pleasant.  The sinful activity goes on without notice, we are happy in sin, and we do not feel that it is slavery of the will.  Though the chains are actually about us, yet they do not gall us.  In this condition, which is that of every unawakened sinner, we are not conscious of the “bondage of corruption.”  In the phrase of St. Paul, “we are alive without the law.”  We have no feeling sense of duty, and of course have no feeling sense of sin.  And it is in this state of things, that arguments are framed to prove the mightiness of mere conscience, and the power of bare truth and moral obligation, over the perverse human heart and will.

But the Spirit of God awakens the conscience; that sense of obligation to be perfectly holy which has hitherto slept now starts up, and begins to form an estimate of what has been done in reference to it.  The man hears the authoritative and startling law:  “Thou shalt be perfect, as God is.”  And now, at this very instant and point, begins the consciousness of enslavement,—­of being, in the expressive phrase of Scripture, “sold under sin.”  Now the commandment “comes,” shows us first what we ought to be and then what we actually are, and we “die."[2] All moral strength dies out of us.  The muscle has been cut by the sword of truth, and the limb drops helpless by the side.  For, we find that the obligation is immense.  It extends to all our outward acts; and having covered the whole of this great surface, it then strikes inward and reaches to every thought of the mind, and every emotion of the heart, and every motive of the will.  We discover that we are under obligation at every conceivable point in our being and in our history, but that we have not met obligation at a single point.  When we see that the law of God is broad and deep, and that sin is equally broad and deep within us; when we learn that we have never thought one single holy thought, nor felt one single holy feeling, nor done one single holy deed, because self-love is the root and principle of all our work, and we have never purposed or desired to please God by any one of our actions; when we find that everything has been required, and that absolutely nothing has been done, that we are bound to be perfectly holy this very instant, and as matter of fact are totally sinful, we know in a most affecting manner that “whosoever committeth sin is the slave of sin”.

But suppose that after this disheartening and weakening discovery of the depth and extent of our sinfulness, we proceed to take the second step, and attempt to extirpate it.  Suppose that after coming to a consciousness of all this obligation resting upon us, we endeavor to comply with it.  This renders us still more painfully sensible of the truth of our Saviour’s declaration.  Even the regenerated man, who in this endeavor has the aid of God, is mournfully conscious that sin is the enslavement of the human will.  Though he has been freed substantially, he feels that