But sinning is one thing and a sinful nature is another; and we see no evidence in Scripture that the latter is ever eradicated completely while we are in the body. If we could see ourselves with God's eye, we should doubtless discover sinfulness lying beneath our most joyful moments of unsinning conduct, and the stain of our old and fallen nature so discoloring our whitest actions as to convince us that we are not yet faultless in his presence. Only let us gladly emphasize this fact, that as we inherit from Adam a nature incapable of sinlessness, we inherit from Christ a nature incapable of sinfulness. Therefore, it is written: "Whosoever is born of God cannot sin, for his seed remaineth in him." It is not the nature of the new nature to sin; it is not the law of "the law of the Spirit of life" to transgress. For the new-born man to do evil is to transgress the law of his nature as before it was to obey it. In a word, before our regeneration we lived in sin and loved it; since our regeneration we may lapse into sin but we loathe it. 3. _The Spirit of Glory: Our Transfiguration_. "The Spirit of glory and of God resteth upon you," writes Peter (1 Peter 4: 14). Let us recall this apostle's habit of dividing the stages of redemption into these two, "the sufferings of Christ and the {119} glory that should follow," in which he seems to conceive of our Lord's mystical body, the church, as passing through and reproducing the twofold experience of its Head, in humiliation and in subsequent exaltation. Even in the time of her humiliation she has the Spirit of glory abiding on her, as the cloud of glory rested down upon the tabernacle in the wilderness during all the pilgrimage of the children of Israel. And is not Peter's saying the same as Paul's, in his picture of the suffering creation: "But ourselves also, which have the first-fruits of the Spirit, even we ourselves groan within ourselves, waiting for the adoption, to wit, the redemption of our body" (Rom. 8: 23). Not yet have we reached the consummation of our hope, at the "appearing of the glory of our great God and Saviour Jesus Christ" (Titus 2: 13, R. V.); but the Spirit, through whose inworking power this great change is to be wrought, already dwells in us, giving us by his present quickening the pledge and earnest of our final glory. And so we read in another Scripture: "But if the Spirit of him that raised up Jesus from the dead dwell in you, he that raised up Christ from the dead shall also quicken your mortal bodies by his Spirit that dwelleth in you" (Rom. 8: 11). It is not our dead bodies which are here spoken of as the objects of the Spirit's quickening, but our mortal bodies--bodies liable to death and doomed to death if the Lord {120} tarry, but not yet having experienced death. Hence the quickening referred to has to do rather with the vivifying of the living saints than the resurrection of the dead saints.