What rest! What comfort! What strength! What moral elevation! What sweet relief for the poor burdened soul that has been vainly seeking, for years perhaps, to find peace in self-improvement! What deliverance from the wretched thralldom of legality, in all its phases, to find out the precious secret that my guilty, ruined, bankrupt self--the very thing that I have been trying by every means in my power to improve, has been completely and forever set aside--that God is not looking for any amendment in it--that He has condemned it and put it to death in the cross of His Son! What an answer is here to the monk, the ascetic, and the ritualist! Oh, that it were understood in all its emancipating power! This heavenly, this divine, this spiritual Christianity. Surely were it only known in its living power and reality, it would deliver the soul from the thousand and one forms of corrupt religion whereby the arch-enemy and deceiver is ruining the souls of untold millions. We may truly say that Satan's most successful effort against the truth of the gospel, against the Christianity of the New Testament, is seen in the fact of his leading unconverted people to take and apply to themselves ordinances of the Christian religion, and to profess many of its doctrines. In this way he blinds their eyes to their own true condition, as utterly ruined, guilty, and undone; and strikes a deadly blow at the pure gospel of Christ. The best piece that was ever put upon the "old garment" of man's ruined nature is the profession of Christianity; and, the better the piece, the worse the rent. See Mark ii. 21. Let us bend an attentive ear to the following weighty words of the greatest teacher and best exponent of true Christianity the world ever saw. "For _I_ through the law _am dead_ to the law, that I might live to God. _I am crucified_ with Christ; nevertheless I live; yet _not I_, but Christ liveth in me." Mark this, "I--not I--but Christ." The old "I"--"crucified." The new "I"--Christ. "And the life which I now live in the flesh, I live by the faith of the Son of God, who loved me and gave Himself for me" (Gal. ii. 19, 20).[II.] This, and nothing else, is Christianity. It is not "the old man," the first man, becoming religious, even though the religion be the profession of the doctrines, and the adopting of the ordinances of Christianity. No; it is the death and burial of the old man--the old I--and becoming a new man in Christ. Every true believer is a new man in Christ. He has passed clean out of the old creation-standing--the old estate of sin and death, guilt and condemnation; and he has passed into a new creation-standing--a new estate of life and righteousness in a risen and glorified Christ, the Head of the new creation, the last Adam.