of prayers, and penances, and fastings, and religious exercises; he thinks that if he can persevere with these he may somehow wriggle into heaven. And so he takes a thoroughly valetudinarian view of the whole matter of soul-saving; he shuts his soul up in a sick chamber, and he doses it with spiritual exercises; perhaps he hates fasting, but he dreads the future too much to refrain from it; perhaps prayers are a weariness to him, but his nervous terrors force him to pray, because by it he will "save his soul;" and all the while in spiritual vitality his soul pines and sickens. Should any one make a claim on him for service, his instinct is to refuse; he tells himself that he is very sorry he cannot help, but he is afraid of risking his own salvation; he must watch himself, and if he goes into the thick of common, human, irreligious life, if he goes among the publicans and sinners, he might be infected by their bad example, he might become one of them. So he shuts his soul up in a warm, close, devotional atmosphere, and lives, as he thinks, to the glory of God, where there are no chill blasts of worldliness or of common interests blowing upon him he will save his soul. And yet do we not feel, with his poor, thin, deteriorating character, that every day he is losing it?

Or, again, there is the mechanical religionist, the man who is not merely frightened by nervous emotion, who does not think of God as being so much a hard master, as a merely mechanical being. He has a quantitative theory of devotion, and a mechanical theory of life; he will do so much church, so much prayers, so much self-denial, so much almsgiving, all as a matter of hard duty. He will keep

a bit of his soul curtained off as a kind of sanctuary -there is his religion-and with that and its observances nothing shall interfere, but the rest of his life is his own; he may be a harsh father, a bullying advocate, a bitter enemy, a swindling director, a taker of fees for which he does no work-he may be all this, he may be losing day by day every vestige of honour and generosity, and yet he may all the time be believing, and even be firmly convinced that, because of the religion which he keeps so carefully shut off in its water-tight compartment, he is saving his soul. We cannot have kept our eyes open if we have not known such cases; we may even be such people ourselves. The worst of it is that, if it be so, we are likely to become so adept at selfdeception. No one seems so morally and spiritually hopeless as the man who has a little dried-up religion in a bit of his life; he keeps it like a pea in a box, and if some day some wandering evangelist gives him a pang of discomfort, he shakes his box, the pea rattles, and he is in a blaze of triumph. "Why, there is my religion; I fast twice in the week, I go to church, I pray morning and evening, I keep from bad company, I believe in God's Revelation; I am saving my soul."

All the while the soul, the life, the character, the self, sickens and pines and dies under such treatment; the religious element is dried up by being divorced from the real interests of life, and from the love of the great Father. The child-feeling towards God, by which man grows, is deadened by nervous fears; the attitude becomes, "I dare not though I would," and at last the soul is lost by being saved.

These are the failures. How, then, are we to grasp the inmost teaching of this paradox-to lose the soul in order to save it?

The soul must brace itself by vigorous exercises;