FOUR SUCCESSIVE STATES OF A HUMAN SOUL.

BY THE EDITOR.

(Concluded from page 442.)

THE Apostle represents Sin in three aspects. First, as simply Sin, "Sin, that it might appear Sin." What, alas ! it is, and not what our blind and beguiled hearts are fain to represent it. Secondly, as the most virulent, deceitful, and deadly poison, turning the greatest blessing into the most fatal curse, “Working death in me by that which is good." And, Thirdly, as of all evils the most evil; so evil, that in vain you may search the language of man for a word that can express its badness; so that you must come back again and reduplicate upon it its own name," exceeding sinful." If one were compelled to find a word which branded with condign infamy the cowardly kidnapping and midnight murder of the young Duke d'Enghien by the first Napoleon, one would be quite at a loss for any one expression or any accumu lation of epithets by which to do justice to the matchless meanness of the crime, and should be reduced to borrowing the perpetrator's own name to characterize his deed: "It was exceedingly Napoleon-like." It just showed the man. And thus the Apostle, when he is called to stigmatize sin, though he is writing in the most expressive language the world has ever known, is utterly at a loss for expression, and is obliged to content himself with saying that Sin is exceeding sinful.

I. "Sin, that it might appear Sin." To sinners, sin does not appear sin. Such is the deceitfulness of sin " that it never ventures to present itself at first in its native deformity, its naked hideousness, but comes disguised, and with a smiling countenance and persuasive accents; sometimes assuming the name and similitude of Pleasure, sometimes styling itself Nature, and sometimes, with an air of frank humility, announcing itself as Frailty. If it would come in its fiendish form, uttering its own tones of cruelty and horror, we should start from it with abhorrence and affright. But it approaches in a seductive shape, and entices us with honied words; we yield to its fatal fascinations, and dream ourselves happy in its embrace, and it is only when we begin to feel its deadly working that we recognize it as Sin. It is like some mortal poison fused into a sparkling, roseate, inviting cordial. Behold it as it smiles before you and "moveth itself aright"! It seems to say, “Drink, and forget your sorrow. Drink, and be as gods." It looks like anything rather than poison. You drink, and as it begins to work death, the poison appears poison then. The rolling, starting, livid eyeball; the discoloured, swollen, distorted countenance; the wild, delirious look; the fire-flood rushing through the veins, and the vital current changed into molten lava; the uncontrollable, convulsive agony,—all show, not only that it is poison, but that it is exceeding poisonous.

II. And in this is seen the exceeding sinfulness of Sin, that it works death by that which is good-the highest good-the law of God; like the chemistry of the wasp, which extracts venom for its sting from the sweetest substances in nature.

Such is our innate corruption, and such the abounding of iniquity around us, that it is extremely difficult to obtain any true impression of the malignity and hatefulness of Sin. The prophet Jeremiah, illustrating the impos

sibility that the sinner should transform his own character, asks, “Can the Ethiopian change his skin?" Might we not extend the metaphor, and adapt it to our present subject? The Ethiopian was born black; he sees all his kindred, neighbours, and countrymen to be black too; he cannot therefore perceive his blackness to be an unlovely peculiarity. And thus it is with us. We are born sinful, and our entire race are born sinful also; it is therefore hard for us to be convinced how unsightly, disgusting and detestable a thing Sin is. We are a generation of spiritual lepers; the leprosy cleaves to our souls. Our nearest kin, our dearest friends,-our whole species is marked by the plague-spot. The very air we breathe is laden with its infection; the very globe we inhabit is impregnated with the deadly contagion. Hence it requires a miracle, a supernatural enlightenment, to make us see how loathsome a thing it is to be a sinner. The unregenerate meet; they smile at each other; they converse cheerfully with each other; they compliment each other; they mark not the ravages of disease on each other's spirits; they sicken not at the putrescent spiritual exhalations which reek from each other's souls. How should they? For each bears about with him a tainted atmosphere. Ah! to God and holy angels how melancholy are such meetings! how ghastly are such smiles! how appalling such a reciprocation of disease!

Let no one think that we dip our pencil into too black and dismal colours. If we could but make Sin appear Sin, the name of sinner would be felt to be the most abhorred appellation that could be affixed to our souls. But the sad truth is that the unconverted see Sin through a false medium, through the stained glass of corrupt inclination, prejudice, and interest. O could we but dash that coloured glass to the ground! could we couch that moral blindness so that Sin might appear as it appears to God and to happy spirits! The sinfulness of Sin cannot be seen until it comes in contrast with the Law: "Thou shalt love the Lord thy God," etc. The first thing then which shows the strength, the malignity of Sin in our nature, and the inevitable ruin which it must entail, is that it is rebellion, irreconcilable, against the Law of God, which law is the manifestation of the nature of God. There can be no fair and righteous test of the evil of Sin but this. A robber and murderer may maintain most strictly the laws of honour amongst thieves; he may be most scrupulously faithful to his accomplices; nay, he may be most wastefully generous with the spoils of his crime, but society whom he outrages will not judge him by that.

