And in closing, we desire to repeat and emphasize this truth.  Whoever will enter upon that process of self-wrestling and self-conflict which has been described, will come to a profound sense of the truth which our Lord taught in the words of the text.  All such will find and feel that they are in slavery, and that their slavery is their condemnation.  For the anxious, weary, and heavy-laden sinner, the problem is not mysterious, because it finds its solution in the depths of his own self-consciousness.  He needs no one to clear it up for him, and he has neither doubts nor cavils respecting it.

But, an objection always assails that mind which has not the key of an inward moral struggle to unlock the problem for it.  When Christ asserts that “whosoever committeth sin is the slave of sin,” the easy and indifferent mind is swift to draw the inference that this bondage is its misfortune, and that the poor slave does not deserve to be punished, but to be set free.  He says as St. Paul did in another connection:  “Nay verily, but let them come themselves, and fetch us out.”  But this slavery is a self-enslavement.  The feet of this man have not been thrust into the stocks by another.  This logician must refer everything to its own proper author, and its own proper cause.  Let this spiritual bondage, therefore, be charged upon the self that originated it.  Let it be referred to that self-will in which it is wrapped up, and of which it is a constituent element.  It is a universally received maxim, that the agent is responsible for the consequences of a voluntary act, as well as for the act itself.  If, therefore, the human will has inflicted a suicidal blow upon itself, and one of the consequences of its own determination is a total enslavement of itself to its own determination, then this enslaving result of the act, as well the act itself, must all go in to constitute and swell the sum-total of human guilt.  The miserable drunkard, therefore, cannot be absolved from the drunkard’s condemnation, upon the plea that by a long series of voluntary acts he has, in the end, so enslaved himself that no power but God’s grace can save him.  The marble-hearted fiend in hell, the absolutely lost spirit in despair, cannot relieve his torturing sense of guilt, by the reflection that he has at length so hardened his own heart that he cannot repent.  The unforced will of a moral being must be held responsible for both its direct, and its reflex action; for both its sin, and its bondage in sin.

The denial of guilt, then, is not the way out.  He who takes this road “kicks against the goads.”  And he will find their stabs thickening, the farther he travels, and the nearer he draws to the face and eyes of God.  But there is a way out.  It is the way of self-knowledge and confession.  This is the point upon which all the antecedents of salvation hinge.  He who has come to know, with a clear discrimination, that he is in a guilty bondage