"I will run

says David It is just

now the freeness of a grateful and confiding spirit -the alacrity of a willing obedience. in the way of thy commandments "when thou hast enlarged my heart." this enlargement that is opened up to the disciple, on his accepting of Christ, and so being delivered from the fears and the fetters of legality. The mountain of a before inextinguishable debt is now liquidated; and a discharge is given by which, from a peculiar skilfulness in the method of our salvation, the very justice of God, as well as His mercy, is guaranteed to the acceptance of the sinner; and he now has a comfort and an expectation in the service of that Being, before whom he had hitherto stood paralysed, as if in the hands of an unappeased and unappeasable creditor; and the holiness, which formerly he would have attempted in vain as his price or his purchase-money for that heaven the gate of which was shut against all his exertions, he now most cheerfully renders as his freewill offering and his preparation for that heaven whose gate is now open to receive him; nor can he look to the whole process and principle of his recalment to the favour of God, without seeing depicted therein the love which that God bears to righteousness, and the hatred which He bears to iniquity. The very contemplation from which he gathers peace to his breast, brings down upon it a purifying influence also. The same spectacle of Jesus Christ and Him crucified, that charms from the believer's heart the fears of guilt, tells him in most impressive terms of the evil of it: And that deed of amnesty, on which are inscribed the cha

racters of goodwill to the sinner, is so emblazoned with the vestiges of God's detestation for sin, and so ratified by a solemn expiation because of itthat the intelligent disciple cannot miss the conclusion, nor will he fail to proceed upon it, that this is the will of God even his sanctification.

I trust that even those of you who have no experience of this transition at all, and to whom I still speak as in a mystery, will at least admit, that, when a man comes practically and powerfully under the operation of these influences, he must feel another moral pulse, and breathe another moral atmosphere from before. It is the doctrine of the Bible, that without supernatural aid the transition cannot be effected—that, even for the establishment of that faith which is the primary and presiding element of this great renewing process, an agency must descend upon us from on high which nevertheless it is our duty to watch and to pray for; and that unless from the first to the last we feel our dependence upon the Spirit of God, we shall not be upheld in those habits and affections of sacredness, which constitute our meetness for the inheri tance that is above. But my purpose in introducing this remark, is to demonstrate how wide is the dissimilarity in the whole frame and forthgoings of a man's mind, after the accession of this influence from what they were before it-how certainly a new character, as well as a new condition, emerges from it: and, when you connect the change with that which the Bible reveals to us of the power from the upper sanctuary by which it has been effected, you will be at no loss to perceive on the

6

one hand, why converts to the faith of the gospel, as born of the Spirit are said to be in the Spirit; and, on the other, you will be at as little loss to perceive the meaning of the apostle's phrase, when we were in the flesh'-when we were what nature originally made us; and before that transition by believing, which introduced another relationship with God, and introduced us to another habit and another disposition in regard to Him.

The apostle tells us what took place both with him and with his disciples, at the time when they were in the flesh. Then did the motions of sins, which were by the law, work in their members to bring forth fruit unto death. We should like here to know in the first instance, what is meant by the phrase of sins which were by the law? Some understand such things as were declared by the law to be sinful-as if the apostle had said, 'then did certain affections which by the law were pronounced sins, work in our members to bring forth fruit unto death.' Others assign a still greater force to the law in this passage, as if the law had not only declared the affections in question to be sinful, but as if it was the law that had made them to be sinful. And indeed there is nothing hyperbolical in ascribing this function to the law-and that, on the principle that where there is no law there is no transgression. If a man break no rule he is no sinner-and if there was positively no rule to break, then sin were an impossibility. It is the law that characterises sin as sinful; that makes the affection to be sin which but for it would have been no sin at all, and that purely by forbidding it. So

that it is quite fair to understand the motions of sins which were by the law, to be not merely such motions or desires as the law had declared to be sinful, but also such motions and desires as the law had actually constituted sinful.

But admitting both these explanations as quite consistent the one with the other, and as alike applicable to the passage before us, there are others, who, additional to these, would ascribe to the law an influence of a still more active and efficient quality as if it not only rendered certain affections sinful which but for it could not have obtained any such character, but as if it called forth into being the very affections themselves. They would make the law, not merely a discoverer and an assertor of sin, but they would make it a provocative to sin; or an instrument for calling it into existence, as well as an instrument for detecting and exposing it. They think themselves warranted in this explanation by the text, "that the law entered that the offence might abound;" and still more by the text, that "the law wrought in me all manner of concupiscence ❞—so that these last interpreters, in explaining the phrase of the motions of sin which were by the law, would not object to the idea of the law having actually excited these motions, and being thus the efficient originator of the sins that proceeded from them.

Nor is this view of the matter so much at war with the real experience of our nature, as may at first be supposed. The law may irritate and inflame the evil propensities of the heart to greater violence. The yoke, which it lays on human cor

ruption, may cause that corruption to fester and tumultuate the more. The perverse inclination is just fretted to a stouter and more daring assertion of itself, by the thwarting resistance which it meets with; and you surely can conceive, nay, some of you may have found-how legal prohibitions, and remorseful visitations, and all the scruples of a remaining conscience and sense of rectitude in the bosom, which lie in the way of some vicious indulgence on which the appetite is set, may give the keener impulse to its demands, and make it more ungovernable than had there been no law. when once all the barriers of principle are levelled, you may well imagine-how, on the pressure and the prohibition being removed, the depraved tendency will burst out into freer and larger excesses; and the harder the struggle was ere the victory over a feeling of duty had been obtained, the prouder will be the rebel's subsequent defiance to all its suggestions, and the more fierce and lawless will be his abandonment.

And

Nay, I can figure how the existence and felt obligation of a law may, on minds of a more delicate cast, have somewhat of the same operation. It is not too subtile a remark, for there is substantial and experimental truth in it-that, if the imputation of guilt lie hard upon a man, and he overwhelmed therewith sink into shame and into despondency-in addition to losing his sense of character, he may lose the character itself. He will come down in reality to the level of the surrounding estimation; and you have only to envelope him in an atmosphere of disgrace, in order