and subbued your wills-and so, causing you to love the way of holiness, has turned your duty into an enjoyment. It has done more than the surety who only liquidates the debt, but perhaps leaves you as thriftless and idle and improvident as before, for new debts and new difficulties. But it has acted like the surety, who not only pays all for you, but supplies you with the means of future independence; and teaches you the management for turning them to the best account; and watches over your proceedings with the assiduity and advices of a friend, whose presence ever delights instead of offending you; and charms you by his own example into the sobriety and industry and good conduct, which form the best guarantees for your prosperity in this world. Thus, we say, does the grace of the gospel not only disenthrall the soul of man from the bondage of guilt; but, enriching it with other desires and other faculties than before, causes it to prosper and to be in health—and to abound in those fruits of the Spirit against which there is no law.

Let me just urge then in conclusion, that you proceed on the inseparable alliance which the gospel has established, between your deliverance from the penalty of sin and your deliverance from its power -that you evidence the interest you have in the first of these privileges, by a life graced and exalted by the second of them-that you now break forth as emancipated creatures whose bonds have been loosed, and from whom the fetters of corruption have been struck off along with the fetters of condemnation. You may say, that it is preach

ing to the dead, to bid you move and bestir yourselves towards the path of holiness—but not if faith accompany the utterance, for in that case power and life will go along with it. Like the withered hand you will perform the gesture that is required of you at the hearing of our voice—if the Spirit of all grace lend His efficacy to the word that is spoken; and actuate you with that belief in the gospel record, which strengthens as well as saves, and which sanctifies us well as justifies.

163

LECTURE XXXV.

ROMANS, vi, 15-18.

What then? shall we sin, because we are not under the law, but under grace? God forbid. Know ye not, that to whom ye yield yourselves servants to obey, his servants ye are to whom ye obey; whether of sin unto death or of obedience unto righteousness? But God be thanked, that ye were the servants of sin, but ye have obeyed from the heart that form of doctrine which was delivered you. Being then made free from sin, ye became the servants of righteousness."

You will perceive that in the 15th verse, the apostle reiterates the objection that was made at the outset of the chapter, where it is said—“ What! shall we continue in sin that grace may abound?"-the same objection, but grounded on a distinct consideration, or on a consideration differently expressed at least in the 15th verse, where it is said, 'What then? shall we sin, because we are not under the law, but under grace? It strikes me that the apostle, when treating this question as put at the first, has in his eye the grace that pardons; and, in his reply, he urges the inconsistency of creatures, who for sin had been adjudged to die, but through the death of another had been recalled to life again, ever recurring in the habit of their practice to that which brought upon them so sore a condemnation. By the time he arrives at that point in the progress of his argument where we now are, he had asked them to resist the power sin, and to give themselves up unto the service of

of

God; and was encouraging them with the prospect of success in this new plan of life, on the assurance that this power of sin was not unconquerable, but that, instead of its prevailing over them, they should be enabled to prevail over it— because, instead of being now under the law, they were now under grace. And we have no doubt that there was here a reference, not to grace as it pardons, but to grace as it purifies. There is another passage in his writings, where he tells us what that circumstance is which denotes a man to be not under the law. "But if ye be led by the Spirit ye are not under the law.” To be taken under the leading of the Spirit is to be taken under grace-even that grace which paid the debt of our souls and is now upholding them in spiritual subsistence. What is the consequence of the Spirit's leading, or what is the fruit of it?—why that we are led to the preference and the practice of all those virtues which enter into the composition of true moral excellence, of which the apostle gives us the enumeration by such specific terms as love and peace and joy and gentleness and goodness and long-suffering and faith and meekness and temperance, against which, says he, there is no law. The grace which delivered us from the reckoning of the law because of our past delinquencies, delivers us also from the future reckonings of the law, by introducing us to such a character and such a conduct as even the law has nothing to allege against; and so the circumstance of being under grace, so far from leading us to sin, leads us just in the opposite direction-leads us to

that domain of righteousness which is not under the law, and that because there the law finds no occasion on which it might put forth its authority to condemn; and there its authority to issue orders is not called for, because it is in fact anticipated by the heaven-born affection which does not wait for its commands, by the heaven-born taste which delights in the doing of them.

Ver. 16. There may appear a sort of unmeaning and uncalled-for tautology in this verse-a something not very close or consequential, and which it is difficult to seize upon. The apostle had already asked them not to yield themselves unto the obedience of sin, but to yield themselves unto the obedience of God. If it were a real and effectual yielding of themselves to the obedience of God, an actual course of obedience to God would emerge from it. If it were but the semblance of thus yielding, or the putting forth of a warm but unsteadfast purpose which was not adhered to and not followed up-then would they still continue in the obedience of sin. Now, says the apostle, you are the servants of him whom you indeed obeynot the servants of him whom you only profess to obey. You may have engaged yourselves to one master-you may have gone through the form of yielding yourselves up unto him—you may perhaps have deluded yourselves into the imagination, that you have made good your surrender unto his will and unto his authority; but still, if, in the fact and in the real history, you obey another-you prove by this that you are indeed the servants of