Sin and Grace. ROMANS Vii. 24, 25. "O wretched man that I am! who shall deliver me from the body of this death? I thank God through Jesus Christ our Lord." It is related of a bloody tyrant in ancient times, or it was the fiction of the poets to describe the excess of tyranny, that it was his frequent and horrible pleasure to bind the living to the dead; to condemn his lingering victims to endure for days and nights the cold embrace and loathsome touch of some swollen and rotten carcase, which they themselves were ere long to resemble, and with whose wretched dust their own was to moulder away. Such may be thought the bitterest dregs of human misery: yet hardly inferior, perhaps, to the reasonable soul of man, is the bondage and burthen of that mass of fleshly appetites, whose earthly bonds restrain its every nobler aspiration; whose increasing corruptions pollute, while they destroy; whose propensities tend downwards to their native clay; and whose heritage are the grave and hell!' Nor must this hideous picture be regarded as the creature of imagination; nor is it of his own case only that St. Paul is speaking in Romans vii. 24, 25: though he, like other men, had felt the bondage which he mourns, and, happier than many men, had been greatly and gloriously rescued. It is a complaint in which every man must sympathise who has examined seriously his own heart and conscience; who has ever sought to forsake a single sinful practice, or attempted to cleanse his soul from the stain of a single unholy desire. Wickedness is often called blindness, and, as it should seem at first, with sufficient reason; since a course of wickedness is so utterly contrary to the visible interest of man, that none but the blind, it might be thought, would court their ruin. But if wickedness proceeded from blindness only, should we so often find, as we are unhappily doomed to do, that 'they who have eaten most largely of the tree of knowledge, are often furthest removed from the tree of life?' and that they who, of all men, best know their duty and interest, are often of all others most backward to follow either? The profligate whose vices are dragging him to an early grave, will tell you, perhaps with tears, that he knows, but cannot escape his danger; and many a man of lofty spirit and lofty understanding has mourned in secret over those pursuits by which his outward attention was engrossed. The inquiry would be too long here, to trace to its source that mighty strife between good and evil which is as old as all created things; in which the angels first, and afterwards our parents fell; and which, crushed as the serpent's head has been by Christ, continues still, and, till the final triumph of our Redeemer, must continue, to shake with its convulsive struggles the pillars of the universe. It is enough for us to know that we are by nature sick unto death, but that we have a great Physician at hand to heal us. It is sufficient for us to recollect that we must not complain of evils for which a remedy is provided; and that the apostle himself, who would seem to plunge us in despair by the picture which he draws of our natural condition, bursts forth immediately after into a noble exclamation of thankfulness to that God who hath delivered us, through Jesus Christ our Lord. There are two points in this great deliverance, this dreadful ransom which the Son of God has paid for our souls by his own dying agonies, which, according to St. Paul's argument, could not be supplied by any human code of morality, nor even by the Jewish law itself, and the commandments given from Mount Sinai. The points are-pardon and grace; pardon for past offences, grace to enable us to lead new lives, and to make us less unworthy inhabitants of that heaven whither Christ is gone before. The one restores us to the same degree of favour with God which our nature possessed before its fall; the other supports us against those temptations under which we must else, of necessity, again have fallen: and thus, by the Christian covenant, are boasting and despair alike excluded; boasting by the sense of our natural want of means to please the Most High, and despair by the knowledge that the Most High himself is on our side, and that, if we fall not away from him, we may in security look on the assaults of our spiritual and fleshly enemies. From what has been said, the following practical conclusions may be drawn. First, since our condition is by nature so perilous-since our passions are so strong, and our flesh so frail and prone to evil; what constant vigilance do those passions |