We shall all agree, all of us at least who have thought at all about right and wrong, and tried to do right and avoid wrong--that there goes on in us, at times, a strange struggle. We wish to do a right thing, and at the very same time long to do a wrong one. We are pulled, as it were, two different ways by two different feelings, feel as if we were two men at once, a better man and a worse man struggling for the mastery. One may conquer, or the other. We may be like the confirmed drunkard who cannot help draining off his liquor, though he knows that it is going to kill him; or we may be like the man who conquers his love for drink, and puts the liquor away, because he knows that he ought not to take it. We know too well, many of us, how painful this inward struggle is, between our better selves, and our worse selves. How discontented with ourselves it makes us, how ashamed of ourselves, how angry with ourselves. We all understand too well--or ought to understand, St. Paul's words: How often the good which he wished to do, he did not do, but the evil which he did not wish to do, he did. How he delighted in the law of God in his inward man; but he found another law in him, in his body, warring against the law of his mind--that is his conscience and reason, and making a slave of him till he was ready at times to cry, "Oh wretched man that I am, who shall deliver me from the body of this death?" We can understand too, surely the famous parable of Plato, the greatest of heathen philosophers, who says, that the soul of man is like a chariot, guided by a man's will, but drawn by two horses. The one horse he says is white, beautiful and noble, well-broken and winged, too, always trying to rise and fly upward with the chariot toward heaven. But the other horse is black, evil, and unmanageable, always trying to rush downward, and drag the chariot and the driver into hell. Ah my friends, that is but too true a picture of most of us, and God grant that in our souls the better horse may win, that our nobler and purer desires may lift us up, and leave behind those lower and fouler desires which try to drag us down. But to drag us down whither? To hell at last, says Plato the heathen. To destruction and death in the meanwhile, says St. Paul. Now in the text St. Paul explains this struggle--this continual war which goes on within us. He says that there are two parts in us--the flesh and the spirit--and that the flesh lusts, that is, longs and struggles to have its own way against the spirit, and the spirit against the flesh. First, there is a flesh in us--that is, a carnal animal nature. Of that there can be no doubt: we are animals, we come into the world as animals do--eat, drink, sleep as they do--have the same passions as they have--and our carnal mortal bodies die at last, exactly as the animals die.