each that a Christian is free from the
obligation of the moral law. If it is not true that we can keep it and
so earn heaven, it is equally false that we may break it without penalty
or remorse. What he insisted upon was this: that obligation is one
thing, and energy is another; the law is good, but it has not the gift
of pardon or of inspiration; by itself it will only reveal the
feebleness of him who endeavours to perform it, only force into direst
contrast the spiritual beauty of the pure ideal and the wretchedness of
the sinner, carnal, sold under sin. In this respect, indeed, the law was
its own witness. For if, among all the millions of its children, one had
lived by obedience, how could he have shared in its elaborate
sacrificial apparatus, in the hallowing of the altar from pollution by
the national uncleanness, in the sprinkling of the blood of the offering
for sin? Take the case of the highest official. A sinless high priest
under the law would have been paralysed by his virtue, for his duty on
the greatest day of all the year was to make atonement first for his own
sins.

3. The law being an authorised statement of what innocence means, and
therefore of the only terms upon which a man might hope to live by
works, is an organic whole, and we either keep it as a whole or break
it. Such is the meaning of the words, he that offendeth in one point is
guilty of all; because He who gave the seventh commandment gave also the
sixth--so that if one commit no adultery, yet kill, he has become a
transgressor of the law in its integrity (James ii. 11). The challenge
of God to human self-righteousness is not one which can be half met. If
we have not thoroughly kept it, we have thoroughly failed.

4. But this failure of man does not involve any failure, in the law, to
accomplish its intended work. It is, as has been said, a challenge. The
sense of our inability to meet it is the best introduction to Him Who
came not to call the righteous but sinners to repentance, and thus the
law became a tutor to bring men to Christ. It awoke the conscience,
brought home the sense of guilt, and entered, that sin might abound in
us, whose ignorance had not known sin without it. It was strictly that
which Moses most frequently calls it--the Testimony.

5. Finally, however, the teaching of Scripture is not that Christians
are condemned to live always in a condition of baffled striving,
hopeless longing, conscious transgression of a code wh