COMMENT.

In irrational agents, namely, the brute animals, the will is hidden or absorbed in the law. The law is their nature. In the original purity of a rational agent the uncorrupted will is identical with the law. Nay, inasmuch as a will perfectly identical with the law is one with the divine will, we may say, that in the unfallen rational agent the will constitutes the law.* But it is evident that the holy and spiritual power and light, which by a prolepsis or anticipation we have named law, is a grace, an inward perfection, and without the commanding,

*In fewer words thus: For the brute animals, their nature is their law;--for what other third law can be imagined, in addition to the law of nature, and the law of reason? Therefore: in irrational agents the law constitutes the will. In moral and rational agents the will constitutes, or ought to constitute, the law: I speak of moral agents, unfallen. For the personal will comprehends the idea, as a reason, and it gives causative force to the idea, as a practical reason. But idea with the power of realizing the same is a law; or say:--the spirit comprehends the moral idea, by virtue of its rationality, and it gives to the idea causative power, as a will. In every sense, therefore, it constitutes the law, supplying both the elements of which it consists, namely, the idea, and the realizing power. 233 binding and menacing character which belongs to a law, acting as a master or sovereign, distinct from, and existing, as it were, externally for, the agent who is bound to obey it. Now this is St. Paul's sense of the word, and on this he grounds his whole reasoning. And hence too arises the obscurity and apparent paradoxy of several texts. That the law is a law for you; that it acts on the will not in it; that it exercises an agency from without, by fear and coercion; proves the corruption of your will, and presupposes it. Sin in this sense came by the law: for it has its essence, as sin, in that counter-position of the holy principle to the will, which occasions this principle to be a law. Exactly (as in all other points) consonant with the Pauline doctrine is the assertion of John, when speaking of the re-adoption of the redeemed to be sons of God, and the consequent resumption (I had almost said re-absorption) of the law into the will

James i, 25. He says, For the law was given by Moses, but grace and truth came by Jesus Christ. That by the law St. Paul meant only the ceremonial law, is a notion that could originate only in utter inattention to the whole strain and bent of the Apostle's argument.