ome Christians. But we are the very same beings, still; we are the
same self-willed and self-enslaved sinners yet.

Oh, never is the human spirit more deeply conscious of its bondage to its
darling iniquity, than when these paralyzing fears shut down upon it,
like night, with "a horror of great darkness." When under their
influence, the man feels most thoroughly and wretchedly that his sin is
his ruin, and yet his sinful determination continues on, because
"whosoever committeth sin is the _slave_ of sin," Has it never happened
that, in "the visions of the night when deep sleep falleth upon men," a
spirit passed before your face, like that which stood still before the
Temanite; and there was silence, and a voice saying, "Man! Man! thou must
die, thou must be judged, thou must inhabit eternity?" And when the
spirit had departed, and while the tones of its solemn and startling cry
were still rolling through your soul, did not a temptation to sin solicit
you, and did you not drink in its iniquity like water? Have you not found
out, by mournful experience, that the most anxious forebodings of the
human spirit, the most alarming fears of the human soul, and the most
solemn warnings that come forth from eternity, have no prevailing power
over your sinful nature, but that immediately after experiencing them,
and while your whole being is still quivering under their agonizing
touch, you fall, you rush, into sin? Have you not discovered that even
that most dreadful of all fears,--the fear of the holy wrath of almighty
God,--is not strong enough to save you from yourself? Do you know that
your love of sin has the power to stifle and overcome the mightiest of
your fears, when you are strongly tempted to self-indulgence? Have you no
evidence, in your own experience, of the truth of the poet's words:

"The Sensual and the Dark rebel in vain, Slaves by their own compulsion."

If, then, you would know that "whosoever committeth sin is the _slave_ of
sin," contemplate sin in relation to the fears which of necessity rest
upon a spirit capable, as yours is, of knowing that it must leave the
body, that it must receive a final sentence at the bar of judgment, and
that eternity is its last and fixed dwelling-place. If you would know
with sadness and with profit, that sin is the enslavement of the will
that originates it, consider that all the distressing fears that have
ever been in your soul, from the first, have not been able to set you
f