or not.

that is a summary) 'judges you, and in God's sight convicts you, whether you yourselves at present recognise its decision For to have respect of persons is plainly inconsistent with the principle of the commandment, Thou shalt love thy neighbour as thyself.' Respect of persons is obviously, in its very nature, to some extent a limiting of what God has expressed universally. He says 'thy neighbour,' and we say 'my rich neighbour,' 'my neighbour of exactly the same way of thinking in religious matters,' or the like. The good Samaritan did not turn away from the poor wounded traveller because his features showed that he was not a Samaritan but a jew.

You see, brethren, how gravely our inspired apostle viewed this intrusion of worldly considerations into the sphere of purely religious thought and feeling. He evidently saw here not merely what was likely to cause some annoyance to an individual treated with neglect or contempt, but the working of that very evil and most destructive tendency under which the church has suffered deplorably all down its generations,— the tendency to distrust the support of the unseen divine King, to doubt the almighty energy of faith, to lean on man, and trust to earthly buttresses, as if Christ had never said, 'My kingdom is not of this world.'

The tenth and eleventh verses are intended to impress yet more deeply on the readers of the Epistle a conviction of the serious light in which the apostle-and indeed his Master, speaking by him through His Spirit-regarded such respect of persons as has been described. James has called their conduct 'sin,' and the fact that they were 'convicted by the law as transgressors' showed it to be such; for, as we are expressly told elsewhere, 'sin' and 'the transgression of the law' are convertible terms, co-extensive (1 John iii. 4). But to James's readers this would appear 'an hard saying.' All men are prone to think that the law of God, strictly so called-the law as a stern condemning judge-takes cognizance only of large matters. There is a vast number of acts into which our consciences tell us that an element of moral wrongness enters, which yet, counting them little, we consider to be

scarcely sins, or transgressions of God's law. Society often calls sins of this kind by half-jesting names, attenuating and palliating, that, by the subtle power of words, the feeling may be deepened which the heart desires, that these are trifling matters, not within the sweep of law. When, for example, the fulfilment of a disagreeable engagement is evaded through the pretence of illness, or when a lady instructs her servant to tell certain persons, if they call, that she is not at home, whether she be really at home or not,—this class of falsehoods is named 'white lies.' Among the Jews, the teaching of the scribes and Pharisees, which dwelt mainly on isolated precepts instead of broad principles of duty, had a tendency to produce the impression that, whenever men could persuade themselves that any act or course of conduct did not fall within the exact letter of any particular prohibition, then it was not within the range of the law at all. Accordingly, having called the respect of persons sin,' 'transgression,' James anticipates an objection arising from such views and feelings, to this effect: 'This may be a violation of a single point of propriety or duty; but surely it is not sin, not a breach of law.' The apostle's answer is: 'Whosoever shall keep the whole law, and yet offend in one point, he is guilty of all. For He that said, Do not commit adultery, said also, Do not kill. Now, if thou commit no adultery, yet if thou kill, thou art become a transgressor of the law.'

Here he shows the supposed objectors, you observe, that God's law constitutes a grand unity; that everything which in any measure is morally wrong, is a violation of this one glorious body of law; and consequently, that even if a man could keep, and did keep, all the commandments of God except one, the breach of that one makes him, in the fullest sense of the words, a violator of God's law, and liable to punishment. The only difficulty in the verses lies in the words 'guilty of all. They must be explained by the course of thought, and particularly by the words 'transgressor of the law,' in the end of the eleventh verse, to which plainly, from the argument, they are used as very nearly equivalent. The apostle does not mean

to say that all sins are equally heinous, or that a man who has told one lie is necessarily as great a sinner as one who has broken all the commandments of the Decalogue. He means that a man who has broken one commandment cannot shelter himself under the idea that he has merely violated a precept isolated from the general law of God, but is guilty of a breach of the law which includes all the commandments, and thus has as really, though it may be not so glaringly, placed himself in opposition to God, as if he had broken all the commandments.

The apostle lays down as his fundamental proposition, that the authority on which the law rests is one: 'He that said, Do not commit adultery, said also, Do not kill.' We might conceive the Scripture to have been partly the word of God, partly the utterance of men unguided by God. In this case some precepts might have been from God, whilst others were only the suggestion of human wisdom. But 'all Scripture is given by inspiration of God.' This is the general truth, of which the apostle's argument leads him to make the part prominent, that all which the Bible declares to be divine law is really such. From this fundamental proposition, it follows that the essential principle pervading every point of the law, even the minutest, is

one.

