whatever your hand findeth to do which you know to be obviously right. Do it under a sense of allegiance to God, in defect meanwhile of the more generous and angelic principle that you like the doing of it; and the transition pointed out in the text seems to be, that, as the fruit of your being subordinated to God's authority, will you come at length to be assimilated to Him in holiness.

V. 20. This twentieth verse seems an argument for our entire dedication to the new master, into whose service we have entered ourselves. It is somewhat like the consideration of making the past time of our life suffice, for having done the will of the flesh; and that it is now high time to spend the remainder of our life in doing the will of God. Aforetime you were wholly given over to the service of sin, and righteousness as emanating from the divine sovereignty had no dominion. You were free from righteousness, or wholly unrestrained by its obligations and its precepts. Now then be free from sin, resist the mandates of the old tyrant, and give yourself wholly up to the will of the new master-Let your obedience to Him now be as complete, as was your disregard of Him then; and an argument of mighty influence why the old service should be altogether given up and the new service be altogether followed, is urged upon them in the following verse, by the appeal which the apostle makes to their own memory, of what it was they gained in the employment of their first master.

V. 21. The apostle now proceeds to an argument, that could be better seized upon by those, who had to a certain degree moved onwards in Christianity-who could now speak to the superiority of the new service over the old; and that, not from the higher authority which had prescribed it, but from the more refined character and enjoyment of the service itself-by those whose moral taste had undergone a renovation, and could now look back with loathing upon the profligacies of their former career, while they cherished a love and a heartfelt preference for those beauties of holiness which adorned the new path whereon they had entered. You will see that, to appreciate such a comparison, marked a higher state of spiritual cultivation, than merely, at the bidding of God, to enter upon the task, which at the outset of their gospel profession He as their new master had put into their hand. The musical scholar, who, at the bidding of a parent or a preceptor, practises every day at the required hours upon an instrument, is not so ripe for a festival of harmony, as he, who, under the impulse of an ear all awake to its charms, revels as in his most kindred element, when spontaneously he sets him down to the performancenot as a task, but as an entertainment. And neither is that spiritual scholar so ripe for heaven, who, because of the infirmity of his flesh, needs to have his distaste for holiness overcome by the argument of God's authority-as he, who, in his love for holiness, now confirmed by the experience

he has had of its pleasant and peaceful ways, nauseates with his whole heart the opposite vice and the opposite impurity. It is right to lift the voice of an imperative requirement on the side of new obedience, at the commencement of every man's Christianity-just as it is right to exact from the musical scholar, a regular attendance on lessons which at the outset he may find to be wearisome. But as in the one case what is felt to be a weariness, often merges, with the cultivation of the taste and of the ear, into a willing and much-loved gratification -so, in the other case, what, from the strength of remaining carnality was laboured at as a bondage and called for the direct incitement of God's authoritative command to make head against the sluggishness of nature, yet, as the fruit of perseverance in the walk of holiness, does the will itself at length become holy; and there is a growth of affection for all its exercises and all its ways; and the doing of the allotted task by the outer man, calls forth and confirms a suitable taste of accordancy in the inner man; and, in proportion to the strength of the regard for what is sacred, must be the strength of the recoil from what is sinful and what is sensual. So that while Paul, in illustrating the transition of a gospel convert from sin unto righteousness, did, at the moment of that transition and because of the infirmity of his flesh, urge in terms as direct as if the legal economy were still in force, the obligation under which he lay, to exchange the service of one master for the

service of another-yet, with the disciple who long had practised and long had persevered at the bidden employment, could he use an argument of a higher and nobler and more generous character; and, triumphantly appealing to his own recollection, asked him to compare the vileness and wretchedness of his former days, with the preciousness of that heavenly charm which he now felt to be in all the works and all the ways of new obedience.

The apostle tells us here of the fruit of sin in time, and of its fruit in eternity. For its fruit in time he refers his disciples to their own experience; and, whether we advert to the licentious or the malignant passions of our nature, we shall find that even on this side of the grave it is a fruit of exceeding bitterness. That heart, which is either tossed with the agitations of unhallowed desire, or which is preyed upon by the remorse and shame and guilty terror that are attendant on its gratification that once serene bosom, from which its wonted peace, because its wonted sense of purity has departed that chamber of the thoughts which is no longer calm, because stormed out of all tranquillity and self-command by the power of a wild imagination-The unhappy owner of all this turbulence, who has given up the reins of government, and now maddens in the pursuit of his tumultuous joys along the career of lawless dissipation-let him speak for himself to the fruit of those things, of which he may well be ashamed. O does he not

feel, though still at a distance from the materialism of hell, that a hell of restlessness and agony has already taken up its inmost dwelling-place in his own soul; that there the whip of a secret tormentor has begun its inflictions; and, even now, the undying worm is consciously active and never ceases to corrode him! Or, if he be a stranger still to the fiercer tortures of the heart, will he not at least admit, that, as the fruit of guilty indulgence, a hell of darkness if not a hell of agony, has taken possession of it-that, at least, the whole of that beauteous morning light which gladdened his pure and peaceful childhood is utterly extinguishedthat all the vernal springs of approved and placid satisfaction are now dried up-and that, in the whole rapture and riot of his noisy companionship, there is nought that can so cheer his desolate spirit as in the happy years of his boyhood-nought that shines so sweetly upon him, as did the lustre of his pious and his early home.

Or, if, from the wretchedness of him who is the victim of his base and sordid propensities, you proceed to examine the wretchedness of him whom deceit is ever instigating against another's rights, or cruelty has steeled against all that is exquisite and all that is prolonged in another's sufferingsyou will find that here too, the heart which is the place of wickedness is also the place of woe; and that, whatever the amount of unhappiness may be of which he is the instrument to others, it may not equal the unhappiness which his own moral