The Battle of Life ends, and it is meant to end, in victory. So St. Paul was at once stern and joyous. ' As sorrowful, but always rejoicing '; and the joy came, in his mind, directly out of the sorrow. Nor, indeed, was it so much sorrow in our personal sense of the word that he meant as tribulation---the great trouble that arises from facing the difficulties and temptations of the Christian warfare, from standing firm against the world, from self-subjugation. Life was to him a pursuit, a race, a battle; but a pursuit which should attain, a race which had a goal, a battle which was to end in victory. The struggle was constant, the watchfulness should be unvarying, the armor with which he armed the Christian soldier always ready. Yet, the end was worth all the trouble, and the battle made the soul. ' So fight I, not as one that beateth the air.' ' I press toward the mark for the prize of the high calling of God in Christ Jesus.'

The victory is Christ's, and ours in Him. This is the solution of the great apostle to the Gentiles. The seventh chapter of his Epistle to the Romans is the record of a battle, a fierce and prolonged conflict, between the good and the evil---' the good that I would I do not, and the evil that I would not, that I do.' It ends with a sudden shout of triumph: ' Who shall deliver me from the body of this death? I thank God through Jesus Christ our Lord.' The Name suggests the whole. Atonement, justification, redemption, freedom, moral power and purity, spiritual life culminating in life eternal, are all wrapped up in that one all-potent Name. It is the talismanic word which transforms a scene radiant with heavenly glory; which bids the slave start into freedom, the sick into health, the dead into life.

Our Christian faith is this: that the struggle of Christ with sin was more than one event in the long fight of humanity with sin, however splendid that event might be. It was the consummation and essential completion of the struggle. It was the victory. It was the King coming down into the battle to finish it, to give the blow that should assure its end. The struggle goes on, each soldier struggles still; but each struggles in a strife already won, and lays hold of a victory already certain. Do we understand that truth---how great, how deep, how glorious it is? Let us know the Life of Christ more deeply. Let us read it and meditate upon it, and let it freely in to show its power upon our lives; and then, when we have laid hold of His Divinity, it will seem simply impossible that such as He is should have lived and died in strife with sin, and yet have left sin as He found it. No power of victory that is attributed to such a life as His can seem too great to be true.

In Christ, timothy. maranatha