him, unless they are exerted in their highest grade of irresistible grace.  A brute surrenders himself to his appetites and propensities, and lives the low life of nature, without being capable of aspirations for anything purer and nobler.  But man does this very thing,—­nay, immerses himself in flesh, and sense, and self, with an entireness and intensity of which the brute is incapable,—­in the face of impulses and stirrings of mind that point him to the pure throne of God, and urge him to soar up to it!  The brute is a creature of nature, because he knows no better, and can desire nothing better; but man is “as the beasts that perish,” in spite of a better knowledge and a loftier aspiration!

If then, you would know that “whosoever committeth sin is the slave of sin,” contemplate sin in reference to the aspirations of an apostate spirit originally made in the image of God, and which, because it is not eternally reprobated, is not entirely cut off from the common influences of the Spirit of God.  Never will you feel the bondage of your will more profoundly, than when under these influences, and in your moments of seriousness and anxiety respecting your soul’s salvation, you aspire and endeavor to overcome inward sin, and find that unless God grant you His special and renovating grace, your heart will be sinful through all eternity, in spite of the best impulses of your best hours.  These upward impulses and aspirations cannot accompany the soul into the state of final hopelessness and despair, though Milton represents Satan as sometimes looking back with a sigh, and a mournful memory, upon what he had once been,[4]—­yet if they should go with us there, they would make the ardor of the fire more fierce, and the gnaw of the worm more fell.  For they would help to reveal the strength of our sin, and the intensity of our rebellion.

III.  Sin is spiritual slavery, if viewed in reference to the fears of the human soul.

The sinful spirit of man fears the death of the body, and the Scriptures assert that by reason of this particular fear we are all our lifetime in bondage.  Though we know that the bodily dissolution can have no effect upon the imperishable essence of an immortal being, yet we shrink back from it, as if the sentence, “Dust thou art, and unto dust thou shalt return,” had been spoken of the spirit,—­as if the worm were to “feed sweetly” upon the soul, and it were to be buried up in the dark house of the grave.  Even the boldest of us is disturbed at the thought of bodily death, and we are always startled when the summons suddenly comes:  “Set thy house in order, for thou must die.”

Again, the spirit of man fears that “fearful something after death,” that eternal judgment which must be passed upon all.  We tremble at the prospect of giving an account of our own actions.  We are afraid to reap the harvest, the seed of which we have sown with our own hands.  The thought of going to a just judgment, and of receiving from the Judge of all the earth, who cannot possibly do injustice to any of His creatures, only that which is our desert, shocks us to the centre of our being!  Man universally is afraid to be judged with a righteous judgment!  Man universally is terrified by the equitable bar of God!