nt of his sin, and not an excuse for it.

"If weakness may excuse,
What murderer, what traitor, parricide,
Incestuous, sacrilegious, may not plead it?
All wickedness is weakness."[1]

The doctrine, then, which is taught in the text, is the truth that _sin
is spiritual slavery_; and it is to the proof and illustration of this
position that we invite attention.

The term "spiritual" is too often taken to mean unreal, fanciful,
figurative. For man is earthly in his views as well as in his feelings,
and therefore regards visible and material things as the emphatic
realities. Hence he employs material objects as the ultimate standard, by
which he measures the reality of all other things. The natural man has
more consciousness of his body, than he has of his soul; more sense of
this world, than of the other. Hence we find that the carnal man
expresses his conception of spiritual things, by transferring to them, in
a weak and secondary signification, words which he applies in a strong
and vivid way only to material objects. He speaks of the "joy" of the
spirit, but it is not such a reality for him as is the "joy" of the body.
He speaks of the "pain" of the spirit, but it has not such a poignancy
for him as that anguish which thrills through his muscles and nerves.
He knows that the "death" of the body is a terrible event, but transfers
the word "death" to the spirit with a vague and feeble meaning, not
realizing that the second death is more awful than the first, and is
accompanied with a spiritual distress compared with which, the sharpest
agony of material dissolution would be a relief. He understands what is
meant by the "life" of the body, but when he hears the "eternal life" of
the spirit spoken of, or when he reads of it in the Bible, it is with the
feeling that it cannot be so real and lifelike as that vital principle
whose currents impart vigor and warmth to his bodily frame. And yet,
the life of the spirit is more intensely real than the life of the body
is; for it has power to overrule and absorb it. Spiritual life, when in
full play, is bliss ineffable. It translates man into the third heavens,
where the fleshly life is lost sight of entirely, and the being, like St.
Paul, does not know whether he is in the body or out of the body.

The natural mind is deceived. Spirit has in it more of reality than
matter has; because it is an immortal and indestructible essence, while
matter is neither. Spiritual thing