wasted time, opportunities lost, frivolous conversation, that was our chief guilt.  And yet with all that trifling as it may be, when it comes to be the history of life, does it not leave behind a restless undefinable sense of fault, a vague idea of debt, but to what extent we know not, perhaps the more wretched just because it is uncertain?

My Christian brethren, this is the sting of sinfulness, the wretched consciousness of an unclean heart.  It is just this feeling, “God is not my friend; I am going on to the grave, and no man can say aught against me, but my heart is not right; I want a river like that which the ancients fabled—­the river of forgetfulness—­that I might go down into it and bathe, and come up a new man.  It is not so much what I have done; it is what I am.  Who shall save me from myself?” Oh, it is a desolate thing to think of the coffin when that thought is in all its misery before the soul.  It is the sting of death.

And now let us bear one thing in mind, the sting of sin is not a constant pressure.  It may be that we live many years in the world before a death in our own family forces the thought personally home.  Many years before all those sensations which are so often the precursors of the tomb—­the quick short cough, lassitude, emaciation, pain—­come in startling suddenness upon us in our young vigour, and make us feel what it is to be here with death inevitable to ourselves.  And when those things become habitual, habit makes delicacy the same forgetful thing as health, so that neither in sickness, nor in health, is the thought of death a constant pressure.  It is only now and then; but so often as death is a reality, the sting of death is sin.

Once more we remark, that all this power of sin to agonize, is traced by the Apostle to the law—­“the strength of sin is the law;” by which he means to say that sin would not be so violent if it were not for the attempt of God’s law to restrain it.  It is the law which makes sin strong.  And he does not mean particularly the law of Moses.  He means any law, and all law.  Law is what forbids and threatens; law bears gallingly on those who want to break it.  And St. Paul declares this, that no law, not even God’s law, can make men righteous in heart, unless the Spirit has taught men’s hearts to acquiesce in the law.  It can only force out into rebellion the sin that is in them.

It is so, brethren, with a nation’s law.  The voice of the nation must go along with it.  It must be the expression of their own feeling, and then they will have it obeyed.  But if it is only the law of a government, a law which is against the whole spirit of the people, there is first the murmur of a nation’s disapprobation, and then there is transgression, and then, if the law be vindicated with a high hand, the next step is the bursting that law asunder in national revolution.  And so it is with God’s law.  It will never control