OF SPIRITUAL MINDEDNESS. 371 Christ Jesus.' v. 17. This is not the life here intend- ed, for this life depends solely on the sovereign grace of God by Jesus Christ, and the imputation of his righteousness to us, unto pardon, right to life and sal- vation. (2.) There is a life of sanctification. As life, in the foregoing sense, is opposed to death spiritual, as to the guilt of it, and the condemnatory sentence of death wherewith it was accompanied; so in this it is opposed to it, as to its internal power on, and effica- cy in, the soul, to keep it under an impotency to all acts of spiritual life, yea, an enmity against them. This is that life wherewith we are quickened by Christ Jesus, when before we were dead in trespasses and sins, Eph. ii. 1, 5. Of this life the apostle treats di- rectly in this place ; for having, in the first four verses of the chapter, declared the life of justification, in the nature and causes ofit ; in the following he treats of death spiritual in sin, with the life of sanctifi- cation, whereby we are freed from it. And to be spiritually minded in this life in a double sense. (1.) In that it is the principal effect and fruit of that life. The life itself consists in the infusion and communication of a principle ; that is, of faith and obedience to all the faculties and powers of onr soul, enabling us to live to God. To be spiritually minded, which is a grace whereto many duties concur, and that not only as to the actings of all grace in them, but as to the degreesof their exercise, cannot be this life formally ; but it is that wherein the power of this principle of life, in the first and chiefest place, puts forth itself. All actings of grace, all duties of obedi- ence, internal and external, proceed from this spring
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