perversities have fermented in his own bosom. The man of deep and inscrutable design, who is an utter stranger to the simplicity and godly sincerity of the gospel-the man of thought and mystery and silence, and into the hiding-place of whose inaccessible heart the light of day never enters the man who ever ruminates and ponders and revolves, and has a secret chamber of plot and artifice in his own bosom which admits of no partnership with a single brother of the speciesSuch a one, it may be thought, diabolical though he be, will, in the triumphs of his wary and well-laid policy, have his own sources of diabolical satisfaction. But ere he reach his place in eternity, he too in time may have the foretaste of the misery that awaits him. There is already a hell in his own heart, that is replete with the worst sufferings of the hell of condemnation; and if through the deep disguises in which he lies entrenched from the eye of his fellow-men, we could see all the fears and all the forebodings that fluctuate within him, we should say of him, what is true of every son of wickedness, that, like the troubled sea, he cannot rest.

It seems inseparable from the constitution of every sentient creature, and who is at the same time endowed with moral faculties, that he cannot become wrong without at the same time becoming wretched. And what is the death that is the end of these things, but their natural and their fullgrown consummation? The fruit of sin in time,

when arrived at full and finished maturity, is just the fruit of sin through eternity. There may be fire-there may be a material lake of a material lake of vengeancethere may be the shootings of physical agony inflicted on the material frames of the damned by material instruments: But we believe that the chief elements of the torture there, will be moral elements that fierce and unhallowed desire that contempt and jealousy and hatred unquenchablethat rancour in every heart, and disdain in every countenance that the glare of fiendish malignity, and the outcry of mutual revilings, and the oaths of daring blasphemy, and the keen agony of conscious and convicted worthlessness-We believe that these will form the ingredients of that living lake, where the spirits of the accursed will be for ever inhaling an atmosphere of spiritual bitterness. And such is the natural course and consummation of iniquity upon earth. It is merely the sinner reaping what he has sown; and suffering the misery that is essentially entailed upon the character; and passing onwards, by a kind of necessary transition, from the growth and indulgence of vice here, to the constitutional result of it in wretchedness both here and hereafter. It makes no violent or desultory step, from sin in time to hell in eternity. The one emerges from the other, as does the fruit from the flower. It is simply that the sinner be filled with his own ways, and that he eat the fruit of his own devices. All that is necessary to constitute a hell, is to congregate the disobedient together, where,

in the language of the Psalmist, they are merely given up by God to their own hearts' lusts, and where they walk in their own counsels.

To conclude there are some we trust here present, who feel the force of the comparison between their past and their present habits; and who all open to the charms of the vast superiority which. lies in holiness, would, from the impulse of spiritual taste alone, make a most quick and disgustful recoil from all iniquity. But there may be others, who, instead of having accomplished the transition from darkness to light, are only at the turning point or are yet but meditating the transition, instead of having made it. They have not yet acquired that loathing for sin, and that love of sacrednesss, which would make them appreciate the contrast, which the apostle makes between the service of the old and the service of the new master. Then let us revert to them with the argument of the apostle, who spoke to his young converts as a man, and because of the infirmity of their flesh. If they are not yet in a condition for being roused to the performance of the latter service by the finer argument of taste, let us attempt to rouse them by the grosser argument of authority. The scholar is compelled to his hours of attendance for a musical task, and thus does he work himself into a musical taste. And know, ye men, who are still only at the place of breaking forth on the career of new obedience, that it is a career which must be entered on-that though it shall for the present be against

every taste and tendency of the inner man, your business is to constrain the outer man to a conformity with all the requirements of the gospel-that the life of a Christian is not utterly and throughout like a piece of well-tuned harmony, moving in soft and flowing accordance with a well-poised and smoothly-going mechanism. But there is a conflict, and a strenuousness, and a painful opposition between the delights of nature and the demands of the gospel, and a positive striving to enter in at the strait gate, and a violence in seizing upon the kingdom of heaven which is taken by force.

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LECTURE XXXVII.

ROMANS, vi, 22, 23.

"But now, being made free from sin, and become servants to God, ye have your fruit unto holiness, and the end everlasting life. For the wages of sin is death; but the gift of God is eternal life through Jesus Christ our Lord."

THE apostle, in contrasting the nature and enjoyment of the two services, passes from that of sin which is indeed a service of bitterness, to that of righteousness which is a service of delight here and of enduring bliss and glory hereafter. It is remarkable that he speaks of holiness as the fruit, and not as the principle of our service to God-as the effect which that service has upon the character, and not as the impelling moral power which led to the service. And this accords with the observations that we made on the various clauses of the nineteenth verse-where they who had yielded their members servants to iniquity, are represented as having thereby reaped fruit unto iniquity—or, in other words, as having, by their own sinful work, aggravated and confirmed the sinfulness of their own characters. And, on the other hand, they who had yielded their members servants to righteousness, are represented as having reaped thereby fruit unto holiness-or, in other words, they, by doing, and that on a direct feeling of obligation or at the bidding of a direct authority, that which was

VOL. II.