dience, both to the body and the soul. The redemption of the Gospel delivers men from bad habits, destructive vices, which attack health and life, from the fear of death, which is its chief evil, and from sin, which disqualifies the soul for its full life and happiness hereafter. The mistake we often make in trying to understand passage like this, freely, popularly written, is that we cut too close, press the meaning of terms too far, and do not give enough scope and freedom of movement to a deeply moved and highly impassioned nature, pouring itself out in a mingled flood of arguments, illustrations, historical references, glancing from heaven to earth, and earth to heaven, to the past, to the future, to man, to God, to Adam, to Christ, to life, death, and futurity. All have sinned. All suffer the penalty, because all have committed the offence, and not merely because Adam sinned. Nothing appears in this passage of what schoolmen and theorists call original sin; it is actual, personal unrighteousness which is laid at every man's door.

13-17. This passage is an explanatory and parenthetical one, according to the common version, though Griesbach and Tischendorf incorporate it into the regular tenor of discourse. For until the law. I. e. sin existed not only after the Law was given, by which it was more fully brought to light, but it was found in the world from the beginning, though not imputed or charged so severely upon men who lived only under the

light of nature. Acts xvii. 30. Neander gives the following as the probable train of thought in ver. 13, 14, a very obscure passage: "Paul brings forward the objection that the sin of Adam had reigned in the world until Moses, although no positive law was in existence, and without law there could be no imputation of sin. He repels this objection by the fact that death still reigned even over thosewho had not sinned, like Adam, against a positive law. This fact is an objective evidence of imputation, and, as is evident from the preceding remarks, this imputation proves itself to be just in the conscience, which exhibits men as transgressors of an undeniable divine law.". The figure of him that was to come. second Adam. In what respects the first Adam was a type or figure of the second is unfolded by the Apostle in the following passage, to the end of the chapter.

I. e. the

15. Some critics make the first clause of this and of the 16th verse interrogative instead of affirmative. Paul discriminates the difference between the offence of the first and the gift of the second Adam. While, by the sin of the first, the consequences of death passed upon many, i. e. all, so by the second did the gracious gift of God in life and light and love abound unto many, i. e. all. The remedy provided was designed to be as extensive as the malady. The "many" in one case is as broad a term as the "many" in the other. We may dwell upon single terms, and

the obedience of the other. If all men are condemned by the offence of one, the same all are justified by the righteousness of the other. These universal terms, so frequently repeated and so variously diversified, cannot be reconciled to the limitation of the blessings of the Gospel to the elect alone, or to a part only of the human race."

21. Sin and grace are represented as two monarchs disputing the throne of the world, and reigning over their respective empires of death and life. But, as if to guard against misapprehension both here and elsewhere, righteousness is constantly introduced as the result of grace, and as the condition of eternal life. Instead of a

good life and character being undervalued by the Apostle in these passages as of little worth, they are put in the foreground as the object of grace, and the fruit of the Gospel, and the preliminary to that eternal life by our Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ.

Judaism still lingers in the Christian churches. The Epistles of Paul are needed to emancipate us, and lead us into the fulness and freedom of the knowledge of Christ.

CHAPTER VI.

The doctrine of justification has been hitherto discussed, but from this point in the Epistle the doctrine of sanctification is taken up. These words, justification and sanctification, are old theological terms, and they convey little meaning now to many.

Let us try to explain them. The Jews claimed the privileges of the Gospel exclusively to themselves, but Paul opens the door to the Gentiles as also embraced in the plan of the grace of God. Neither Jew nor Gentile had any merits or claims to plead; both were sinners before God, and he admitted them to the blessings of his love freely, without money and without price. He put them, in other words, in the way of becoming, of being made just, holy, good. The Jews were taken as they were, and the Gentiles were taken as they were; and the Jews did not have to become Gentiles, nor the Gentiles Jews, in order to become the disciples of Christ. They were both put in the way, entered in the school, the Church, the fold of Christ, freely, by the pure and loving and compassionate grace and favor of God. The sole condition of their entrance was faith, confidence; for in order to get any good from the Gospel, they must come to it in a humble, believing, prepared state of mind, conscious of sin, conscious of spiritual need, and relying fully upon Christ as able to supply that need to the utmost. It then depended subsequently upon the personal fidelity of the disciple how far he was benefited, purified, quickened, and prospered in the spiritual life, after thus by an act of free and unpurchased love and grace being put in the way of God's righteousness, i. e. in God's method and culture for making righteous, holy, and good men. The question arose,

