e to a profound sense of the truth which our
Lord taught in the words of the text. All such will find and feel that
they are in slavery, and that their slavery is their condemnation. For
the anxious, weary, and heavy-laden sinner, the problem is not
mysterious, because it finds its solution in the depths of his own
_self-consciousness_. He needs no one to clear it up for him, and he has
neither doubts nor cavils respecting it.

But, an objection always assails that mind which has not the key of an
inward moral struggle to unlock the problem for it. When Christ asserts
that "whosoever committeth sin is the slave of sin," the easy and
indifferent mind is swift to draw the inference that this bondage is its
misfortune, and that the poor slave does not deserve to be punished, but
to be set free. He says as St. Paul did in another connection: "Nay
verily, but let them come themselves, and fetch us out." But this slavery
is a _self_-enslavement. The feet of this man have not been thrust into
the stocks by another. This logician must refer everything to its own
proper author, and its own proper cause. Let this spiritual bondage,
therefore, be charged upon the _self_ that originated it. Let it be
referred to that self-will in which it is wrapped up, and of which it is
a constituent element. It is a universally received maxim, that the agent
is responsible for the _consequences_ of a voluntary act, as well as for
the act itself. If, therefore, the human will has inflicted a suicidal
blow upon itself, and one of the consequences of its own determination is
a total enslavement of itself to its own determination, then this
enslaving _result_ of the act, as well the act itself, must all go in to
constitute and swell the sum-total of human guilt. The miserable
drunkard, therefore, cannot be absolved from the drunkard's condemnation,
upon the plea that by a long series of voluntary acts he has, in the end,
so enslaved himself that no power but God's grace can save him. The
marble-hearted fiend in hell, the absolutely lost spirit in despair,
cannot relieve his torturing sense of guilt, by the reflection that he
has at length so hardened his own heart that he cannot repent. The
unforced will of a moral being must be held responsible for both its
direct, and its _reflex_ action; for both its sin, and its _bondage_ in
sin.

The denial of guilt, then, is not the way out. He who takes this road
"kicks against the goads." And he will find t