victims to forge and rivet their own chains. And it is so in this case.
Sinners are the slaves of Satan; those evil desires and inclinations
which they so recklessly obey are but the tools and bonds of the great
oppressor. The wicked man sells his soul to the devil for the price of
indulgence in "the pleasures of sin, which are but for a season." There
is a very easy way of testing this question of freedom or bondage in sin.
If you are really free, free to do as you like, you can do good as well
as evil; you can give up your companionship with iniquity, and break your
covenant with darkness, as readily, and with as little difficulty, as you
made the compact. Let the man who rejoices in his liberty to sin try to
abandon iniquity; he will surely find it an impossible task. However
clearly he may discern the purity, justice, and goodness of God's law,
however passionately he may long, and however earnestly he may strive, to
regulate his life by it, he will find himself "carnal, sold under sin;"
he will "find another law in his members warring against the law of his
mind, and bringing him into captivity to the law of sin and death." It
is easy to float with the stream, and the stronger the current the more
buoyantly and exultingly it bears you on. But try to breast the current.
You will soon find that you have undertaken a task which is "impossible
with men," and will sink exhausted and undone with the vain endeavour.
Alas! Satan is in very truth the lord of every enslaved soul, not
rightfully, only by virtue of the foulest usurpation; but he is so in
fact, and he "binds our captive souls fast in his slavish chains." And
by this bondage unto sin he holds us captive to death. His law is "the
law of sin and death;" and till Christ redeem and actually deliver us, we
are bound over to endure "the bitter pains of eternal death." It is an
awful thought, but it is as true as it is awful. Our cruel and
relentless jailer keeps us in the prison of sin, shut up under his power,
with a view to our everlasting death. May we be made conscious of our
enslavement, for till we become so, we are not likely to seek for
deliverance!

2. _The sure sign of bondage to Satan is continual subjection_, _or
rather liability_, _to the fear of death_. It would scarcely be true to
say of the great mass of the unconverted, that they are continually
haunted and incommoded by the fear of death. Their general condition is
one of thoughtless a