and Paul proceeds to discuss it, whether so generous and gracious a system, relaxing the severity of the old Hebrew law, would not be abused, and the Gospel, free to Jew or Gentile, asking only faith or trust as its elementary condition, disdaining no sinner, however flagrant, be made a system of license, and not a culture of holiness. After being placed by the liberal offers of Christianity on the basis of this ample justification, the sins of neither Jews nor Gentiles being any more remembered against them, and only faith being demanded for the present and fidelity for the future, would the system work well? would they not relapse, would they not be ready to yield to sin because God had provided such ample means to cancel and destroy it, and so mercifully increased his blessings when men had most aggravated their transgressions? Hitherto the Apostle had applied himself to the discussion of the establishment and conditions of the Gospel method of righteousness and holiness; he now turns to its practical reception and operation, the philosophy of its motives and influences, and how it would bear upon human nature to sanctify it. In other words, he now changes the topic from justification to sanctification.

1, 2. The argument is further developed. The objection would naturally arise, that, if no virtue of ours could establish any claim to God's favor on the ground of merit, but that his blessings must still descend to us on the score of his free love and grace, the Apostle was confounding all moral distinctions. If, as men became more corrupt, the mercy of God had been made more apparent, should we not continue and increase in sin,

to call down more and more of such glorious gifts of the Spirit? The answer, in one word, is, No; it would be inconsistent. — God forbid. Let it not be. — Dead to sin, live, &c. The two courses are as opposite as any thing can be; one is as death, and the other as life. If we are really dead, we certainly cannot live. So the man of sin is slain once for all. Paul may be here regarded not so much as answering existing as anticipated objections which his large and sympathetic moral imagination, not to say prophetic power, foresaw. Antinomianism was the name later given to this exaggeration of grace to the discredit of practical obedience and good works.

3-7. The simple thought here is, that the disciples of Christ by baptism, which was the sign of their allegiance to their Master, had renounced their former wicked life, and could not therefore consistently resume it. As has been said, if Christ died for sin, they died to sin. But the mind of Paul, rich in comparison and analogy, was not content with the simple thought. He overflows; he pours out a flood of contrasts, resemblances, relations to the central idea, fragmentary and incomplete, but suggestive and instinct with power and life. With what a master's hand does he carve out new forms and images of truth, and create new spheres of contemplation! We are apt to make so much of the inspiration of Paul that we are blind to his sublime genius, one of the greatest in every faculty that was ever enshrined in mortal clay.

Baptized into Jesus Christ. So was it said of the Israelites that they were baptized into Moses in the cloud and

in the sea. 1 Cor. x. 2. This mode of expression means that they took upon themselves the profession of a faith or religion by such a rite as baptism, or figuratively by whatever outward sign. Matt. xxviii. 19. To be baptized into Christ meant the same as to be baptized into the name of the Father, Son, and Holy Ghost. We get a clew to several facts here. 1. Baptism was a perpetuated Christian rite. 2. Baptism was a token of Christ's death, as well as the Supper. 3. Baptism would seem to have been performed by affusion or immersion; though, from the silence of the Scriptures on the subject as to the definite mode, we learn that that mode was not essential, else it would have been described. The silence as well as the speech of the Scriptures is significant. The somewhat circuitous path of the Apostle's association of ideas seems to be first, in ver. 2, of the Christian having died to sin, then, ver. 3, this death to sin having been symbolized by baptism into the great vital fact of the Gospel, the death of Christ; from death, by a natural association, he passes, ver. 4, to the resurrection from death, verified bodily in Christ, and to be verified spiritually in each believer; in ver. 5, he clinches the connection of ideas between baptism and burial, death and resurrection, by reiterating it in more direct terms; and, ver. 6, is led, in speaking of Christ's death, to recall what kind of a death it was, crucifixion,

and that, as his body was crucified, so should our old man, our body of sin, perish, and then we should be emancipated from the service of sin; for he who is dead, or that which is dead, cannot sin. Thus this oblique and somewhat zigzag chain-work of ideas conducts us to the same conclusion as above, that, as the man of sin had been slain once for all, he could not by any possibility rise again to do mischief. It was simply irrational and impossible, therefore, for a Christian to talk of continuing in that to which he had died.

7-11. An amplification of the same thought of the inconsistency of a Christian voluntarily continuing in sin. As the Apostle had showed on the negative side of death the impossibility of living any longer by choice in sin, so now he shows the same impossibility on the positive side of life.

Dead to sin. They could not abide in it or return to it any more; now much more, being alive to righteousness, they could not relapse. They have had therefore two pledges to the faithfulness of discipleship,death to sin and life to Christ. They were as insensible to sin as the dead are to an object, and they were as conscious of Christ as if he were an integral part of their being, or section of their life.

7, 8. There are two conclusions to the proposition in ver. 6, that "the old man" is crucified; one is, that he who is thus dead is "freed," literally