andments would not be accompanied with any thunders or
lightnings, and the discharge of duty would be as easy, spontaneous,
and as much without effort, as the practice of sin now is.

Thus have we considered two particulars in which the Divine law,
originally intended to render man happy, and intrinsically adapted to do
so, now renders him miserable. The commandment which was ordained to
life, he now finds to be unto death, because it places him under a
continual restraint, and drives him to a perpetual effort. These two
particulars, we need not say, are not all the modes in which sin has
converted the moral law from a joy to a sorrow. We have not discussed the
great subject of guilt and penalty. This violated law charges home the
past disobedience and threatens an everlasting damnation, and thus fills
the sinful soul with fears and forebodings. In this way, also, the law
becomes a terrible organ and instrument of misery, and is found to be
unto death. But the limits of this discourse compel us to stop the
discussion here, and to deduce some practical lessons which are
suggested by it.

1. In the first place, we are taught by the subject, as thus considered,
that _the mere sense of duty is not Christianity_. If this is all that a
man is possessed of, he is not prepared for the day of judgment, and the
future life. For the sense of duty, alone and by itself, causes misery in
a soul that has not performed its duty. The law worketh wrath, in a
creature who has not obeyed the law. The man that doeth these things
shall indeed live by them; but he who has not done them must die by them.

There have been, and still are, great mistakes made at this point. Men
have supposed that an active conscience, and a lofty susceptibility
towards right and wrong, will fit them to appear before God, and have,
therefore, rejected Christ the Propitiation. They have substituted ethics
for the gospel; natural religion for revealed. "I know," says Immanuel
Kant, "of but two beautiful things; the starry heavens above my head, and
the sense of duty within my heart."[3] But, is the sense of duty
_beautiful_ to apostate man? to a being who is not conformed to it? Does
the holy law of God overarch him like the firmament, "tinged with a blue
of heavenly dye, and starred with sparkling gold?" Nay, nay. If there be
any beauty in the condemning law of God, for man the _transgressor_, it
is the beauty of the lightnings. There is a splendor in them, but th