through its senses and propensities, which are all good in themselves, and only evil when allowed to gain the ascendency over the moral and spiritual faculties, the body can bring even the mind into subjection to the law of the members, and turn the very instruments created by God for righteous and holy purposes into weapons of moral evil. Thus hunger may lead to gluttony, thirst to drunkenness, love to lust, speech to slander, and by this civil insurrection and war within man, the true sovereignty may be usurped by the mob of bodily passions. But it is a totally unauthorized and most pernicious error to infer that man is born naturally and wholly depraved, because he is connected for a time with this material organization, out of whose perversion these occasions to sin arise. The mind and the members were both pronounced "good" by the All-wise Creator, and it is only when the order of authority is reversed, and the law of the mind is subjugated to the law of the members, that we can call either mind or members evil. He then libels not only himself, but his Maker, who literally, and not in an impassioned and figurative sense, calls his nature totally depraved. Man can hardly sink so low, or so entirely divest himself of the spiritual attributes, that something good, some "moral remains," will not survive.

"E'en from the tomb the voice of Nature cries, E'en in our ashes live their wonted fires."

Chrysostom well remarks: "He does not say, Let not the flesh live,

Know ye not, that 16 his servants ye are

neither act, but, Let not sin reign. For he came not to abrogate human nature, but to rectify the will."

The

Alive from the dead. The Greeks and Romans, polished as they were by a splendid material and intellectual civilization, were spiritually dead in trespasses and sin, and even surpassed the untutored children of nature in their rank vices of sensuality. But the Christian believers had been brought to life from this moral death, and they were bound therefore to bring forth the fruits of such a life in all manner of virtues and graces. For sin shall not have, &c. promise is given, that sin would be even better subdued under grace, or the gracious influence of Christianity, than under a legal system like the Mosaic code, or, in general, any dispensation of law. For law appeals to only a part of man's nature, his will, conscience, understanding, and fears, but grace to the higher affections and aspirations likewise, which are far more availing and enduring. The fact, therefore, that they were under the gracious system of Christianity, with all its tender and affecting motives of Christ and him crucified, instead of relaxing their moral conduct, was even more effectual than the austere code of Moses to guard them against sin.

15, 16. The Apostle resumes the question of ver. 1, with a modification, though it is rather a new illustration than a new argument he gives in the following verses. The main idea of the first of the chapter was, that it was simply inconsistent and

impossisible that one who had died to his old sinful life should continue in it any longer. He organically cut off from such an inconsequence as well as immorality. The main idea of the last half of the chapter is that of service, slavery; an illustration well understood then, and, alas! too intelligible now. After stating the caviller's objection, and expressing his abhorrence of it, God forbid, he proceeds to remind them of the necessity of the servant rendering obedience to his master. The service we have chosen we must take the consequence of, for we cannot obey one master and obtain the rewards of another. We are paid in kind. Good is paid with good, and evil is paid with evil. — His servants ye are, &c. You must take the alternative of the condition you have adopted. God does not punish men arbitrarily, but according to the nature of the course they pursue. He has affixed by constant laws certain consequences to certain actions. He has coupled sin and death, and obedience and righteousness, by irreversible bonds. To be good is to be happy, i. e. to live; to be wicked is to be miserable, i. e. to die.

17. That ye were the servants of sin. The emphatic word is were. The matter for thanks was not in reality that they were, but that they were so no longer. A truer rendering therefore would be," But God be thanked,

No man

vants of somebody. There is no other alternative. Again, if you are the servants of one, you cannot be the servants of another. can serve two masters. Formerly you were under bondage to sin, and, of course, you were exempt from the service of righteousness, ver. 20. But having changed this service from one master to another, you are now the servants of righteousness, and are just as free from the service of sin now as you were from that of righteousness before, ver. 18. And, ver. 19, as in one case there was a progress from step to step, a piling up of sin on sin, and your faculties, by the momentum of habit and use, acquired greater and greater proneness to evil; so now, as the process is reversed, these same members and powers of your nature gain more and more aptitude for the new service, and go on from moral righteousness to spiritual holiness, from justification to sanctification.-I speak after the manner of men, &c.; i. e. I take illustrations from human society and the institution of slavery, with which you are familiar, in order that you may, not

withstanding your unspirituality, the better understand the unsearchable riches of Christ.

