=No; put on,= clothe and arm yourselves with, =the Lord Jesus Christ,= Himself the living sum and true meaning of all that can arm the soul; =and for the flesh take no forethought lust-ward.= As if, in euphemism, he would say, "Take all possible _forethought against_ the life of self (σάρξ), with its lustful, self-wilful gravitation away from God. And let that forethought be, to arm yourselves, as if never armed before, with Christ." How solemnly explicit he is, how plain-spoken, about the temptations of the Roman Christian's life! The men who were capable of the appeals and revelations of the first eight chapters yet needed to be told not to drink to intoxication, not to go near the house of ill-fame, not to quarrel, not to grudge. But every modern missionary in heathendom will tell us that the like stern plainness is needed now among the new-converted faithful. And is it not needed among those who have professed the Pauline faith much longer, in the congregations of our older Christendom? It remains for our time, as truly as ever, a fact of religious life--this necessity to press it home upon the religious, _as_ the religious, that they are called to a practical and detailed holiness; and that they are never to ignore the possibility of even the worst falls. So mysteriously can the subtle "flesh," in the believing receiver of the Gospel, becloud or distort the holy import of the thing received. So fatally easy is it "to corrupt the best into the worst," using the very depth and richness of spiritual truth as if it could be a substitute for patient practice, instead of its mighty stimulus.