2. The fact of ethical interest from which we must proceed is that man, in virtue of his spiritual nature, is _akin to God_, and participates in the three great elements of the divine Personality--thought, love and will.[15] Personality has been called 'the culminating fact of the {62} universe.' And it is the task of man to realise his true personality--to fulfil the law of his highest self. In this work he has to harmonise and bring to the unity of his personal life, by means of one dominating force, the various elements of his nature--his sensuous, emotional, and rational powers. By the constitution of his being he belongs to a larger world, and when he is true to himself he is ever reaching out towards it. From the very beginning of life, and even in the lowest phases of his nature he has within him the potency of the divine. He carries the infinite in his soul, and by reason of his very existence shares the life of God. The value of his soul in this sense is repeatedly emphasised in scripture. In our Lord's teaching it is perhaps the most distinctive note. The soul, or self-conscious spiritual ego, is spoken of as capable of being 'acquired' or 'lost.'[16] It is acquired or possessed when a man seeks to regain the image in which he was created. It is lost when he refuses to respond to those spiritual influences by which Christ besets him, and by means of which the soul is moulded into the likeness of God. 3. A full presentation of this subject would involve a reference even to the physical powers which form an integral part of man and witness to his eternal destiny. (1) The very body is to be redeemed and sanctified, and made an instrument of the new life in Christ. The extremes of asceticism and self-indulgence, both of which found advocates in Greek philosophy and even in the early Church, have no countenance in scripture. Evil does not reside in the flesh, as the Greeks held, but in the will which uses the flesh for its base ends. Not mutilation but transformation, not suppression but consecration is the Christian ideal. The natural is the basis of the spiritual. Man is the Temple of God, every part of which is sacred. Christ claims to be King of the body as of every other domain of life. The secret of spiritual progress does not consist in the unflinching destruction of the flesh, but in its firm but kindly discipline for loyal service. It is not, therefore, by {63} leaving the body behind but by taking it up into our higher self that we become spiritual. As Browning says, 'Let us cry all good things Are ours, nor soul helps flesh more now Than flesh helps soul.'