us and find us and save us. We could go on in our sin and stand anything but that. When that love is clearly seen and felt and known, it conquers, and it more than conquers. It becomes the most dynamic moral force in the universe. It saves, it renews, it transforms, it vitalizes, it spiritualizes. It works the one real miracle which proves that God has come. It makes out of men like us persons who can exhibit and transmit the same love which saved us. We discover how to become living epistles of the thirteenth of First Corinthians!

IV

THE GOSPEL OF GOD WITH US

In one of the most wonderful passages ever written by anybody (2 Cor. III. 5), St. Paul contrasts the two types of religion, one of which he calls "the ministry of condemnation," and the other "the ministry of righteousness "; one "the ministry of the letter," the other "the ministry of the spirit"; one "the ministry of the old covenant," which is passing away, the other "the ministry of the new covenant," which remains. The primary difference between the two types of religion lies for him in the fact that the "old," as

he calls it, is external. It is a legal system written in graven letters - imposed from without by a lawgiver and to be followed in detail under the expectation of death as the penalty of disobedience. The mark and badge of it, he says, is always slavery, and, in spite of the fact that the system is "obeyed," the heart behind the veil remains all the time unchanged and untransformed. The " new," on the other hand, is fundamentally inward and of the spirit. Instead of a lawgiver who fulminates commands, with terror of condemnation, the God of all mercy and tenderness "shines into our hearts to give the light of his glorious knowledge in the face of Jesus Christ." And his revelation of light and grace and glory and righteousness does not remain outside us as something foreign and external, but it becomes a formative life and power in us and makes us a living letter, or epistle, of Jesus Christ, with the new ministry of glory written in the inmost substance of our being, so that the Christian himself, and not a written document, is the exhibition of the message or covenant - the believer himself is the document. But, unlike the "old" written code, the new document undergoes change and is capable of progress, for as the believer the living epistle-lives unveiled in the

presence of the luminous Christ, he is changed into an ever-growing likeness by the working of the Spirit within him. He goes from glory to glory in an ever-heightening transformation of spirit, until men see in him the marks of the Lord Jesus. But there is no slavery here, for where the spirit of the Lord is there are liberty and inward freedom, and obedience becomes a thing of joy.

Once you enter upon this ministry of the new covenant- the ministry which liberates and which changes the minister himself into an epistle of Jesus Christ- you no longer "faint" in the presence of difficulties and misunderstandings:

having obtained this ministry we faint not." It is possible now to be "pressed on every side, yet not straitened; to be perplexed, but not unto despair; to be smitten down, yet not destroyed, always bearing about in the body the dying of Jesus, so that the life also of Jesus is manifested in our bodies!" That is the supreme boldness of St. Paul's wonderful message, that the life of Jesus can be so written in us that we can manifest it "in our mortal bodies "; that the dying of the Lord Jesus can be "borne about" in our lives as we live among men.

Suddenly he rises to a new height, as though at that point a fresh inspiration swept over him,

like a new sun risen on mid-noon.

He now real

izes, apparently for the first time, that this new inward man, this hidden unseen self which the Spirit forms in us in likeness to the image and glory of Christ, will be a permanent and eternal self, capable of surviving "the decaying of our outward man." If that is so, then the "dissolving of our outward tent," the fleshly body, is a matter of no special concern, for we shall not be "naked," or uncovered," when that is gone, since by this inward spiritual process God has been constructing in us an immortal, eternal, heavenly house or habitation, so that, even with the body gone, we shall be "clothed" with our heavenly house. God made us for this very thing, that mortality might be swallowed up of life, and in so far as we are changed into the divine image we have formed a permanent and ever-enduring inward self, which is always "at home with the Lord."

That is St. Paul's new ministry, which, he rightly claims, "far exceeds in glory" the old ministry of the letter. It is certainly bold and daring, and it is still far beyond the slow faith and vision of most of us, who easily hark back to the literal, the tangible, and the external. We are still too unbelieving for "the light of the gos

pel of the glory of Christ, who is the image of God, to dawn in us." We talk of our new theologies and our old theologies, but these partylines, these middle walls of partition, would all fall away and vanish if we could rise to this gospel of the new covenant-which is the transformation of a man like us into a living document which manifests Christ, and into an immortal self which in any world will be "at home with the Lord."