have therefore received Christ Jesus the Lord, so walk ye in Him; "* let consecration crown conversion, let self devotement to Christ answer to His self devotement for you. Has the reader noticed the significant "therefore" in that earnest plea for consecration with which the x1th of Romans opens? Just previously the question has been asked, "Or who hath first given to Him, and it shall be recompensed unto him again?" Had we first rendered something to God, we might look for a return. But, on the contrary, we have received everything from Him-"for of Him and through Him and to Him are all things." And this is the reason why we should render to Him all that we have. "I beseech you therefore, brethren, by the mercies of God, that ye present your bodies a living sacrifice, holy, acceptable unto God, which is your reasonable service."

One love demands another. If God has shown His love to us by giving His Son to die as a sacrifice for our sins, let us show our love by giving ourselves to live in daily sacrifice for Him. giving ourselves," we say. Self-sacrifice may be scanted in two ways. We may give our posses

* Coloss. 2: 6.

"By

sions, instead of giving ourselves; or we may give ourselves to God's service instead of to God himself. In either case our sacrifice is lame and our consecration lacking. There must be se.f-surrender to Him who surrendered Himself for us, before Christ can be "all and in all." Have we not found persons giving their money to charity, under the idea that their gift would in some way sanctify the giver and make him acceptable to the Lord? But God requires our persons before He asks our purses. We are to "present our bodies" unto Him, and that will carry our possessions. For the body is "the temple of the Holy Ghost," and Jesus tells us that it is the temple that sanctifies the gold, and not the gold that sanctifies the temple. The devotement of self therefore must go before devotement of property and possessions. This is the divine order which the apostle so thankfully recognizes in acknowledging the gifts of the Macedonian Christians. For making menliberality, he adds,

tion of the riches of their

"And this they did, not as we expected, but first gave their own selves to the Lord, and unto us by the will of God." * And for this cause he declares

* 2 Cor. 8: 5.

that he ministered the gospel of God to the Gentiles, that being renewed by the Spirit, they might be fitted to give in the Spirit, "that the offering up of the Gentiles might be acceptable, being sanctified by the Holy Ghost.” * And the oppo

site idea is equally true-that we must devote ourselves to the Lord, not merely to some work for the Lord, which may absorb in itself the interest and zeal, which should be bestowed on His divine person.

Now nothing is clearer than the fact that a Christian gets power from God, just in proportion to the entireness of his self-surrender to God. If we ask how this is, the answer is easy. It is not that God keeps a strictly debt and credit account with the Christian, giving so much grace for so much sacrifice, so much power for so much humility. It is by the action of a necessary law that it comes to pass. We know that, in the human body, the privation of any one of the senses only intensifies the power of those which remain. If, for example, the sight be lost, the touch and taste become thereby much more acute. Exactly so it is between the three factors of our human being

* Rom. 15: 16.

ɔody, soul and spirit; whatever either one surrenders is carried over to the credit of the others, and inures to their strength. That is why fasting helps communion - the carnal appetites being denied that the spiritual appetites may be awakened to a more hungry craving. Hence the significance of the plea that we present our bodies a living sacrifice. We should have said "bodies and spirits," and many so enlarge the exhortation. But no! Let the body be surrendered up for the enrichment of the soul, fleshly desires repressed, that spiritual desires may be enlarged—the carnal man, in a word, sacrificed to the spiritual.

We have seen this significant device on an ancient seal—the effigy of a burning candle, and underneath it the superscription, “I give light by being myself consumed." This is the true symbol of Christian devotedness-giving out light by giving up our lives to Him who loved us the zeal of God's house consuming us while we furnish divine illumination to the world.

And this leads us to urge what we believe to be all important to this whole subject· that we should make our consecration a definite, final, and irrevocable event in our spiritual history. It is

not enough for us to hear one say that he believes in Jesus Christ; we want a decisive and confessed act of acceptance. And likewise we are not satisfied to urge upon our readers a consecrated life merely; we wish to insist on the value and power of a solemn and definite and overshadowing act of consecration. Let it be made with the utmost deliberation, and after the most prayerful selfexamination; let the seal of God's acceptance of it be most carefully sought; let it be final, in the sense of being irrevocable, but initiatory in the sense of being introductory to a new life-a life that belongs, henceforth, utterly to God, to be lived where He would have it lived, to be employed as He would have it employed, to be finished when He would have it finished. Oh, who is sufficient for such an engagement! But many have made it, and we find in them a living demonstration of its value.

In the spiritual history of George Whitfield we have a striking example of such definite and whole hearted consecration. With the Wesleys in the "Holy Club" of Oxford, he had sought with prolonged prayer and self-mortification for a deeper work of the Spirit in his heart. Whole days he