It means also struggle and hardship. It means truceless war against the spirit of selfishness, against everything that tends to drag us down, against the law of sin in our own members. It means a truceless war against low ideals and tolerated evils in the world about us. It means soldiership in the eternal crusade of Christ against whatsoever things are false and dishonest and unjust and foul and ugly and of evil report.
It is an ideal which, considered in isolation from the Christian Gospel of redemption and the power of the Holy Spirit, could only terrify and daunt a man who had a spark of honesty in his composition: and for this reason the mass of men refuses to take it seriously. It is an ideal which, in the case of all who do take it seriously, convinces them of sin.
Nevertheless to lower the ideal, to abate one jot of its severity, to compromise, on the score of human weakness, though it were but in a single particular, the flawless perfection of its standard, were to prove false to all that is highest within us, and traitor to the cause of Christ.
"Never, O Christ—so stay me from relenting—Shall there be truce betwixt my flesh and soul."
CHAPTER II
THE WAY OF THE WORLD
The three traditional enemies of the Christian life are symbolized under the headings of the World, the Flesh, and the Devil, and the classification has a certain convenience. The "World" stands in this connexion for human society in so far as it is organized apart from Christ. It is obvious that "the way of the world," as represented by the general outlook of conventional society, is in many respects in manifest conflict with the principles of the Gospel. The existing social order is the product of a compromise between inherited influences and standards which are in a certain sense broadly Christian, and the natural man's instinctive selfishness in matters both individual and social. The conflict against the spirit of worldliness which should be one of the marks of a genuine Christian life is beset by peculiar difficulties, precisely because in a society which is in some respects partially Christian the issues are confused. Public opinion indubitably tolerates many things which should not be tolerated, and condones others which should not be condoned. But public opinion approves much that is good, and does lip-service to a variety of Christian ideals, even while reserving the reality of its devotion for the worship of success and material comfort.
Perhaps it may be said that the most fundamental characteristic of essentially "worldly" opinion is absence of idealism. Worldliness is the principle of contentment with things as they are. Against worldliness, so defined, the Christian is committed to a conflict all along the line, since even in those regions of life and conduct in which the standards recognized by the world are right and good so far as they go, "the good is the enemy of the best." To rest content at any point with what has already been attained is fatal to all spiritual advance. It is, in effect, the death of the soul.
Mr. William Temple has remarked that in the conflict of Christians against the Devil and the Flesh the public opinion of the Church, as visibly organized, is on their side, but that in their conflict with the World it is decidedly against them. That is an over-statement, but it conveys a truth. Undoubtedly the Church has made compromises with the World, a fact which arises partly as the result of the inclusion within her fold of a large proportion of merely nominal members whose Christianity is no more than an inherited or conventional tradition. A further point of importance is this. Two thousand years is not a long period in relation to the scale of the world's history as a whole, and Christianity is still a comparatively young religion. The problem of worldliness is mainly a problem of the relation of the Church to the social order; and there are reasons why it was natural that the working out of the Christian ideal of conduct should first have been developed in relation to the affairs of private and domestic life.
Christians in the early days were a "little flock," surrounded by a society whose standards and conventions and beliefs were frankly pagan and hostile. So long as these conditions obtained the issues were plain: the contrast in ideals between Church and World stood out sharp and clear. The world, it was held, was ready to perish, and destined at no distant date to do so. "The whole world," writes S. John, "lieth in wickedness." The Church stood apart as the spiritual brotherhood of GOD'S elect who were called to assist at the obsequies of a world which was in process of passing away. "The world passeth away, and the lust thereof: but he that doeth the will of GOD abideth for ever."