be removed, and the wall of
partition between man and God thrown down. What can law answer to
such a demand? It is silent; it can only say, 'What is written is
written.' It has no word to speak that promises 'the blotting out of
the handwriting that is against us'; and through its silence one can
hear the mocking laugh of the tyrant that keeps his castle.

But Christ has come 'for sin'; that is to say His Incarnation and
Death had relation to, and had it for their object to remove, human
sin. He comes to blot out the evil, to bring God's pardon. The
recognition of His sacrifice supplies the adequate motive to copy His
example, and they who see in His death God's sacrifice for man's sin,
cannot but yield themselves to Him, and find in obedience a delight.
Love kindled at His love makes likeness and transmutes the outward
law into an inward 'spirit of life in Christ Jesus.'

Still another way by which God 'condemns sin in the flesh' is pointed
to by the remaining phrase of our text, 'sending His own Son.' In the
beginning of this epistle Jesus is spoken of as 'being declared to be
the Son of God with power according to the Spirit of holiness'; and
we must connect that saying with our text, and so think of Christ's
bestowal of His perfect gift to humanity of the Spirit which
sanctifies as being part of His condemnation of sin in the flesh.
Into the very region where the tyrant rules, the Son of God
communicates a new nature which constitutes a real new power. The
Spirit operates on all our faculties, and redeems them from the
bondage of corruption. All the springs in the land are poisoned; but
a new one, limpid and pure, is opened. By the entrance of the Spirit
of holiness into a human spirit, the usurper is driven from the
central fortress: and though he may linger in the outworks and keep
up a guerilla warfare, that is all that he can do. We never truly
apprehend Christ's gift to man until we recognise that He not merely
'died for our sins,' but lives to impart the principle of holiness in
the gift of His Spirit. The dominion of that imparted Spirit is
gradual and progressive. The Canaanite may still be in the land, but
a growing power, working in and through us, is warring against all in
us that still owns allegiance to that alien power, and there can be
no end to the victorious struggle until the whole body, soul, and
spirit, be wholly under the influence of the Spirit that dwelleth in
us, and nothing shall hurt or d