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LECTURE XLII.

ROMANS, vii, 14, 15.

"For we know that the law is spiritual; but I am carnal, sold under sin. For that which I do, I allow not: for what I would, that do I not; but what I hate, that I do."

THE first thing to be remarked here, is the transition which the apostle makes at this verse into another tense. It looks as if from the 7th verse to the 14th, he, using the past tense, was describing the state of matters antecedent to his conversion, and showing what his case was under the law; but that now, sliding into the use of the present tense, he is describing his experience as a believer: And this is one argument for Paul speaking here in his own person, and not in that of an unregenerate

man.

The law is spiritual.' It has authority over the desires of the inner man. It holds a sinful wish to be criminal, as well as a sinful performance. It finds matter for condemnation in the state of the will, as well as in the deeds of the outward history. It demands punishment, for example, not merely on the action by which I wrest another's property; but on the affection by which I covet it. Paul once thought himself free of all offences, in regard to a neighbour's rights, because he had never put forth the hand of violence, or plied any device of

fraudulency against them. But when he looked to the spiritual nature of the commandment, in that it interdicted him even from the longings of a secret appetite for that which was not rightfully his own-then, conscious that with all the abstinence of his outer man from the acts of dishonesty there was still a secret propensity in his heart towards the gains or the fruits, he felt himself, when standing at the bar of this purer and loftier jurisprudence, to be indeed a transgressor. And so, in the general, there may be no disobedience on the part of the outer man to any of God's commandments; and yet there may be, all the while, an utter distaste for them on the part of the inner man-and this is what the law takes cognizance of, in virtue of its spiritual character, and pronounces to be sinful. To do what is bidden with the hand, is not enough to satisfy such a law—if the struggling inclination of the heart be against it. And above all will it charge the deepest guilt on a man-because of his disaffection towards Godbecause of a love for the creature, that has deposed from its rightful ascendancy over him the love of the Creator-because of that moral anarchy and misrule in the constitution of his spirit, whereby, with its relish for the gifts of Providence, it has a disrelish and disregard for the Giver of them; and because while it may yield many compliances with the law of God at the impulse of dread or of danger or of habit, it yields not to God Himself the offering of a spontaneous devotion, the tribute of an intelligent or of a willing reverence.

Perhaps my best recommendation to you, for the purpose of acquiring a more thorough discernment of God's law in the spirituality of its character, is that you peruse with faithful application to your own heart the fifth chapter of Matthewwhere, article by article, you have the comparison between a spiritual and what may be called a carnal commandment; and from which you will at once perceive, how possible it is, that, with a most rigid and undeviating faithfulness in regard to the latter, there may be an utter deficiency from the former in all its requirements-and how truly the same individual may say of himself, that, when in the flesh, he, touching the righteousness that is of the law, was blameless; and yet, when advanced and elevated above this state and now in the spirit, he may say, O wretched man that I am, who shall deliver me from the law of sin in my members! You see how, in proportion to his high sense of the law, he may have a low sense of himself; and that, just as one advances in the discernment of its purity and in the delicacy of his recoil at the slightest deviations therefrom, which surely mark his progressive sanctification-the more readily will he break forth into exclamations of shame and selfabhorrence: Or the loftier his positive ascent on the heights of sacredness, the more fearful will he be of all those drags and downward tendencies by which he still is encompassed; and which, if not felt to be most hazardous as well as most humbling, may not only cause to slip the footsteps of the

heavenward traveller; but may precipitate him from the eminence that he has gotten, into the lowest depths of wretched and hopeless apostacy.

'I am carnal'-It is on the principles just now uttered, that Paul may have made this affirmation of himself. The same man who could say of all the good that was done-" nevertheless not me but the grace of God that is in me"-Surely this man, who thus knew what he should refer to God's grace and what he should refer to his own separate and unaided self, might, even after this grace had become the habitual visitant or inmate of his heart, still look to his own soul; and, conceiving of it as apart or disjoined from the fountain out of which he draws the supplies of its nourishment, might well say that I am carnal.' Suppose for a moment that the branch of a tree were endowed with a separate consciousness of its own-then, however lovely in blossom or richly-laden with fruit, it may feel of the whole efflorescence which adorns it, that it was both derived and is upholden, by the flow of a succulence from the stem; and it may know, that, if severed therefrom, it would forthwith wither into decay, and that all the goodly honours wherewith it was invested would drop away from it. The twofold consciousness of what it would be in itself, and of what it is in the tree, might force the very utterance that was emitted by a Christian disciple when he said, "I am dead nevertheless I live." "Yet not I" adds the apostle" but Christ liveth in me." I apart from Him

without whom I can do nothing-I disjoined from the Saviour who compares Himself to a tree and us to the branches-I who in Christ am a new creature-out of Christ am dead and out of Him am carnal.

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The Scripture phrase "to be in the flesh" when descriptive of character is applied in sacred writ only to the unregenerate. They who are in the flesh cannot please God." "You are not in the flesh but in the Spirit, if so be that the Spirit of God dwell in you." But the Scripture term carnal is sometimes applied to a man after his conversion.

A man when newly born again

is a babe; yet to such did Paul apply this epithet, "I could not speak unto you as unto spiritual but as unto carnal, even as unto babes in Christ. For ye are yet carnal, for whereas there is among you envying and strife and divisions, are ye not carnal and walk as men ?" Only think of a Christian as made up of two ingredients, the one consisting of all that he inherits by nature, the other consisting of all that is superinduced on him by grace. Think of his inward and experimental life as consisting of a struggle between these ingredients, in which the one does habitually and will at length ultimately and completely prevail. But the wrong principle belonging properly and primitively to the man himself, and the right principle being derived from without through the channel of believing prayer, or the exercise of faith in Christ Jesus-how natural is it in these circumstances,