But it is the price which all who are possessed of influence must pay—­that their acts must be measured, not in themselves, but according to their influence on others.  So, my Christian brethren, to bring this matter home to every-day experience and common life, if the landlord uses his authority and influence to induce his tenant to vote against his conscience, it may be he has secured one voice to the principle which is right, or at all events, to that which seemed to him to be right:  but he has gained that single voice at the sacrifice and expense of a brother’s soul.  Or again—­if for the sake of ensuring personal politeness and attention, the rich man puts a gratuity into the hand of a servant of some company which has forbidden him to receive it, he gains the attention, he ensures the politeness, but he gains it at the sacrifice and expense of a man and a Christian brother.

3.  The last remark which we have to make is this:—­How possible it is to mix together the vigour of a masculine and manly intellect with the tenderness and charity which is taught by the gospel of Christ!  No man ever breathed so freely when on earth the air and atmosphere of heaven as the Apostle Paul—­no man ever soared so high above all prejudices, narrowness, littlenesses, scruples, as he:  and yet no man ever bound himself as Paul bound himself to the ignorance, the scruples, the prejudices of his brethren.  So that what in other cases was infirmity, imbecility, and superstition, gathered round it in his case the pure high spirit of Christian charity and Christian delicacy.

And now, out of the writings, and sayings, and deeds of those who loudly proclaim “the rights of man” and the “rights of liberty,” match us if you can with one sentence so sublime, so noble, one that will so stand at the bar of God hereafter, as this single, glorious sentence of his, in which he asserts the rights of Christian conscience above the claims of Christian liberty—­“Wherefore if meat make my brother to offend, I will eat no flesh while the world standeth, lest I make my brother to offend.”

 XVII.

 Preached May 16, 1852.

 VICTORY OVER DEATH.

   “The sting of death is sin, and the strength of sin is the law. 
    But thanks be to God which giveth us the victory through our Lord
    Jesus Christ.”—­1 Cor. xv. 56, 57.

On Sunday last I endeavoured to bring before you the subject of that which Scripture calls the glorious liberty of the Sons of God.  The two points on which we were trying to get clear notions were these:  what is meant by being under the law, and what is meant by being free from the law?  When the Bible says that a man led by the Spirit is not under the law, it does not mean that he is free because he may sin without being punished for it, but it means that he is free because being taught by God’s Spirit to love what His law commands he is no longer conscious of acting from restraint.