would be no arming of law with terror, no proclamation of ten commandments amidst thunderings and lightnings.  He would be a law unto himself, as all the heavenly host are,—­the law working impulsively within him by its own exceeding lawfulness and beauty.  The very fact that God, in the instance of man, is compelled to emphasize the penalty along with the statute,—­to say, “Keep my commandments upon pain of eternal death,”—­is proof conclusive that man is a rebel, and intensely so.

And now what is the effect of this combination of command and threatening upon the agent?  Is he moulded by it?  Does it congenially sway and incline him?  On the contrary, is he not excited to opposition by it?  When the commandment “comes,” loaded down with menace and damnation, does not sin “revive,” as the Apostle affirms?[1] Arrest the transgressor in the very act of disobedience, and ring in his ears the “Thou shalt not” of the decalogue, and does he find that the law has the power to alter his inclination, to overcome his carnal mind, and make him perfect in holiness?  On the contrary, the more you ply him with the stern command, and the more you emphasize the awful threatening, the more do you make him conscious of inward sin, and awaken his depravity.  “The law,”—­as St. Paul affirms in a very remarkable text,—­“is the strength of sin,[2]” instead of being its destruction.  Nay, he had not even ([Greek:  te]) known sin, but by the law:  for he had not known lust, except the law had said, “Thou shalt not lust.”  The commandment stimulates instead of extirpating his hostility to the Divine government; and so long as the mere command, and the mere threat,—­which, as the hymn tells us, is all the law can do,—­are brought to bear, the depravity of the rebellious heart becomes more and more apparent, and more and more intensified.

There is no more touching poem in all literature than that one in which the pensive and moral Schiller portrays the struggle of an ingenuous youth who would find the source of moral purification in the moral law; who would seek the power that can transform him, in the mere imperatives of his conscience, and the mere struggling and spasms of his own will.  He represents him as endeavoring earnestly and long to feel the force of obligation, and as toiling sedulously to school himself into virtue, by the bare power, by the dead lift, of duty.  But the longer he tries, the more he loathes the restraints of law.  Virtue, instead of growing lovely to him, becomes more and more severe, austere, and repellant.  His life, as the Scripture phrases it, is “under law,” and not under love.  There is nothing spontaneous, nothing willing, nothing genial in his religion.  He does not enjoy religion, but he endures religion.  Conscience does not, in the least, renovate his will, but merely checks it, or goads it.  He becomes wearied and worn, and conscious that after all his self-schooling he is the same creature at heart, in his disposition and affections, that he was at the commencement of the effort, he cries out, “O Virtue, take back thy crown, and let me sin."[3] The tired and disgusted soul would once more do a spontaneous thing.