the positive part of the injunction, deduced from a consideration. of the great design of the gospel revelation. The first of these motives is stated in the third, fourth, and fifth verses. The second in the sixth. Let us attend to them in their order.

§ 1.-Motive drawn from the character of the course against which the exhortation is directed.

This, then, is the first motive which the apostle uses to urge Christians not to live the rest of the time to the lusts of men, but to the will of God. "The time past of our life may suffice us to have wrought the will of the Gentiles, when we walked in lasciviousness, lusts, excess of wine, revellings, banquetings, and abominable idolatries: wherein they think it strange that you run not with them to the same excess of riot, speaking evil of you; who shall give account to him who is ready to judge the quick and the dead." The whole of this statement bears on one point, -the criminal, disgraceful, dangerous character of that course which the apostle calls on Christians studiously to avoid. The leading ideas are these: To follow that course is to work the will of the Gentiles, the unenlightened heathen, the nations that knew not God. The importance of avoiding that course is manifest from the practices in which those who walk in it indulge, the infatuation under which they labour, and the responsibility under which they lie; and additional force is given to these considerations from the circumstance, that this is a course which Christians themselves once pursued, but which they have through the faith of the truth been led to abandon. Let us endeavour a little more fully to bring out these thoughts, and show how well fitted they are to serve the apostle's purpose, of impressing on the minds of those to whom he wrote a sense of the importance of their not living the rest of the time in the flesh to the lusts of men, but to the will of God.

(1.) The course which he guards them against is that which is characteristic of the Gentiles. It is "the will of the Gentiles." To make "the lusts of men," that is, natural inclination, the rule and reason of conduct, in forgetfulness of, in opposition to," the will of God," is that which formed the character of the gentile nations, and made them in a religious and moral point of view the very reverse of what every christian man must desire to be. The Gentiles are represented in the New Testament as by way

of eminence" sinners," as "not knowing God," as "not following after righteousness." The strongest expression for an enormous and uncommon crime is, that it was "not so much as named among the Gentiles;" a phraseology intimating that they were familiar with crime in almost every conceivable form. It must be a very strange crime they are unacquainted with, a very shocking one which their moral feelings are revolted by.

1

We have a few specimens given us here of the kind of conduct by which the gentiles were generally characterised. They "walked in lasciviousness, lusts, excess of wine, revellings, banquetings, and abominable idolatries;" and we have a complete portrait of gentile character and manners given us in the close of the first chapter of the Epistle to the Romans, where they are represented as guilty of the most shocking and unnatural crimes, "filled with all unrighteousness, fornication, wickedness, covetousness, maliciousness; full of envy, murder, debate, deceit, malignity; whisperers, backbiters, haters of God, despiteful, proud, boasters, inventors of evil things, disobedient to parents, without understanding, covenant-breakers, without natural affection, implacable, unmerciful: knowing the judgment of God, that they who commit such things are worthy of death, yet not only doing the same, but taking pleasure in those who do them." 2 And in what did this fearful depravity of character and conduct originate? just in living to the lusts of men, and not to the will of God, allowing natural inclination, unchecked by a regard to the will of God, to be the rule and the reason of action.

In the very fact that the course of conduct forbidden is that by which the Gentiles were characterised, there is couched a strong dissuasive from it. What characterised Gentiles, could not be becoming saints. In the simple phrase "working the will of the Gentiles," you have folded up the principal motive which the Apostle Paul, in his Epistle to the Ephesians, so finely amplifies, "I say therefore, and testify in the Lord, that ye walk not as other Gentiles walk, in the vanity of their mind; having the understanding darkened, being alienated from the life of God through the ignorance that is in them, because of the blindness of their heart: who, being past feeling, have given themselves over to lasciviousness, to work wickedness with

1 Gal, ii. 20. 1 Thess. iv. 5. Rom. ix. 30. 1 Cor. v. 1.

2 Rom. i. 18-32.

greediness. But ye have not so learned Christ; if so be ye have heard him, and been taught by him, as the truth is in Jesus that ye put off, concerning the former conversation, the old man, who is corrupt according to the deceitful lusts; and be renewed in the spirit of your minds; and that ye put on the new man, which after God is created in righteousness and true holiness."

(2.) The motive suggested by these enormities themselves, to guard against the depraved principle, of which all these enormities of the Gentiles were merely the development, the making natural inclination, not the will of God, the rule and reason of conduct, is greatly strengthened by the view which the apostle takes, in the 4th verse, of the infatuation which characterised those who had given themselves up to its guidance. They were "given up to a reprobate," a wrong-judging, "mind." The very faculty of discovering truth from falsehood, and right from wrong, though not destroyed so as that they ceased to be accountable beings, was weakened and perverted. They called, and to a considerable degree thought, in reference to religious and moral subjects, "darkness light, and light darkness, evil good, and good evil, bitter sweet, and sweet bitter." As an evidence of this, "they thought it strange" that they who had "escaped the pollutions of the world, through the knowledge of the Lord and Saviour Jesus, did not run with them to the same excess of riot," and "spoke evil of them" for those very tempers and habits which ought to have drawn forth expressions of their approbation. They accounted the abandonment of those courses, in which they sought, in which they confidently, though vainly, hoped to obtain, happiness,-arrant folly! And they ran down as irreligious, and despisers of the gods, those who had been "turned from dead idols to serve the living God." They mistook their licentious indulgence for true happiness, and their

1 Eph. iv. 17-24.

2'Adóxiμov voɔ̃v. Rom. i. 29.

3 Συντρεχόντων ὑμῶν εἰς τὴν αὐτὴν ἀσωτίαν. What a striking illustration of the peculiar appropriateness of the apostle's terms ouvrez and rarías do the following lines from a Roman poet, in reference to the orgies of Bacchus, afford!

"Turba ruunt: mixtæque viris, matresque nurusque

Vulgusque, proceresque ignota ad sacra feruntur
Quis furor-

Femineæ voces, et mota insania vino

Obscenique greges, et inania tympana

OVID, Met. iii. 529, &c.

"abominable idolatries" for true religion. "Their foolish hearts were darkened." What fearful delusion was this! How thankful should Christians be for having been awakened from such a delirious dream, and made sober-minded, sound-minded, in their judgments respecting the most important and interesting of all subjects, God's character and will, and their own duty and happiness! How carefully should they guard against being in any degree again brought under the intoxicating influence of "this present evil world," operating on unbridled natural inclination; of being in any degree " entangled or overcome" by these deceitful worldly lusts, from which, through the Spirit and word of Christ, they have almost "clean escaped!"1

(3.) Another consideration, suggested by the apostle as fitted to warn Christians against "living to the lusts of men," is the awful responsibility under which they lie who follow this course. "They must give account to him who is ready to judge the quick and the dead." Men may act as if they were irresponsible; but they cannot make themselves irresponsible. They cannot escape the judgment of God; and, though they may make their lusts or their will the rule by which their actions are regulated, they cannot make them the rule by which their actions shall be judged. Their attempts to break the bands that bind them to God are unavailing, except to convert what might have been a silken cord, in the hand of God, to draw them up to heaven, into an iron chain to drag them to the judgment-seat, or adamantine fetters to bind them in the prison of hell. "For God will bring every work into judgment, with every secret thing, whether it be good or whether it be evil." "The Lord hath prepared his throne for judgment. And he shall judge the world in righteousness; he shall minister judgment to the people in uprightness." Before that tribunal all must stand, and "God will render to every man according to his works:" to those "who live to the will of God," "who, in a patient continuance in welldoing, seek for glory, honour, and immortality, he will render eternal life; but to those "who live to the lusts of men, who work the will of the Gentiles," "who are contentious, and do not obey the truth, but obey unrighteousness, he will render indignation and wrath, tribulation and anguish." "Behold, the Lord

12 Pet. ii. 19, 20.

1 1

cometh with ten thousand of his saints, to execute judgment upon all, and to convince all that are ungodly among them of all their ungodly deeds which they have ungodly committed, and of all their hard speeches which ungodly sinners have spoken against him." Who, with the judgment-seat before him, the account which must there be given, and the fearful results if that account is, that the time in the flesh has been spent in obedience to the lusts of men and the will of the Gentiles, instead of the will of God, would not tremble at the thought of allowing natural inclination, or common custom, to take the place of Divine authority as the controlling and guiding power of life? Such is, I apprehend, the force of the statement contained in the 5th verse as a motive to Christians to avoid living to the lusts of men, working the will of the Gentiles; and it is not easy to estimate the power it ought to have on every mind.

While there can be no doubt that the account here spoken of is the last account at the final judgment, it may be doubted, whether that is the judgment which God is here represented as "ready," prepared, just about to execute, on the living and the dead. Eighteen hundred years have nearly elapsed since these words were written, and that judgment has not yet taken place. The whole human race are sometimes divided into the living and the dead, meaning by those terms all who have died, and all who are to be found alive at the coming of our Lord. Thus the apostle declares that " Jesus is ordained of God to be the Judge of the quick," that is, the living, and "the dead;" and Paul orders Timothy to do his official duties" before God and the Lord Jesus Christ, who shall judge the quick and the dead at his appearance and kingdom."

But it is difficult to perceive any reason in the passage before us for referring to this division of all mankind, as either dead or living, at the day of judgment. It seems highly probable, that the word "dead," used in the first clause of the next verse as descriptive of persons to whom the gospel is preached, preached when dead, signifies those who are spiritually dead; as there can be no doubt that they who live, spoken of in the second clause, they who "live to God in the spirit," are those who are spiritually

1 Eccles. xii. 14. Psal. ix. 7, 8. Rom. ii. 6-9.
2 Τῷ ἑτοίμως ἔχοντι.
3 Acts x. 42.

Jude 14, 15.

2 Tim. iv. 1.