Sin, then, is seen in its true colours, 1st, In its resistance to the Law of God. 2nd, In its effects—death eternal. Christ is the incarnate Law. In hating the Law, we hate Christ. Sin works death by the Gospel, which is the perfect law of liberty, making it a savour of death unto death,”– works death by the blessed Cross-like Judas, finding death at the very lips of Christ.

66

We have marked two stages of a sinner's spiritual history as exemplified in the experience of Saul of Tarsus. We gazed, first, upon his self-satisfied because self-ignorant state, and we next beheld his startled awaking to a perception of the real nature of the Law of God, and of the strength and malignity of Sin as a rebellious power within his soul. We have now to consider the third and fourth stages of the sinner's history,-The struggle of the enlightened intellect and the awakened conscience to keep the Law of God; their utter discomfiture, enslavement, and despair through the superior

strength of the senses and the passions; and, lastly, The rescue, quest, and the glorious liberty through Christ.

the con

This chapter might be headed, The Confessions of an Awakened Sinner. Paul, on starting up from the splendid dream of his self-righteousness, was astounded at the unsuspected strength of the rebel force within him. It was a humiliating discovery to him, when he, who fancied himself a saint, and had passed as such amongst the highest religious circles, suddenly found himself a sinner, a most base, black and death-deserving, death-doomed sinner. But a far more disheartening discovery awaited him. He thought that by energy of will he could put down this rebel force; he flattered himself that by prompt, vigorous, and well-directed effort he could crush rebellion, and regain his shattered self-esteem by asserting the mastery over his own appetites and affections. He looked upon his lawless emotions as a gang of subterranean conspirators and coiners who might be unearthed and destroyed. Alas! he found that the rebel power was the ruling power. This fearful fact is depicted in our text with great animation. We find here two most interesting and important facts of psychology strongly and truthfully brought out: First, that there exist in the soul of man two opposing forces, a higher and a lower, the one drawing him to good, the other dragging him to evil; and, Secondly, that the tendency to evil is incontestably the stronger of the two. The former fact is too plain to be for a moment doubted. That two mighty elements perpetually strive for the mastery in the soul of man is one of the many doctrines of Holy Writ which accord with the consciousness and even the confession of universal man. The proudest philosopher, and the wildest savage; the apologist and worshipper of human nature, and the reckless reprobate who holds in equal contempt the dread authority of God and the sacred rights of his brotherman; the gloomy and licentious Sadducee, and the humble and heavenaspiring saint; those who reject revelation, those who revere it, and those whom it has never reached,—all experience, in a greater or less degree, the intestine warfare of these two potent principles which St. Paul here designates the Law of the Members and the Law of the Mind. Our bosoms teach us this truth as expressly as our Bibles, that there are two powers agitating and distracting this little commonwealth within with perpetual civil conflict. The one, "the Law of the Mind," speaking in the tone of kingly command, as having the right; the other lifting up the voice of a rebellious mob, as having the power;-the one reminding us of "whatsoever things are true, whatsoever things are honest, whatsoever things are just, whatsoever things are pure, whatsoever things are lovely, whatsoever things are of good report; the other pleading for whatsoever things are convenient, whatsoever things are gratifying, whatsoever things are agreeable to our corrupt and selfish nature. Which of us has not felt impulses which, if obeyed, would have connected us in ennobling consanguinity with the loveliest and loftiest specimens of sanctified humanity,-yea, allied us with those stainless spirits who have been ascending in holiest excellence ever since God bade them be? and which of us, on the other hand, has not had to give battle to another class of impulses, which, were we abandoned to them, would debase us to a level with the most embruted outcasts of humanity, and would fit us for the companionship and the doom of all that is hateful in the universe?

