We are told that the Biblical view of human nature is too dark.  Well, the important question is not whether it is dark, but whether it is true.  But, apart from that, the doctrine of Scripture about man’s moral condition is not dark, if you will take the whole of it together.  Certainly, a part of it is very dark.  The picture, for instance, of what men are, painted at the beginning of this Epistle, is shadowed like a canvas of Rembrandt’s.  The Bible is ’Nature’s sternest painter but her best.’  But to get the whole doctrine of Scripture on the subject, we have to take its confidence as to what men may become, as well as its portrait of what they are—­and then who will say that the anthropology of Scripture is gloomy?  To me it seems that the unrelieved blackness of the view which, because it admits no fall, can imagine no rise, which sees in all man’s sins and sorrows no token of the dominion of an alien power, and has, therefore, no reason to believe that they can be separated from humanity, is the true ‘Gospel of despair,’ and that the system which looks steadily at all the misery and all the wickedness, and calmly proposes to cast it all out, is really the only doctrine of human nature which throws any gleam of light on the darkness.  Christianity begins indeed with, ‘There is none that doeth good, no, not one,’ but it ends with this victorious paean of our text.

And what a majestic close it is to the great words that have gone before, fitly crowning even their lofty height!  One might well shrink from presuming to take such words as a text, with any idea of exhausting or of enhancing them.  My object is very much more humble.  I simply wish to bring out the remarkable order, in which Paul here marshals, in his passionate, rhetorical amplification, all the enemies that can be supposed to seek to wrench us away from the love of God; and triumphs over them all.  We shall best measure the fullness of the words by simply taking these clauses as they stand in the text.

I. The love of God is unaffected by the extremest changes of our condition.

The Apostle begins his fervid catalogue of vanquished foes by a pair of opposites which might seem to cover the whole ground—­’neither death nor life.’  What more can be said?  Surely, these two include everything.  From one point of view they do.  But yet, as we shall see, there is more to be said.  And the special reason for beginning with this pair of possible enemies is probably to be found by remembering that they are a pair, that between them they do cover the whole ground and represent the extremes of change which can befall us.  The one stands at the one pole, the other at the other.  If these two stations, so far from each other, are equally near to God’s love, then no intermediate point can be far from it.  If the most violent change which we can experience does not in the least matter to the grasp which the love of God has on us, or to the grasp which we may have on it, then no less