The law is a transcript of the divine character. It contains many details for our guidance; but of this body of law love is the soul, all-pervading: for God' (whose character the law expresses) 'is love.' A breach of the law in its minutest detail, therefore, is a breach of love: as, when a man strikes another severely on one of his limbs, he hurts not that limb only, but the whole man, because life and sensation are everywhere. But further, the spirit of true obedience to the law is one-loving respect and submission to God as the Author of the whole law. Such obedience is necessarily implicit and impartial. If a man selects certain commandments to obey, if he 'picks and chooses' among God's precepts, it is plain that he follows his own will, not God's; and the same spirit that leads him to break one, would, under other temptations, lead him to break all. There is here no true obedience to God. His sincere servants ' esteem all His precepts concerning all things to be right.'

XII.

JUDGMENT BY THE LAW OF LIBERTY.

'So speak ye, and so do, as they that shall be judged by the law of liberty. 13 For he shall have judgment without mercy that hath showed no mercy; and mercy rejoiceth against judgment.'-JAMES II. 12, 13.

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HE twelfth verse contains an earnest practical appeal, founded on the whole preceding discussion; and this is enforced in the thirteenth by a very solemn and pointed s.atement of the respective results of the two courses of life which men may pursue.

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The injunction in the twelfth is so framed as to remind the readers of some momentous doctrinal truths. One of these is, that we shall be judged. To any one who looks at the course of history, either of individuals or nations, with an eye that sees no deeper than the outer covering of things, it may seem as if God, having created His world, and established certain general physical laws, had then left it to develope for itself its good and evil, joy and sorrow,-unheeded, uncared for. One generation goeth,' after a life of thoughtlessness and sin, and another cometh,' to idle through the same frivolous round; and still no voice of solemn rebuke comes forth from the 'excellent glory.' A Howard and a John Williams live lives full of self-sacrificing devotion to God and to their fellow-men; yet no visible diadem of heavenly beauty is set by a divine hand upon their brows, and for them too, as for the thoughtless and the base, 'it is appointed to die.' In the nineteenth century of gospel light men repeat the crime of Cain-slaveholding nations repeat the oppressions of Egypt-the iniquities of our great cities cry to the Lord, as did the sins of Sodom and Gomorrah; and still the sky is not cleft by the destroying bolt of God's wrath. Nay, so strangely assigned seem the

portions of men at times-the wicked revelling in prosperity, and God's servants draining the waters of a full cup' of trouble-that even believers are tempted to say, 'How doth God know, and is there knowledge in the Most High?' And scoffers, walking after their own lusts,' and exulting in their fancied impunity, say, 'Where is the promise of His coming? for, since the fathers fell asleep, all things continue as they were from the beginning of the creation.'

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But all such thoughts are foolish and false; 'for the eyes of the Lord are upon the ways of man, and He seeth all his goings.' 'He knoweth the way of the righteous;' and 'there is no darkness nor shadow of death, where the workers of iniquity may hide themselves.' And though in the riches of His goodness He bears long with sinners, that His forbearance may lead them to repentance,' yet He has not left us without manifold witness that even now He is sitting in judgment. The awful visitation of the flood, when desolation swept over the world of the ungodly, who were buying and selling, planting and building, marrying and giving in marriage, and scoffingly asking, 'Where is the promise of His coming?' until the day that the fountains of the great deep were broken up and the windows of heaven opened, how loud a voice of solemn warning has this for our modern world! National judgments, varied and most distinct, from the overthrow of the cities of the plain to the sea of blood into which their national sin of slaveholding recently brought our brethren in America, have continually been attesting that God is the Governor among the nations. And every sickness, every bereavement, every stroke of adversity, should be felt by each individual as a 'coming of the Son of man' to him for gentle judgment, to remind him that, though day passes after day now in comparative quiet and monotony, yet certainly one day the Lord shall come in His glory, the judgment shall be set, and the books opened. For all the judgments of time are but prelusive of one great solemn, sublime event, when time shall be no longer. The last stage in the ripening of the bitter fruits of sin, the final crisis in the history of its working among men, will then have

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