This simplifies the matter amazingly. It answers a thousand questions and solves a thousand difficulties. It is of little use to split hairs about the harm of this or that particular thing. The question is, What is our real purpose and object? do we merely want to get on as men, or do we long to live as true Nazarites? According to the language of 1 Corinthians iii. 3, to “walk as men” and to be “carnal” are synonymous. Does such language really govern us? do we drink into the spirit and breathe the atmosphere of such a scripture? or are we ruled by the spirit and principles of a godless, Christless world? It is useless to spend our time arguing points which would never be raised at all if our souls were in the right temper and attitude. No doubt, it is perfectly right, perfectly natural, perfectly consistent, for the men of this world to enjoy all that it has to offer them, and to maintain their rights and their dignities to the very utmost of their power. It were childish to question this. But on the other hand, what is right and natural and consistent for the men of this world, is wrong, unnatural, and inconsistent for God’s Nazarites. Thus the matter stands, if we are to be governed by the simple truth of God. We learn from the sixth chapter of Numbers that if a Nazarite drank wine or shaved his locks, he defiled the head of his consecration. Has this no voice, no lesson for us? Assuredly it has. It teaches us that if our souls desire to pursue a path of whole-hearted consecration to God, we must abstain from the joys of earth, and surrender the dignities and the rights of nature. It must be thus, seeing that God and the world, flesh and spirit, do not and cannot coalesce. The time will come when it will be otherwise; but just now, all who _will_ live to God, and walk in the Spirit, must live apart from the world and mortify the flesh. May God, of His great mercy, enable us so to do. One other feature of the Nazarite remains to be noticed. He was not to touch a dead body.—“All the days that he separateth himself unto the Lord, he shall come at no dead body. He shall not make himself unclean for his father, or for his mother, for his brother, or for his sister, when they die; because the consecration of his God is upon his head.”