This, then, is certain; nor is it less demonstrable that, by nature, the evil

is by far the stronger of the two. Even the heathen were aware of this. There are many very marked and memorable passages in the writings of the olden sages, poets, and historians, which, I think, must have been present to the mind of St. Paul when he penned this passage, for he had studied Greek literature at the feet of Gamaliel. He could scarcely help recalling a very vivid passage in Xenophon's History of the Education of Cyrus, where a young Median nobleman, being placed by Cyrus in a position of high trust and strong temptation, was first warned by Cyrus in words like these, "I have seen a great many persons who have thought themselves very strong, wretchedly overcome by the violence of their passions, in spite of all their resolutions, who have owned afterwards with shame and grief that their passion was a bondage and slavery from which they had not the power to redeem themselves, an incurable distemper out of the reach of all remedies and human efforts, a kind of bond or necessity more difficult to force than the strongest chains of iron." "Fear nothing," said the young nobleman; "I am sure of myself. I will answer with my life, I shall do nothing contrary to my duty." The youth, after all, basely betrayed his trust. On being summoned before Cyrus to answer for his crime, he thus replied: "Alas! now I am come to the knowledge of myself; and certainly I must have two souls, for plainly it is not one and the same which is both evil and good, and which loves honourable and base conduct, and at the same time wishes to do a thing and not to do it. Plainly, then, there are two souls; and when the good one prevails, then it does good; and when the evil one predominates, then it does evil."

Many like passages from pagan pages might readily recur to the Apostle, such as these two from Euripides: "I have learnt indeed that such things as I am wishing to do are bad, but my passion is too much for my resolutions; " and again, "I have forgotten nothing of the things of which you put me in mind, but even whilst I have the conviction, nature forces me." And even the obscene Ovid supplies the often-quoted saying,

"I see the right, and I approve it too :

I hate the wrong, and yet the wrong pursue."

Innumerable confirmations of this might be collected from our own British moralists, poets, and popular writers, as where Dr. Johnson says of one of the literary men about town of that time, "His mind is all virtue, his body all vice." For, fallen as we are, our very nature, as endowed with reason and conscience, compels us to do homage to the right, the good, the beautiful, the true; and if to do well were as easy as to wish to do well, there is not a lost soul in the pit but might be lifted up to Paradise.

This spark of the Divine light, conscience, can never be put out, even though smouldering and smothered beneath the vilest refuse of the fall. Thus the most hardened heathen made frank and full confession of the truth recorded in our text. And thus another of them exclaims with anguish, "I hate my own members-this frail body, a renegade, a deserter from the mind." But O, how bitterly does the awakened sinner feel this bondage of our nobler faculties to our baser tendencies! This consciousness St. Paul powerfully portrays: "For we know that the law is spiritual." It corresponds not only with the nature of God, but also with our own nobler nature, our reason and conscience; "but I am carnal;” the preponderating force of our nature, its gravitation, is downwards. That

which the law of God and my own intelligence and conscience agree to condemn, I commit. "I am sold under sin." He felt like a high-born and high-spirited personage who, in punishment of some great misdemeanour, is delivered over and sold as a slave to a tribe of savages, who drive him to do their hated drudgery, compel him to conform to their disgusting usages, to gorge their loathsome offal, and prey on garbage, to bend before their grim and gaudy idols, rewarding him only with daily stripes, and ever holding up before him a death of torture and of shame; and all this aggravated by the consciousness that his own misdeeds have banished him amongst these barbarians, and bound him with this chain, and by the fearful looking for of yet more fiery retribution in the future world.

When Saul of Tarsus first awoke to the fearful facts of his case, he made desperate and determined efforts to free himself. His higher powers struggling to disentangle themselves from earthly enslavement much resembled Milton's description of the creation of the king of the forests:

"Now half appear'd

The tawny lion, pawing to get free
His hinder parts."

But all his efforts are in vain, until in utter self-despair, he cries, "O wretched man that I am! who shall deliver me from the body of this death?"

And then deliverance comes. He raises this triumph-shout, “I thank God through Jesus Christ our Lord." He has emerged by faith in Christ into the region of moral liberty and power described at large in the succeeding chapter. This, however, opens to us too wide a field to be measured now; and one claiming an ampler survey than our remaining space will allow.

WOODHOUSE GROVE IN THE OLDEN TIME.

BY AN OLD GROVE-BOY.

So

WOODHOUSE GROVE is soon to be no more. The Conference has decided the incorporation of the school with New Kingswood, and the disposal of the premises as one means of defraying the costs of the new scheme. well had the measure been considered, and so wisely matured, that, as a matter of business, a project of utility, nothing can be reasonably said against it; and even if no Grove-boy, old or young, can think of the subject without a sigh of regret, a tear of positive grief, such a one must reflect that what he is called upon to endure now, had been already suffered by every son who had called Old Kingswood mother.

But how came it to be that the first school for preachers' sons, though one of John Wesley's own institutions, died and passed away without either obituarist or biographer? Perhaps because the original creation found another local habitation, in which it has been continued under a slightly altered name. But not simply will the place that once knew the school which had Jabez Bunting* and his contemporaries for its founders, know it

Above all, during this Conference," (namely, Sheffield, 1811,)