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There are two ways of dealing with every vice that troubles us, in either ourselves or others. One is to set to work directly to destroy the vice; that is the negative way. The other is to bring in as overwhelmingly as possible the opposite virtue, and so to crowd and stifle and drown out the vice; that is the positive way. Now there can be no doubt about St. Paul. Here comes his poor Gatatian fighting with his lust of the flesh. How shall he kill it? St. Paul says not, "Do as few fleshly things as you can," setting him out on a course of repression; but, "Do just as may spiritual things as you can, opening before him the broad gates of a life of positive endeavour. And when we have thoroughly comprehended the difference of these two methods, and seen how distinctly St. Paul chose one instead of the other, we have laid hold on one of the noblest characteristics of his treatment of humanity, one that he had gained most directly from his Lord. I should despair of making any one see the distinction who did not know it in his own experience. Everywhere the negative and the positive methods of treatment stand over against each other, and men choose between them. Here is a man who is beset by doubts, perhaps, about the very fundamental truths of Christianity. He may attack all the objections in turn, and at last succeed in proving that Christianity is not false. That is negative. Or he may gather about him the assurance of all that his religion has done, and sweep away all his doubts with the complete conviction that Christianity is true. That is positive, and that is better. We see the same principle, the superiority of the positive to the negative, constantly illustrated in matters of opinion. How is it that people change their opinions, give up what they have steadfastly believed, and come to believe something very different, perhaps its very opposite? I think we all have been surprised, if we have thought about it, by the very small number of cases in which men deliberately abandon positions because those positions have been disproved and seem to them no longer tenable. And even when such cases do occur, the effect is apt to be not good, but bad. The man abandons his disproved idea, but takes no other in its stead; until, in spite of their better judgment, many good men have been brought to feel that, rather than use the power of mere negation, and turn the believer in an error into a believer in nothing, they would let their friend go on believing his falsehood, since it was better to believe something, however stupidly, than to disbelieve everything, however shrewdly. But what then? How do men change their opinions? Have you not seen? Holding still their old belief, they come somehow into the atmosphere of a clearer and a richer faith. That better faith surrounds them, fills them, presses off them with its own convincingness. They learn to love it, long to receive it, try to open their hands and hearts just enough to take it in and hold it along with the old doctrine which they have no idea of giving up. They think that they are holding both. They persuade themselves that they have found a way of reconciling the old and the new, which have been thought unreconcilable. Perhaps they go on thinking so all their lives. But perhaps some day something startles them, and they awake to find that the old is gone, and that the new opinion has become their opinion by its own positive convincing power. There has been no violence in the process, nor any melancholy gap of infidelity between. It seems to me that there is something so sublimely positive in Nature. She never kills for the mere sake of killing, but every death is but one step in the vast weaving of the web of life. She has no process of destruction which, as you turn it to the other side and took at it in what you know to be its truer light, you do not see to be a process of construction. She gets rid of her wastes by ever new plans of nutrition. This is what gives her such a courageous, hopeful, and enthusiastic look, and makes men love her as a mother and not fear her as a tyrant. They see by small signs, and dimly feel, this positiveness of her workings which it is the glory of natural science to reveal more and more. We find the same thing in the New Testament. The God there revealed to us is not a God of repression, or restraint, but a God whose symbols should be the sun, the light, the wind, the fire — everything that is stimulating, everything that fosters and encourages and helps. Such is the God whose glory we see in the face of Jesus Christ. The distinction is everywhere. Not by merely trying not to sin, but by entering farther and farther into the new life, in which, when it is completed, sin becomes impossible; not' by merely weeding out wickedness, but by a new and supernatural culture of holiness, does the saint of the New Testament walk on the ever-ascending pathway of growing Christliness, and come at last perfectly to Christ. This is the true difference between law and grace, add the New Testament is the book of grace. And this character of the New Testament must be at the bottom in conformity with human nature. The Bible and its Christianity are not in contradiction against the nature of the man they try to save. Let us never believe they are. They are at war with all his corruptions, and, in his own interest, though against his stubborn will, they are for ever labouring to assert and re-establish his true self. And in this fundamental character of the New Testament, by which it is a book not of prohibitions but of eager inspirations, there comes out a deep harmony between it and the heart of man. For man's heart is always rebelling against repression as a continuous and regular thing. Man is willing to make self-sacrifices for a certain temporary purpose. The merchant will give up his home, the student shut his books, the mother leave her household for a time, to do some certain work. The world is full of self-sacrifice, of the suppression of desires, the forcing of natural inclinations; but all the while under this crust the fire is burning; all the time, under this self-sacrifice, there is a restless, hungry sense that it is not right, that it cannot be final; there is a crying out for self-indulgence. All the time there is a great human sense that not suppression but expression is the true life. And what has Christ to say to one, who, acting on this prompting of his nature, gives up restraint and tries indulgence? My brother, I can hear him say, you are not wholly wrong. Nay, at the bottom, you are right. Self-mortification, self-sacrifice, is not the first or final law of life. You are right when you think that these appetites and passions were not put into you merely to be killed, and that the virtue which only comes by their restraint is a poor, colour-less, and feeble thing. You are right in thinking that not to restrain yourself and to refrain from doing, but to utter yourself, to act, to do, is the purpose of your being in the world. Only, my brother, this is not the self you are to utter, these are not the acts you are to do. There is a part in you made to think deeply, made to feel nobly, made to be charitable and chivalric, made to worship, to pity, and to love. You are not uttering yourself while you keep that better self in chains, and only let these lower passions free. Let me renew those nobler powers, and then believe with all your heart and might that to send out those powers into the intensest exercise is the one worthy purpose of your life. Then these passions, which you are indulging because you cannot believe that you were meant to give your whole life up to bridling them, will need no forcible bridling, and yet, owning their masters in the higher powers which come out to act, they will be content to serve them. You will not fulfil your passions any longer, but the reason will not be that you have resumed the weary guard over your passions which you tried to keep of old. It will be that you have given yourself up so utterly to the seeking after holiness, that these lower passions have lost their hold upon you. You will not so much have crushed the carnal as embraced the spiritual. I shall have made you free. You will be walking in the Spirit, and so will not fulfil the lusts of the flesh. Is not this Christ's method? Is not this the tone of His encouraging voice? "Whosoever committeth sin is the servant of sin," but "Ye shall know the truth, and the truth shall make you free." It is the positive attainment and not the negative surrender. It is the self-indulgence of the highest, and not the self-surrender of the lowest, that is the great end of the gospel.

(Phillips Brooks, D. D.)

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KJV: This I say then, Walk in the Spirit, and ye shall not fulfil the lust of the flesh.

WEB: But I say, walk by the Spirit, and you won't fulfill the lust of the flesh.