y
for I keep Thy precepts.' Take Christ for your Master, and, being His
servants, you are your own masters, and the world's to boot. For 'all
things are yours if ye are Christ's.' Refuse to bow your necks to
that yoke which is easy, and to take upon your shoulders that burden
which is light, and you do not buy liberty, though you buy
licentiousness, for you become the slaves and downtrodden vassals of
the world and the flesh and the devil, and while you promise
yourselves liberty, you become the bondsmen of corruption. Oh! then,
let us obey from the heart that mould of teaching to which we are
delivered, and so obeying, we shall be free indeed.

'THY FREE SPIRIT'

'The law of the Spirit of life in Christ Jesus hath made
me free from the law of sin and death.'--ROMANS viii. 2.

We have to distinguish two meanings of law. In the stricter sense, it
signifies the authoritative expressions of the will of a ruler
proposed for the obedience of man; in the wider, almost figurative
sense, it means nothing more than the generalised expression of
constant similar facts. For instance, objects attract one another in
certain circumstances with a force which in the same circumstances is
always the same. When that fact is stated generally, we get the law
of gravitation. Thus the word comes to mean little more than a
regular process. In our text the word is used in a sense much nearer
the latter than the former of these two. 'The law of sin and of
death' cannot mean a series of commandments; it certainly does not
mean the Mosaic law. It must either be entirely figurative, taking
sin and death as two great tyrants who domineer over men; or it must
mean the continuous action of these powers, the process by which they
work. These two come substantially to the same idea. The law of sin
and of death describes a certain constancy of operation, uniform and
fixed, under the dominion of which men are struggling. But there is
another constancy of operation, uniform and fixed too, a mighty
antagonistic power, which frees from the dominion of the former: it
is 'the law of the Spirit of life in Christ Jesus.'

I. The bondage.

The Apostle is speaking about himself as he was, and we have our own
consciousness to verify his transcript of his own personal experience.
Paul had found that, by an inexorable iron sequence, sin
worked in himself the true death of the soul, in separation from God,
in the extinction of good and noble capa