The first thing a boy has to do, is to learn implicit obedience to rules.  The first thing in importance for a man to learn is, to sever himself from maxims, rules, laws.  Why?  That he may become an Antinomian, or a Latitudinarian?  No.  He is severed from submission to the maxim because he has got allegiance to the principle.  He is free from the rule and the law because he has got the Spirit written in his heart.

This is the Gospel.  A man is redeemed by Christ so far as he is not under the law; he is free from the law so far as he is free from the evil which the law restrains; he progresses so far as there is no evil in him which it is an effort to keep down; and perfect salvation and liberty are—­when we,—­who though having the first fruits of the Spirit, yet groan within ourselves, waiting for the adoption, “to wit, the redemption of our body”—­shall have been freed in body, soul, and spirit, from the last traces of the evil which can only be kept down by force.  In other words, so far as Christ’s statement is true of us, “The Prince of this world cometh, and hath nothing in me.”

 XX.

 Preached February 21, 1853.

 THE PRODIGAL AND HIS BROTHER.

“And he said unto him, Son, thou art ever with me, and all that I have is thine.  It was meet that we should make merry, and be glad:  for this thy brother was dead, and is alive again; was lost, and is found.”—­Luke xv. 31, 32.

There are two classes of sins.  There are some sins by which man crushes, wounds, malevolently injures his brother man:  those sins which speak of a bad, tyrannical, and selfish heart.  Christ met those with denunciation.  There are other sins by which a man injures himself.  There is a life of reckless indulgence; there is a career of yielding to ungovernable propensities, which most surely conducts to wretchedness and ruin, but makes a man an object of compassion rather than of condemnation.

The reception which sinners of this class met from Christ was marked by strange and pitying mercy.  There was no maudlin sentiment on his lips.  He called sin sin, and guilt guilt.  But yet there were sins which His lips scourged, and others over which, containing in themselves their own scourge, His heart bled.  That which was melancholy, and marred, and miserable in this world, was more congenial to the heart of Christ than that which was proudly happy.  It was in the midst of a triumph, and all the pride of a procession, that He paused to weep over ruined Jerusalem.  And if we ask the reason why the character of Christ was marked by this melancholy condescension it is that he was in the midst of a world of ruins, and there was nothing there to gladden, but very much to touch with grief.  He was here to restore that which was broken down and crumbling into decay.  An enthusiastic antiquarian, standing amidst the fragments of an ancient temple