God lays siege to all hearts in that great sacrifice.  Do you believe that Jesus Christ died for your sins ‘according to the Scriptures’?  Do you see there the assurance of a love which will lift you up above all the cross-currents of earthly life, and the mysteries of providence, into the clear ether where the sunshine is unobscured?  And above all, do you fling back the reverberating ray from the mirror of your own heart that directs again towards heaven the beam of love which heaven has shot down upon you?  ’Herein is love, not that we loved God, but that He loved us, and gave His Son to be the propitiation for our sins.’  Is it true of us that we love God because He first loved us?

THE WARRING QUEENS

   ’As sin hath reigned unto death, even so might grace
   reign through righteousness unto eternal life by Jesus
   Christ our Lord.’—­ROMANS v. 21.

I am afraid this text will sound to some of you rather unpromising.  It is full of well-worn terms, ‘sin,’ ‘death,’ ‘grace,’ ‘righteousness,’ ‘eternal life,’ which suggest dry theology, if they suggest anything.  When they welled up from the Apostle’s glowing heart they were like a fiery lava-stream.  But the stream has cooled, and, to a good many of us, they seem as barren and sterile as the long ago cast out coils of lava on the sides of a quiescent volcano.  They are so well-worn and familiar to our ears that they create but vague conceptions in our minds, and they seem to many of us to be far away from a bearing upon our daily lives.  But you much mistake Paul if you take him to be a mere theological writer.  He is an earnest evangelist, trying to draw men to love and trust in Jesus Christ.  And his writings, however old-fashioned and doctrinally hard they may seem to you, are all throbbing with life—­instinct with truths that belong to all ages and places, and which fit close to every one of us.

I do not know if I can give any kind of freshness to these words, but I wish to try.  To begin with, I notice the highly-imaginative and picturesque form into which the Apostle casts his thoughts here.  He, as it were, draws back a curtain, and lets us see two royal figures, which are eternally opposed and dividing the dominion between them.  Then he shows us the issues to which these two rulers respectively conduct their subjects; and the question that is trembling on his lips is ‘Under which of them do you stand?’ Surely that is not fossil theology, but truths that are of the highest importance, and ought to be of the deepest interest, to every one of us.  They are to you the former, whether they are the latter or not.

I. So, first, look at the two Queens who rule over human life.

Sin and Grace are both personified; and they are both conceived of as female figures, and both as exercising dominion.  They stand face to face, and each recognises as her enemy the other.  The one has established her dominion:  ‘Sin hath reigned.’  The other is fighting to establish hers:  ‘That Grace might reign.’  And the struggle is going on between them, not only on the wide field of the world; but in the narrow lists of the heart of each of us.