act of self-will, and therefore is as truly guilt as any other result or product of self-will,—­as spiritual blindness, or spiritual hardness, or any other of the qualities of sin.  Whatever springs from will, we are responsible for.  The drunkard’s bondage and powerlessness issues from his own inclination and self-indulgence, and therefore the bondage and impotence is no excuse for his vice.  Man’s inability to love God supremely results from his intense self-will and self-love; and therefore his impotence is a part and element of his sin, and not an excuse for it.

  “If weakness may excuse,
  What murderer, what traitor, parricide,
  Incestuous, sacrilegious, may not plead it? 
  All wickedness is weakness."[1]

The doctrine, then, which is taught in the text, is the truth that sin is spiritual slavery; and it is to the proof and illustration of this position that we invite attention.

The term “spiritual” is too often taken to mean unreal, fanciful, figurative.  For man is earthly in his views as well as in his feelings, and therefore regards visible and material things as the emphatic realities.  Hence he employs material objects as the ultimate standard, by which he measures the reality of all other things.  The natural man has more consciousness of his body, than he has of his soul; more sense of this world, than of the other.  Hence we find that the carnal man expresses his conception of spiritual things, by transferring to them, in a weak and secondary signification, words which he applies in a strong and vivid way only to material objects.  He speaks of the “joy” of the spirit, but it is not such a reality for him as is the “joy” of the body.  He speaks of the “pain” of the spirit, but it has not such a poignancy for him as that anguish which thrills through his muscles and nerves.  He knows that the “death” of the body is a terrible event, but transfers the word “death” to the spirit with a vague and feeble meaning, not realizing that the second death is more awful than the first, and is accompanied with a spiritual distress compared with which, the sharpest agony of material dissolution would be a relief.  He understands what is meant by the “life” of the body, but when he hears the “eternal life” of the spirit spoken of, or when he reads of it in the Bible, it is with the feeling that it cannot be so real and lifelike as that vital principle whose currents impart vigor and warmth to his bodily frame.  And yet, the life of the spirit is more intensely real than the life of the body is; for it has power to overrule and absorb it.  Spiritual life, when in full play, is bliss ineffable.  It translates man into the third heavens, where the fleshly life is lost sight of entirely, and the being, like St. Paul, does not know whether he is in the body or out of the body.