tualize my subject at once, and to bring home its application to ourselves, their bondage was not so terrible as the bondage of every man and woman born into the world. Their bondage was temporal,—ours is spiritual; they were born the slaves of Pharaoh,-we are born the slaves of sin; they were in the power of the Egyptians,-you and I are by nature in the power of the devil and his angels.

Now, dear friends, before I go farther, I would beseech you to remember my object in publishing these lectures. It is not to take advantage of my position, and say harsh things; but to try and do good to souls. And if I seem to be uncharitable, or to speak unlovingly, do me the justice to believe I have no desire to be either. I would beg you also not to reject what I say upon your own ideas of truth, but to try my statements by the written Word of God; and before you so try them, pray God, for Christ's sake, to give you His Holy Spirit to open your understanding to understand the Scrip

tures. Let me entreat you to remember this request.

In what I am about to say, my desire is to awaken the attention of lost sinners; and my prayer to God is, that each sinner, into whose hands this book may fall, may be arrested by my words, and aroused to a sense of his position. The wrath of God abideth on him, and he does not feel it: but, if possible, I would make him feel it, for until he does, he will care nothing for the salvation that is provided for him. If there was no hope for him, I would leave him alone, and let him go on undisturbed by me to his miserable ending: but there is hope for him, though he is the greatest sinner out of hell,-for the Scripture says, that "to him that is joined to all the living there is hope." (Eccles. ix. 4.) Therefore, so far from leaving him, I would cry to him, as Paul cried to the Ephesians, "Awake, thou that sleepest, and arise from the dead, and Christ shall give thee light."

I say then, again, that no Egyptian bondage

was ever nearly so cruel, so degrading, or so hopeless, as the bondage in which you and I were born, the fallen sons of Adam. Satan is the prince of this world; and every child of Adam is born, not into the kingdom of God, but into the kingdom of Satan. He is born his subject, his slave. His reason, his senses, his perceptions, are all under his influence: he not only acts, and speaks, but actually thinks as he would have him: he can neither see, nor hear, nor feel, but as he teaches him. So total is his bondage, and so servile his subjection, that when God says one thing, and the devil another, he believes the devil, and makes God a liar!

Remember, I am not speaking of earthly, but of spiritual bondage; and God's Word bears me out in the statement, that so thorough is man's captivity to Satan by nature, and so absolute his rule over him, that for all the purposes for which God sent him into the world, he is altogether and thoroughly dead. It is true, he has natural eyesight, natural hear

ing, and all the other natural senses; he can do anything to promote his own interests in the things of time and sense; he has been known to gain the whole world by his own wisdom and power, and then sit down and weep because there were no more worlds to conquer: but the natural man has no spiritual life or light, not one particle.

No man ever yet followed the guidance of his natural spirit from his birth to his grave, who did not dishonour God, and lose his own soul. All spiritual wisdom left him when God left him at the fall; and so the Scripture tells us (I Corinthians ii. 14):-" The natural man receiveth not the things of the Spirit of God; for they are foolishness unto him:" and again, that "he cannot know them, because they are spiritually discerned." He has by nature no Holy Spirit to teach him. He has the spirit that is in the world, and so can discern worldly things, but he has no Holy Spirit, and so cannot discern spiritual things; and therefore, when I talk to you, who really

are deaf, and blind, and captive, about your deafness and your blindness, and about your worse than Egyptian bondage—though it is a perfectly true picture of what you really are -yet I seem to you as one that is speaking folly.

Such is the bondage in which Satan holds the natural man, that not only has he no truth in him, but he has actually no power to receive the truth when it is put before him. He has no more spiritual power to receive spiritual food than a corpse has to receive natural food. He is dead-not naturally—Adam did not die naturally in the day that he sinned, he lived many hundred years afterwards; but he died SPIRITUALLY, and all his seed in him, so that every natural man is born dead SPIRITUALLY.

Dear friends, these are solemn statements, and surely they should make every unconverted man who hears them, THINK. Do you feel no interest in your heart about your eternal future? If you do not, should not the very fact that you do not, alarm you? Whose