barren cliffs, or melancholy moorlands, and foaming through
narrow rifts in gloomy ravines, it reaches at last fertile lands, and
flows calm, the sunlight dancing on its broad surface, till it loses
itself at last in the unfathomable ocean of the love of God.

We are told that the Biblical view of human nature is too dark. Well,
the important question is not whether it is dark, but whether it is
true. But, apart from that, the doctrine of Scripture about man's
moral condition is not dark, if you will take the whole of it
together. Certainly, a part of it is very dark. The picture, for
instance, of what men are, painted at the beginning of this Epistle,
is shadowed like a canvas of Rembrandt's. The Bible is 'Nature's
sternest painter but her best.' But to get the whole doctrine of
Scripture on the subject, we have to take its confidence as to what
men may become, as well as its portrait of what they are--and then
who will say that the anthropology of Scripture is gloomy? To me it
seems that the unrelieved blackness of the view which, because it
admits no fall, can imagine no rise, which sees in all man's sins and
sorrows no token of the dominion of an alien power, and has,
therefore, no reason to believe that they can be separated from
humanity, is the true 'Gospel of despair,' and that the system which
looks steadily at all the misery and all the wickedness, and calmly
proposes to cast it all out, is really the only doctrine of human
nature which throws any gleam of light on the darkness. Christianity
begins indeed with, 'There is none that doeth good, no, not one,' but
it ends with this victorious paean of our text.

And what a majestic close it is to the great words that have gone
before, fitly crowning even their lofty height! One might well shrink
from presuming to take such words as a text, with any idea of
exhausting or of enhancing them. My object is very much more humble.
I simply wish to bring out the remarkable order, in which Paul here
marshals, in his passionate, rhetorical amplification, all the
enemies that can be supposed to seek to wrench us away from the love
of God; and triumphs over them all. We shall best measure the
fullness of the words by simply taking these clauses as they stand in
the text.

I. The love of God is unaffected by the extremest changes of our
condition.

The Apostle begins his fervid catalogue of vanquished foes by a pair
of opposites which might seem to cover the whole ground