In fact even the literal consideration, at least of one of the commandments, will illustrate this. Take the third: "Thou shalt not take the name of the Lord thy God in vain," and you think of words. Take the sixth, or seventh, or eighth, and not words but deeds involuntarily rise up before your thought. But now consider the tenth: "Thou shalt not covet, etc." and instead of words and deeds, thoughts and dispositions are evidently summoned before its bar.

In harmony with this spiritual extension of the law's applications was the declaration of the Lord of life himself, "Ye have heard that it was said by them of old time, Thou shalt not commit adultery: But I say unto you, that whosoever looketh on a woman to lust after her hath committed adultery with her already in his heart."

Here then is an area from which your utmost vigilance cannot prevent the inroads of the Midianites of sin. They roam everywhere. Over all are hanging the black thunder clouds of doom and the lightnings of a coming judgment which shall be rendered according to the law "The soul that sinneth it shall die."

Being thus swept within the compass of the law's applications, from the Alpha to the Omega of your being, what say you of yourself before God, as to your guilt or innocence, as to your

freedom or bondage? The Apostle says, "All the world becomes guilty before God." "By the deeds of the law there shall no flesh be justified in his sight." What say you? Ah! What can you say but, "I am a sinful man, O Lord."

You have been considering sin in its relations from the view point of the presence or absence of conformity or transgression. But now look for a moment at sin, not as to its relations, but as to its appearance. How does it look? The phrase, "Ugly as sin," would seem to indicate the prevailing popular judgment regarding its looks. This finds memorable expression in literature in the second book of Paradise Lost. Satan in his flight arrives at hellbounds:

"Before the gates there sat,

On either side, a formidable shape:
The one seemed woman to the waist and fair;
But ended foul in many a scaly fold
Voluminous and vast; a serpent arm'd
With mortal sting: About her middle round
A cry of Hellhounds never ceasing bark'd
With wide Cerberian mouths full loud, and rang
A hideous peal; yet, when they list, would creep,
If aught disturb'd their noise, into her womb,
And kennel there, yet there still bark'd and howl'd
Within unseen. Far less abhorr'd than these
Vex'd Scylla, bathed in the sea that parts
Calabria from the hoarse Trinacrian shore;

Nor uglier follow the night hag, when call'd
In secret, riding through the air she comes,
Lured with the smell of infant blood, to dance
With Lapland witches, while the laboring moon
Eclipses at their charms."

The follows a description of the "formidable shape" guarding the other side of the gate— more sublimely horrible still. The one shape was -Sin. The other was her offspring—Death. "Sin, when it is finished, bringeth forth death." They were both children of the devil.

"By their fruits ye shall know them:" And when you see the fruits of sin in the earth and realize its movement in your own life, even superficially, surely the conviction is forced upon you, however meager the beholding, that sin is the most awful, horrible and frightfully deformed thing in the universe.

Sin and the devil are the very antipodes of all that God is. And its blighting and damning presence, through the long and sorrow-laden history of our poor, sin-cursed race, is but a faint revelation of its possibilities.

Dark and repellant are the "fruits of the flesh" when contrasted with those of the Spirit by the Apostle in Gal. V. And this, too, when viewed at long range from within the precincts of Christian society and Christian homes. Darker and

more horrible are they when beheld in volcanic activity and in all their revolting shamelessness and cruelty in pagan lands and in the "submerged tenth" of Christian lands. Yet all this is brightness when contrasted with the conditions which would be realized, even in this world, were it not for the restraining and universally operative influences of the Spirit of God. "But for the grace of God there goes John Bradford," said an old minister, pointing to a condemned criminal on his way to the gallows.

But enough. What say you? Looking at it as a want of inner conformity or as actual transgression, or in the light of its hideous deformity as the offspring of the devil, in utter and eternal antagonism to God, can you do aught else than fall prostrate before Him, saying in humble confession, "I am a sinful man, O Lord."

3

CHAPTER III.

GUILT, CONDEMNATION, POLLUTION.

According to the law, then, and the evidence converging upon you from various sources, it is concluded and you yourself conclude, that you are a sinful and sinning soul. There must be pronounced upon you the word which has been so frequently awaited, in earthly courts, with bated breath, the word "Guilty."

But in your case it is so much the more serious and awful a matter by so much as the heavens are higher than the earth. You are not simply guilty before one or more of your fellows, with its consequent temporal results, but, as the Apostle says, you are "guilty before God." This involves results which are eternal and terrible beyond the power of your imagination to conceive. And you have nothing to answer for yourself in view of the declaration "that every mouth may be stopped." Guilty, guilty, echoes through your soul as all your faculties confirm the decision of the All-seeing One.

There may be a natural impulse to flee—to hide