21–23. Having portrayed the different nature of the service of their former life and the service of Christ, and the utter inconsistency and impossibility, if they had become Christians, of their going back to wallow in the mire of heathenism again, or to accept the beggarly elements of a former dispensation, Paul now antithesizes the rewards of one career to those of the other, as a continuation of the same argument why they could not continue in sin. What fruit. The phrase is significant. Not by arbitrary rewards and punishments does the Moral Governor of the world mete out the opposite results of sin and goodness, but as natural consequences, as fruit, they grow up on the good tree or the evil. Virtue is paid in virtue, and vice in vice; or, in the words of the Talmudists, quoted by Tholuck, "a good action is the reward of a good action, as a wicked action is punished by a second." As has been said, the universe is so constructed that nothing can hurt us but ourselves; sin, or its occasions and temptations in our own heart and life. The end of those things is death. We need not cut down the glowing Apostle to the bold statement of either physical or spiritual death. Not thus can we interpret well. He

says these things are deadly, destructive; they plant diseases in the body, they plant stings in the conscience, and conjure up terrors in the future. The same remarks apply below to the sentence, "The wages of sin is death." Imagine the sinner a laborer, and the wages he earns are destructive of his health, his happiness, and his hopes. For every purpose of moral impression this indefiniteness of language is better than the most elaborate descriptions of punishment. The results of our lives on earth are too vast to be gathered up into any one form or phrase of words, unless it be some such broad ones as life and death. Fruit unto holiness. Paid in kind, as remarked above. Wages— gift. The sinner earns his own fate, works it out as if it were day-wages. But the service of virtue is disinterested. God wisely arranged it that we may love and serve him for his own glorious sake, and not for the loaves and fishes. When we seek the thing, the reward will take care of itself. But if we are thinking all the time of the reward, the act will be likely to be vitiated by self-reference. Not happiness, not virtue's reward, but virtue, is "our being's end and aim." And by Jesus and his Gospel has the gift of eternal life been communicated, and the knowledge and conditions of it made household words in the whole earth.

CHAPTER VII.

1-6. The Apostle continues the subject of a complete sanctification, or, in other words, of a perfected human being after the model of Jesus. His object in this section is to show that every scrap and fragment of obligation to the Law were annihilated. He addresses the Jews, who were acquainted with the Law, and shows them by a familiar illustration how entirely it had been superseded by the Gospel, and how perfectly free they were to become Christians without any longer continuing to be Jews. It was a matter requiring great delicacy and address to maintain the Divine legation of Moses and the original binding authority of his institutions, and at the same time to lead the Jews onward, who had been thus educated, and every fibre of whose intellectual and moral being was inwoven in the Law, and to open to their faith and admiration the greater beauties and glories of Christianity. In truth, the idea of the progressive nature of all religion, as well as of life in general, seems to be one of the hardest lessons for man to learn, whether under the Jewish or the Christian system. He becomes fossilized in ceremonials and creeds, and hears with reluctance the ceaseless command of God's providence, Go up higher.

1. As long as he liveth. The word he is not in the original, but is put in by the translators. The question is

whether the personal pronoun should be he, the man, or it, the Law, for the Greek will admit of either word. Commentators as usual are ranged on opposite sides of the question, but it is more consonant to the argument. Paul is made to say the very thing in the Common Version which he was trying to disprove. He wished to show that the Law was not living, that it was dead; that it could have no more rightful dominion over the Jews, because it had been superseded by that more perfect form of faith and worship of which it was the harbinger.

2, 3. He proceeds to enforce the idea of the abrogation of the Law in general by an instance of its particular cessation in the case of the marriage contract. A woman is under obligation to be faithful to her husband so long as he lives, but at his death she released from all such claims, and is at perfect liberty to marry a second husband, without the charge of adultery. 1 Cor. vii. 39. Thus final and utter is the dissolution of the Law of Moses by the entrance of the Gospel of Christ. The Law was dead, and all indebtedness to it had for ever ceased. It was a thing of the past, as much as the obligation legally of a woman to be bound to her husband after he had died. In regard to the many questions how St. Paul's rhetoric shall be justified, and how the several limbs of his comparison shall be matched with one another, we have nothing to say