If, now, we view sin in relation to these great fears of death, judgment, and eternity, we see that it is spiritual slavery, or the bondage of the will.  We discover that our terror is no more able to deliver us from the “bondage of corruption,” than our aspiration is.  We found that in spite of the serious stirrings and impulses which sometimes rise within us, we still continue immersed in sense and sin; and we shall also find that in spite of the most solemn and awful fears of which a finite being is capable, we remain bondmen to ourselves, and our sin.  The dread that goes down into hell can no more ransom us, than can the aspiration that goes up into heaven.  Our fear of eternal woe can no more change the heart, than our wish for eternal happiness can.  We have, at some periods, faintly wished that lusts and passions had no power over us; and perhaps we have been the subject of still higher aspirings.  But we are the same beings, still.  We are the same self-willed and self-enslaved sinners, yet.  We have all our lifetime feared death, judgment, and eternity, and under the influence of this fear we have sometimes resolved and promised to become Christians.  But we are the very same beings, still; we are the same self-willed and self-enslaved sinners yet.

Oh, never is the human spirit more deeply conscious of its bondage to its darling iniquity, than when these paralyzing fears shut down upon it, like night, with “a horror of great darkness.”  When under their influence, the man feels most thoroughly and wretchedly that his sin is his ruin, and yet his sinful determination continues on, because “whosoever committeth sin is the slave of sin,” Has it never happened that, in “the visions of the night when deep sleep falleth upon men,” a spirit passed before your face, like that which stood still before the Temanite; and there was silence, and a voice saying, “Man!  Man! thou must die, thou must be judged, thou must inhabit eternity?” And when the spirit had departed, and while the tones of its solemn and startling cry were still rolling through your soul, did not a temptation to sin solicit you, and did you not drink in its iniquity like water?  Have you not found out, by mournful experience, that the most anxious forebodings of the human spirit, the most alarming fears of the human soul, and the most solemn warnings that come forth from eternity, have no prevailing power over your sinful nature, but that immediately after experiencing them, and while your whole being is still quivering under their agonizing touch, you fall, you rush, into sin?  Have you not discovered that even that most dreadful of all fears,—­the fear of the holy wrath of almighty God,—­is not strong enough to save you from yourself?  Do you know that your love of sin has the power to stifle and overcome the mightiest of your fears, when you are strongly tempted to self-indulgence?  Have you no evidence, in your own experience, of the truth of the poet’s words: