If not with hope of life,
Begin with fear of death: Strive the tremendous lifelong strife Breath after breath.
Bleed on beneath the rod; Weep on until thou see ; Turn fear and hope to love of God Who loveth thee.
Turn all to love, poor soul;
Be love thy watch and ward; Be love thy starting-point, thy goal, And thy reward.1
ii. The Cause of the Failure.
1. It is natural enough that we should think in the first instance of the law as the agency fitted to bring about the desired result. What can be needed to secure men's fulfilling the righteousness of the law but just that they should have its most reasonable requirements set plainly before them, clothed with the august authority of God Himself ? It might seem as if the law coming to men thus, having its claims enforced, moreover, by the promise of reward in the case of obedience, and by the threat of punishment in the case of disobedience, were the very agency fitted to secure the object desired, did not experience prove that it is utterly powerless to accomplish it. That the powers of the law might be fully tested, it was solemnly pro- mulgated at Mount Sinai, in the hearing of all Israel, amidst the most overwhelming manifestations of the Divine majesty and glory. But even when thus proclaimed in the most impressive manner by God Himself, it failed to secure the fulfilment of its just requirements. And what was it that rendered the law powerless ? It was weak, the Apostle says, " through the flesh."
2. The law is good in itself, but it has to work through the sinful nature. The only powers to which it can appeal are those
1 Christina G. Rossetti.
374 LAW OR LOVE
which are already in rebellion. A discrowned king whose only forces to conquer his rebellious subjects are the rebels themselves is not likely to regain his crown. Because law brings no new element into our humanity, its appeal to our humanity has little more effect than that of the wind whistling through an archway. It appeals to conscience and reason by a plain declaration of what is right; to will and understanding by an exhibition of authority; to fears and prudence by plainly setting forth con- sequences. But what is to be done with men who know what is right but have no wish to do it, who believe that they ought but will not, who know the consequences but " choose rather the pleasures of sin for a season," and shuffle the future out of their minds altogether ?
T[ This is the essential weakness of all law. The tyrant is not afraid so long as there is no one threatening his reign but the unarmed herald of a discrowned king. His citadel will not surrender to the blast of the trumpet blown from Sinai.1
3. The weakness of the law is accentuated when we think of its penal aspects. Even when the law rebounds upon the offender it seldom reclaims and improves. It is punitive and not remedial. You may send a man to the tread-mill, but as he performs the revolutions he may be evolving fresh schemes of crime. You may keep the thief in solitary confinement, hoping to silence him into honesty, but the probability is that he is worse on the day of his liberation than on the day of his apprehension. Of law, both Divine and human, the Apostle's analysis is correct. It is weak, and weak through the flesh. Its chief design it cannot accomplish. It cannot secure compliance.
Tf It is the universal experience that human nature rebels against the severities of repression. Is not that what Paul means when he says : " For I had not known coveting except the law had said, Thou shalt not covet ; but sin, finding occasion, wrought in me through the commandment all manner of coveting." There is a strange perversity in the flesh. There is nothing so tempting to us as the thing prohibited. We see the signboard : " No road this way. Trespassers will be prosecuted," and through love of rebellion we select the prohibited path. The railway companies demand that every passenger shall have either a pass or a ticket, but, through sheer love of duping the law, men attempt the
1 A. Maclaren.
ROMANS viii. 3, 4 375
journey free of cost. The father who plays the despot in his family will create a household of rebels. The State where anarchy is rife is the State where tyrants rule.1
4. This is the Gospel, or, one may say, this is the essence of the Gospel, that Christianity is not simply a new and more impressive declaration that men are sinners, but a new power, greater than the world has ever known before, to help men out of the snares of sin, that they may be sinners no longer. For a long time now men have been told they are sinners. For six thousand years man has heard thundered in his ears the lesson of the law. It has been driven in upon his thoughts by all the penal inflictions of the Divine judgment; by the fires that rained ruin on the cities of the plain; by the waters that overswept the world in the days of Noah; by the handwriting on the wall that doomed the proud city of Babylon; by the sword and fire that fell on sacred Jerusalem ; by the decay of Rome, sapped and undermined by its own vices ; by all the records of the woe that has fallen on wicked men since time began. Men know that fire burns and that water drowns; so they know also that selfishness withers, that intemperance ruins, that ambition overleaps itself and falls on the other side, that avarice belittles the mind, and licentiousness blasts the body and the soul; men know, on the other hand, that virtue brings happiness and that uprightness brings peace. Men know this. But that is not the point. The point is to get a working motive that will lead them to act upon this knowledge.