of society, you see less distinctly the absence of the spirit, unless, you look with a spiritual eye.  The coarseness has passed away—­the rudeness is no longer seen:  there is a refinement in the pleasures.  But if you take the life led by the young men of our country—­strong, athletic, healthy men—­it is still the life of the flesh:  the unthinking, and the unprincipled life in which there is as yet no higher life developed.  It is a life which, in spite of its refinement, the Bible condemns as the life of the sensualist.

We pass on now, to another state of discord—­a state in which the soul is ruined.  Brethren, this is a natural result—­this is what might have been expected.  The natural man gradually subordinates the flesh, the body, to the soul.  It is natural in the development of individuals, it is natural in the development of society:  in the development of individuals, because that childlike, infantine life which exists at first, and is almost entirely a life of appetites, gradually subsides.  Higher wants, higher desires, loftier inclinations arise; the passions of the young man gradually subside, and by degrees the more rational life comes:  the life is changed—­the pleasures of the senses are forsaken for those of the intellect.

It appears natural, again, in the development of society.  Civilization will subordinate the flesh to the soul.  In the savage state, you find the life of the animal.  Civilization is teaching a man, on the principle of this world, to subordinate his appetites; to rule himself; and there comes a refinement, and a gentleness, and a polish, and an enjoyment of intellectual pleasures; so that the man is no longer what the apostle calls a sensual man, but he becomes now what the apostle calls a natural man.  We can see this character delineated in the Epistle to the Ephesians.  “Then we were,” says the apostle, “in our Gentile state, fulfilling the desires of the flesh and of the mind.”  Man naturally fulfils not merely the desires of the flesh, but the desires of the mind.  “And were,” says the apostle, “children of wrath.”

One of the saddest spectacles is the decay of the natural man before the work of the Spirit has been accomplished in him.  When the savage dies—­when a mere infant dies—­when an animal dies—­there is nothing that is appalling or depressing there; but when the high, the developed intellect—­when the cultivated man comes to the last hours of life, and the memory becomes less powerful, and the judgment fails, and all that belongs to nature and to earth visibly perishes, and the higher life has not been yet developed, though it is destined to survive the grave for ever—­even the life of God—­there is here ample cause for grief; and it is no wonder that the man of genius merely should shed tears at he idea of decaying life.

We pass on to consider the Trinity in unity.  All this is contained in that simple expression,