“The Sensual and the Dark rebel in vain, Slaves by their own compulsion.”

If, then, you would know that “whosoever committeth sin is the slave of sin,” contemplate sin in relation to the fears which of necessity rest upon a spirit capable, as yours is, of knowing that it must leave the body, that it must receive a final sentence at the bar of judgment, and that eternity is its last and fixed dwelling-place.  If you would know with sadness and with profit, that sin is the enslavement of the will that originates it, consider that all the distressing fears that have ever been in your soul, from the first, have not been able to set you free in the least from innate depravity:  but, that in spite of them all your will has been steadily surrendering itself, more and more, to the evil principle of self-love and enmity to God.  Call to mind the great fight of anguish and terror which you have sometimes waged with sin, and see how sin has always been victorious.  Remember that you have often dreaded death,—­but you are unjust still.  Remember that you have often trembled at the thought of eternal judgment,—­but you are unregenerate still.  Remember that you have often started back, when the holy and retributive eternity dawned like the day of doom upon you,—­but you are impenitent still.  If you view your own personal sin in reference to your own personal fears, are you not a slave to it?  Will or can your fears, mighty as they sometimes are, deliver you from the bondage of corruption, and lift you above that which you love with all your heart, and strength, and might?

It is perfectly plain, then, that “whosoever committeth sin is the slave of sin,” whether we have regard to the feeling of obligation to be perfectly holy which is in the human conscience; or to the ineffectual aspirations which sometimes arise in the human spirit; or to the dreadful fears which often fall upon it.  Sin must have brought the human will into a real and absolute bondage, if the deep and solemn sense of indebtedness to moral law; if the “thoughts that wander through eternity;” if the aspirations that soar to the heaven of heavens, and the fears that descend to the very bottom of hell,—­if all these combined forces and influences cannot free it from its power.

It was remarked in the beginning of this discourse, that the bondage of sin is the result of the reflex action of the human will upon itself.  It is not a slavery imposed from without, but from within.  The bondage of sin is only a particular aspect of sin itself.  The element of servitude, like the element of blindness, or hardness, or rebelliousness, is part and particle of that moral evil which deserves the wrath and curse of God.  It, therefore, no more excuses or palliates, than does any other self-originated quality in sin.  Spiritual bondage, like spiritual enmity to God, or spiritual ignorance of Him, or spiritual apathy towards Him, is guilt and crime.