that other. He who sins is the servant of sin; and the effect of that service is death. He who obeys is the servant of obedience; and the effect of that service is personal righteousness, or personal meetness for the realms of life everlasting. You may have made a dedication of yourselves unto one of these masters; but you are the servants of the other master, if him you actually serve. And perhaps the best way of seizing on the sense of the apostle in this verse, is just to substitute whomsoever for whom in the first clause of it, when the whole would run thus: 'Know ye not that to whomsoever ye yield yourselves servants to obey, his servants ye are whom ye do actually obey, whether of sin unto death or of obedience unto righteousness?" I have already told I have already told you of your release from condemnation by the death of Christ; and I have told you how monstrously out of all proper character it were, that, after readmittance into the bosom of that accepted family from which sin and sin alone had exiled you, you should again recur to the service of sin; and, under the impression of this sentiment, I have bidden you yield yourselves up unto the service of God. And, to encourage you the more, I have proclaimed in your hearing the helps and the facilities which grace hath provided, for speeding you onward in the accomplishment of this service; and when, after all this, you ask me shall I sin then because of this grace-I answer, No. If you do so, it will prove that the yielding not unto sin but unto God, to which I have just enjoined you, has in fact been no yielding at all-that you have made perhaps a

form of dedication; but it is by your after doings, and by these alone, that we are to estimate the truth and the power of it. The grace which you

allege, as the plea of exemption from God's service, is the very argument on which I found my expectation, that the path of His service is the very place on which I shall now be sure to meet you for it is this grace which gives the power. There would be no wanting of it to substantiate your dedication, if the dedication itself were a heartily sound and sincere one. For a man to say, shall I sin because I am under grace?—is in every way as preposterous, as it were for a sick servant that had long been disabled from work but was now recovered, to say, shall I spend my time in idleness or mischief, now that I have gotten health for the labours of my employment? Such a use of his newly-gotten health, would prove that he had not honestly engaged for the interests of that master, whose servant he professes himself to be; and just so of the application to which it is proposed that grace, that mighty restorer of health to the soul, shall be turned-if you are not actually in the service of God but of sin, it proves that you have not honestly yielded yourselves unto God.

Ver. 17, 18. Thus the question, Whose servants are ye, resolves itself into a matter of fact; and is decided, not by the circumstance of your having made a dedication of yourselves unto God, but by the way in which this is followed up by the doings of obedience. Whosoever he may be to whom you profess that you are servants, you are the real

servants of him whom you obey; and the apostle, on looking to his disciples, pronounces them by this test to have become the servants of righteousness. He knows what they were in time past, and he compares it with what they are now. They were the servants of sin-they are now the servants of righteousness. They not only made a show of yielding themselves up in obedience unto this new master; but they make him to be indeed their master, by their in deed and in truth obeying him. And he not only affirms this change of service on the part of his disciples; but he assigns the cause of it. They obeyed from the heart. There might have been an apparent surrender, but which the inner man did not go along with. There might

have been the form of a yielding; but some secret reservations, some tacit compromise of which perhaps the man was scarcely if at all conscious, some latent duplicity, that marred the deed, and brought a flaw unto it by which it was invalidated. There may have been something like a prostration of the soul, to the new principle that now claims an ascendancy over it; but there must have been a failing or drawback somewhere. All had not been sound at the core-some want of perfect cordiality about it, that explains why there should have been the semblance of a yielding unto one master, but the actual service of another. Now God be thanked, says the apostle, this is not the way with you. I look at your fruit, and I find it the fruit of holiness. I look at your life, and I find it to be the life of the servants of God. I compare you now with what I know you to have been formerly;

and I find such a practical change as convinces me, that, whereas sin was formerly your master, righteousness is now your master in deed and in truth. And the account he gives of this is, that the yielding which they made of themselves was a sincere and honest yielding. The great master act of obedience, which they rendered at that time, was obedience from the heart; and thus it turned out, that what was truly and singly transacted there, sent forth an impulse of power upon their habits and their history.

form of doctrine.

But what is it that they are said here to obey from the heart? It is called in our translation the Now we know that the term doctrine in the original may signify the thing taught, or it may signify the process of teaching. In the last sense it is synonymous with instruction; and instruction, or a process of it, may embrace many items, and may consist of several distinct parts, and be variegated with lessons of diverse sort-to obey which from the heart, is just to take them all in with the simplicity and good faith, in which a child reads, and believingly reads, the exercises of its task-book. And this view of the matter is very much confirmed, by the import of the Greek word corresponding to form in our English translation. It is the same with a mould, that impresses its own precise shape however formed, and conveys its own precise devices however multiplied, to the soft and yielding substance whereunto it is applied. And it is further remarkable, that it would be still more accordant with the original-if, instead of its being said that they

obeyed from the heart the form of doctrine which had been delivered to them, it had been rendered, that they obeyed from the heart the mould or model of doctrine, into which they had been delivered. The image seems taken from the practice of casting liquified metal into a mould; and whereby the cast and the mould are made the accurate counterparts of each other. Christian truth, in its various parts and various prominences, is likened unto a mould -into which the heart or soul of man is cast, that it may come out a precise transcript of that which has been applied to it. Did the melted lead only touch the mould at one point, it would not receive the shape that was designed to be impressed upon it or if the surface of the one adhered to the surface of the other only throughout a certain extent, and not at all the parts, neither yet would there be an accurate similitude between the copy and the model. It is by the closeness and the contact of the two all over, and by the yielding of the one softened throughout for the whole impression of the other, that the one takes on the very shape and the very lineaments which it is the purpose of the other to convey.

And such ought to be the impression, which the heart of man receives from the word of God. It should be obedient to every touch, and yield itself to every character that is graven thereupon. It should feel the impression, not from one of its truths only, but from all of them—else, like the cast which is in contact with the mould but at a single point, it will shake and fluctuate, and be altogether wanting in settled conformity to that