on, or elevation. Even Divine influences leave him
just where they find him, unless they are exerted in their highest grade
of irresistible grace. A brute surrenders himself to his appetites and
propensities, and lives the low life of nature, without being capable of
aspirations for anything purer and nobler. But man does this very
thing,--nay, immerses himself in flesh, and sense, and self, with an
entireness and intensity of which the brute is incapable,--in the face of
impulses and stirrings of mind that point him to the pure throne of God,
and urge him to soar up to it! The brute is a creature of nature, because
he knows no better, and can desire nothing better; but man is "as the
beasts that perish," in spite of a better knowledge and a loftier
aspiration!

If then, you would know that "whosoever committeth sin is the _slave_ of
sin," contemplate sin in reference to the aspirations of an apostate
spirit originally made in the image of God, and which, because it is not
eternally reprobated, is not entirely cut off from the common influences
of the Spirit of God. Never will you feel the bondage of your will more
profoundly, than when under these influences, and in your moments of
seriousness and anxiety respecting your soul's salvation, you aspire
and endeavor to overcome inward sin, and find that unless God grant you
His special and renovating grace, your heart will be sinful through all
eternity, in spite of the best impulses of your best hours. These upward
impulses and aspirations cannot accompany the soul into the state of
final hopelessness and despair, though Milton represents Satan as
sometimes looking back with a sigh, and a mournful memory, upon what he
had once been,[4]--yet if they should go with us there, they would
make the ardor of the fire more fierce, and the gnaw of the worm more
fell. For they would help to reveal the strength of our sin, and the
intensity of our rebellion.

III. Sin is spiritual slavery, if viewed in reference to the _fears_ of
the human soul.

The sinful spirit of man fears the death of the body, and the Scriptures
assert that by reason of this particular fear we are all our lifetime in
bondage. Though we know that the bodily dissolution can have no effect
upon the imperishable essence of an immortal being, yet we shrink back
from it, as if the sentence, "Dust thou art, and unto dust thou shalt
return," had been spoken of the spirit,--as if the worm were to "feed
sweetly" upon