Paul's account of this matter may have accommodated to it, what John
says of the command to mutual Christian love; that it is an old
history, and yet not an old but a new one. _Old_, in the sense, that,
from what time by one man sin came into the world and death by sin,
every one in earnest to fulfil the true end of his being, has found the
dame impotence attached to good resolves; the same supremacy gained by
the baser impulses, in the hour of trial; the same temptation to find
an excuse in what seems so like a law unavoidable, as if it were no
more I that do it, but sin that dwelleth in me, as if it were not the
responsible _I_ that did wrong: this _I_ being controlled by sin, which
is fancied as a foreign agent taking up a residence within, and
controlling the man in spite of him. And, escaped from this and the
like deceits, all have been brought to the stand, "O wretched man that
I am, who shall deliver me from the body of this death!"--that species
of self-despair, finishing the preparation for that renewing influence,
which "is not of him that willeth, nor of him that runneth, but of God
that showeth mercy." Thus the enemy is raised _in die Luften frei_, no
more to receive fresh strength from mother Earth, to renew the contest
successfully.

But this account, so old in one sense, is not so in another--in the
sense of being obsolete, or out of date. It still retains the
freshness of novelty, to answer to the last example of a man's ordering
life, as, he knows, meets the approval of his Judge, and his own truest
welfare.

6. But "the end of the commandment," or the result of the process by
which the soul is put into condition to contend successfully with the
powers of evil, "is charity." So religion preeminently rebinds men to
the rule of not seeking their own advantage at the cost of others;
because it implants a principle, which might dispense with the
certainty of always calculating prudently in doing right. Charity
seeketh not her own--not one's own welfare calculated on the largest
scale, exclusively, or at the cost of the greatest good of the whole.
Thus it is essentially distinct from a prudence, however refined, and
calculating its ends through eternity. It is called "the bond of
perfectness," or a most perfect bond; because, if men were all devoted
thus disinterestedly, each to the good of the whole, society would be
perfectly held together, without other bond. All forms of civil
compact and vo