d grips with
some evil to which we have become habituated; and how we determine and
determine, and try, and fail, and determine again, with no better
result. We are the slaves of our own passions; and no man is free who is
hindered by his lower self from doing that which his better self tells
him he ought to do. The tempter comes to you, and says, 'Come and do
this thing, just for once. You can leave off when you like, you know.
There is no need to do it a second time.' And when you have done it, he
changes his note, and says, 'Ah! you are in, and you cannot get out. You
have done it once; and in my vocabulary once means twice, and once and
twice mean _always_.'

Insane people are sometimes tempted into a house of detention by being
made to believe that it is a grand mansion, where they are just going to
pay a flying visit, and can come away when they like. But once inside
the walls, they never get past the lodge gates any more. The foolish
birds do not know that there is lime on the twigs, and their little feet
get fastened to the branch, and their wings flutter in vain. 'He that
committeth sin is the slave of sin--shut up,' dungeoned, 'under sin.'

But do not forget, either, the other metaphor in our text, in which the
Apostle, with characteristic rapidity, and to the horror of rhetorical
propriety, passes at once from the thought of a dungeon to the thought
of an impending weight, and says, 'Shut up _under_ sin.'

What does that mean? It means that we are guilty when we have done
wrong; and it means that we are under penalties which are sure to
follow. No deed that we do, howsoever it may fade from the tablets of
our memory, but writes in visible characters, in proportion to its
magnitude, upon our characters and lives. All human acts have perpetual
consequences. The kick of the rifle against the shoulder of the man that
fires it is as certain as the flight of the bullet from its muzzle. The
chalk cliffs that rise above the Channel entomb and perpetuate the
relics of myriads of evanescent lives; and our fleeting deeds are
similarly preserved in our present selves. Everything that a man wills,
whether it passes into external act or not, leaves, in its measure,
ineffaceable impressions on himself. And so we are not only dungeoned
in, but weighed upon by, and lie under, the evil that we do.

Nor, dear friends, dare I pass in silence what is too often passed in
silence in the modern pulpit, the plain fact that there i