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here admitted to the number of His children through the faith which is in Christ, and have the family likeness imparted to them. Then it is that you pass from the oldness of the letter to the newness of the Spirit-when, instead of toiling at the observations of virtue for a sordid reward distinct and separate from virtue itself, you are prompted to the observations of virtue by the spontaneous love which you bear to it. This alone is true moral excellence, purified of all that taint of selfishness by which it were otherwise debased and vitiated; and it is only when transformed into this, that you are formed again after the image of God in righteousness and in true holiness

254

LECTURE XL.

ROMANS, vii, 7—13.

"What shall we say then? Is the law sin? God forbid. Nay, I had not known sin but by the law: for I had not known lust, except the law had said, Thou shalt not covet. But sin, taking occasion by the commandment, wrought in me all manner of concupiscence. For without the law sin was dead.

For I was

alive without the law once: but when the commandment came, sin revived, and I died. And the commandment, which was ordained to life, I found to be unto death. For sin, taking occasion by the commandment, deceived me, and by it slew me. Wherefore the law is holy, and the commandment holy, and just, and good. Was then that which is good made death unto me? God forbid. But sin, that it might appear sin, working death in me by that which is good; that sin by the commandment might become exceeding sinful."

THE apostle had before affirmed as much, as that it was the law which constituted that to be sinful, that without the law could have had no such character ascribed to it-nay perhaps, that even the law called forth into living energy and operation, certain sinful affections, which, but for it acting as a provocative, might have lain within us in a state of latent and of unobserved dormancy. And he seems to feel in this verse, as if this might, in the apprehension of his readers, attach the same sort of odiousness to the law that is attached to sin itself. This charge against the law, he repels with the utmost vehemence and decision, and that sort of readiness which carries somewhat the expression of indignancy along with it. And the first consideration

that he calls to his aid is, that the law acted as a

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discoverer of sin. He had not known sin but by the law; and he had not known lust, or as some would understand this clause, he had not known the sinfulness of lust, or he had not known lust to be sinful, except the law had said thou shalt not covet.' It is no impeachment against the evenness of a ruler, that, by the application of it to any material surface, you can discover all that is crooked or unequal thereupon. On the contrary its very power of doing so proves how straight and unerring it is in itself; and the more minute the deviations are which it can manifest to the eye of the observer, the greater is the evidence that is afforded to the perfection of the instrument that you are using. The light of day may reveal a place of impurity, or a soil in the colouring of the object that you contemplate, which could not be recognised under the shade of midnight—nor yet in the duskiness of approaching even. Yet who would ever think on that account, of ascribing to the beautiful element of light, any of that pollution or deformity, which the light has brought forth to observation? The character of one thing may come more impressively home to our discernment, by its contrast with the character of another thing; and the stronger the contrast is between the two, the more intense may our perception become of the distinct and appropriate character of each of them. But it were indeed very strange, if the dissimilarity of these two things, should be the circumstance that led us to confound them; or if when because placed beside each other, the one became more palpably an object of disgust than if viewed sepa

rately the other should not on that very account, become more palpably and more powerfully the object of our admiration. When one man stands before you in the full lustre and loveliness of moral worth, and another loathsome in all the impurities of vice and wickedness-the very presence of the first, may generate in the heart of the observer, a keener sensation of repugnancy towards the second; and this not surely because they have any thing in common, but because they have every thing in wide and glaring opposition. It were indeed a most perverse inference to draw, from the fact of virtue having shed an aspect of greater hatefulness on the vice that is contiguous to it— that therefore it must gather upon itself, the same hue and the same hatefulness which it has imparted to the other. This were altogether reversing the property of a foil, which is certainly not to obscure but to heighten the opposite excellence. And the same of sin and of the law. The law is the ruler which marks and exposes the crookedness of sin-not because crooked itself, but because precisely and purely rectilinear. And it is the light which reveals the blackness and the darkness of sin-not because these are its own properties, but because of its clear and lucid transparency. And it is the bright exemplar of virtue, which rebukes and vilifies all the wickedness that it looks upon,not surely because of any vileness imputable to it; but because of the force wherewith it causes this imputation to descend, from the elevation of its own unclouded purity, on the dross and the degradation and the tarnish by which it is surrounded. So that

to the question, 'Is the law therefore sin because it makes sin known,'-the answer is No. It makes sin known, not because of any participation at all in its character, but because of its strong and total dissimilarity.

Ver. 8. But from the first clause of this verse it would appear, that the law does more than make the deformity more noticeable and more odious than before. It is even the occasion of aggravating that deformity, by making sin more actively rebellious, and causing it to be the more foul and more abundant in its deeds of atrocity. There can be no doubt of the fact, that the law of God does not cure what the apostle here calls the concupiscence of men, or in other words the desire of man's heart towards any forbidden indulgence; and this desire not being cured by the law, is just thereby heated and exasperated the more. The very remorse that follows in the train of any violation, is of itself a constant feeder of the mind with such suggestions and images, as serve to renew the temptation to what is evil. It is ever bringing the thoughts into contact with such objects as before overcame the purposes of the inner man, and may again overcome them; and the very consciousness of having broken a law, by perpetually adhering to the heart and pervading it with the conviction of sin, is just as perpetually operating on the heart with the excitements of sin. The man who does what is morally wrong, and thinks no more of it, may never repeat the transgression till its outward influences have again come about him, after it may be, the interval of many days or months, and prevailed over him as

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