Was, then, that which is good made death unto this youth, by a Divine arrangement?  Is this the original and necessary relation which law sustains to the will and affections of an accountable creature?  Must the pure and holy law of God, from the very nature of things, be a weariness and a curse?  God forbid.  But sin that it might appear sin, working death in the sinner by that which is good,—­that sin by the commandment might become, might be seen to be, exceeding sinful.  The law is like a chemical test.  It eats into sin enough to show what sin is, and there stops.  The lunar caustic bites into the dead flesh of the mortified limb; but there is no healing virtue in the lunar caustic.  The moral law makes no inward alterations in a sinner.  In its own distinctive and proper action upon the heart and will of an apostate being, it is fitted only to elicit and exasperate his existing enmity.  It can, therefore, no more be a source of sanctification, than it can be of justification.

Of what use, then, is the law to a fallen man?—­some one will ask.  Why is the commandment enunciated in the Scriptures, and why is the Christian ministry perpetually preaching it to men dead in trespasses and sins?  If the law can subdue no man’s obstinate will, and can renovate no man’s corrupt heart,—­if it can make nothing perfect in human character,—­then, “wherefore serveth the law?” “It was added because of transgressions,”—­says the Apostle in answer to this very question.[4] It is preached and forced home in order to detect sin, but not to remove it; to bring men to a consciousness of the evil of their hearts, but not to change their hearts.  “For,” continues the Apostle, “if there had been a law given which could have given life”—­which could produce a transformation of character,—­“then verily righteousness should have been by the law,” It is not because the stern and threatening commandment can impart spiritual vitality to the sinner, but because it can produce within him the keen vivid sense of spiritual death, that it is enunciated in the word of God, and proclaimed from the Christian pulpit.  The Divine law is waved like a flashing sword before the eyes of man, not because it can make him alive but, because it can slay him, that he may then be made alive, not by the law but by the Holy Ghost,—­by the Breath that cometh from the four winds and breathes on the slain.

It is easy to see, by a moment’s reflection, that, from the nature of the case, the moral law cannot be a source of spiritual life and sanctification to a soul that has lost these.  For law primarily supposes life, supposes an obedient inclination, and therefore does not produce it.  It is not the function of any law to impart that moral force, that right disposition of the heart, by which its command is to be obeyed.  The State, for example, enacts a law against murder, but this mere enactment does not, and cannot, produce a benevolent disposition in