ot lust." The commandment stimulates instead of
extirpating his hostility to the Divine government; and so long as the
_mere_ command, and the _mere_ threat,--which, as the hymn tells us, is
all the law can do,--are brought to bear, the depravity of the rebellious
heart becomes more and more apparent, and more and more intensified.

There is no more touching poem in all literature than that one in which
the pensive and moral Schiller portrays the struggle of an ingenuous
youth who would find the source of moral purification in the moral law;
who would seek the power that can transform him, in the mere imperatives
of his conscience, and the mere struggling and spasms of his own will. He
represents him as endeavoring earnestly and long to feel the force of
obligation, and as toiling sedulously to school himself into virtue, by
the bare power, by the dead lift, of duty. But the longer he tries, the
more he loathes the restraints of law. Virtue, instead of growing lovely
to him, becomes more and more severe, austere, and repellant. His life,
as the Scripture phrases it, is "under law," and not under love. There is
nothing spontaneous, nothing willing, nothing genial in his religion. He
does not enjoy religion, but he endures religion. Conscience does not, in
the least, renovate his will, but merely checks it, or goads it. He
becomes wearied and worn, and conscious that after all his self-schooling
he is the same creature at heart, in his disposition and affections, that
he was at the commencement of the effort, he cries out, "O Virtue, take
back thy crown, and let me sin."[3] The tired and disgusted soul would
once more do a _spontaneous_ thing.

Was, then, that which is good made death unto this youth, by a _Divine_
arrangement? Is this the _original_ and _necessary_ relation which law
sustains to the will and affections of an accountable creature? Must the
pure and holy law of God, from the very nature of things, be a weariness
and a curse? God forbid. But sin that it might _appear_ sin, working
death in the sinner by that which is good,--that sin by the commandment
might become, might be seen to be, exceeding sinful. The law is like a
chemical test. It eats into sin enough to show what sin is, and there
stops. The lunar caustic bites into the dead flesh of the mortified limb;
but there is no healing virtue in the lunar caustic. The moral law makes
no inward alterations in a sinner. In its own distinctive and proper
actio