But it is not so much that physical fact with its accompaniments which Paul is thinking about when he says that ‘sin reigns in death,’ as it is that solemn truth which he is always reiterating, and which I pray you, dear friends, to lay to heart, that, whatever activity there may be in the life of a man who has rent himself away from dependence upon God—­however vigorous his brain, however active his hand, however full charged with other interests his life, in the very depth of it is a living death, and the right name for it is death.  So this is Sin’s gift—­that over our whole nature there come mortality and decay, and that they who live as her subjects are dead whilst they live.  Dear brethren, that may be figurative, but it seems to me that it is absurd for you to turn away from such thoughts, shrug your shoulders, and say, ‘Old-fashioned Calvinistic theology!’ It is simply putting into a vivid form the facts of your life and of your condition in relation to God, if you are subjects of Sin.

Then, on the other hand, the other queenly figure has her hands filled with one great gift which, like the fatal bestowment which Sin gives to her subjects, has two aspects, a present and a future one.  Life, which is given in our redemption from Death and Sin, and in union with God; that is the present gift that the love of God holds out to every one of us.  That life, in its very incompleteness here, carries in itself the prophecy of its own completion hereafter, in a higher form and world, just as truly as the bud is the prophet of the flower and of the fruit; just as truly as a half-reared building is the prophecy of its own completion when the roof tree is put upon it.  The men that here have, as we all may have if we choose, the gift of life eternal in the knowledge of God through Jesus Christ His Son, must necessarily tend onwards and upwards to a region where Death is beneath the horizon, and Life flows and flushes the whole heaven.  Brother! do you put out your whole hand to take the poisoned gift from the claw-like hand of that hideous Queen; or do you turn and take the gift of life eternal from the hands of the queenly Grace?

III.  How this queenly Grace gives her gifts.

You observe that the Apostle, as is his wont—­I was going to say—­gets himself entangled in a couple of almost parenthetical or, at all events, subsidiary sentences.  I suppose when he began to write he meant to say, simply, ’as Sin hath reigned unto death, so Grace might reign unto life.’  But notice that he inserts two qualifications:  ‘through righteousness,’ ’through Jesus Christ our Lord.’  What does he mean by these?

He means this, first, that even that great love of God, coming throbbing straight from His heart, cannot give eternal life as a mere matter of arbitrary will.  God can make His sun to shine and His rain to fall, ‘on the unthankful and on the evil,’ and if God could, God would give eternal life to everybody, bad and good; but He cannot.  There must be righteousness if there is to be life.  Just as sin’s fruit is death, the fruit of righteousness is life.