law." Rom. 3:31. That is, when we come with penitent hearts to God, and in and through the merits of the blood of Christ receive pardon, we do in the most emphatic manner acknowledge the binding force and stability of that law. As we advance to the seventh chapter of Romans, the apostle gives us the process of a genuine conversion to God. The sinner discovers that the law of God is holy, just, and good. He finds desires springing up to obey God. He even goes so far as to will to obey, but alas! he finds in himself no good thing. He is a condemned sinner; condemned by that law of which one command reads, "Thou shalt not covet." Of that law, he says: "I had not known sin but by the law." That law slew him. That is, by the convicting power of God's Spirit he saw the excellence of the law, and his own departures from it, until "sin, by the commandment, became exceeding sinful." Under this conviction, he decides to leave sin, and obey; but, alas! he finds his sins clinging to him like a dead, putrifying body. When he "would do good, evil is present" with him; and "how to perform that which is good," he finds not. He looks to Christ, and what does he find? Does he find the moral law—by which he discovered his sins—taken away? Does he not rather find his sins forgiven, and a new nature planted in him? He is grafted as a living branch into Christ, the true vine. The old man of sin, the first husband, is dead. The sinner is married to Christ. He is born again, and, as the growth of the germ divine planted in his heart, he now yields the fruit of righteousness, which is obedience to those same laws which before showed him to be a poor, wretched man, under the bondage of condemnation, exposed to death. This deliverance is most beautifully expressed by the same apostle, in the first verses of the eighth chapter of Romans: "For what the law could not do, in that it was weak through the flesh, God sending his own Son in the likeness of sinful flesh, and for sin (by a sacrifice for sin—margin), condemned sin in the flesh; that the righteousness of the law might be fulfilled in us, who walk not after the flesh, but after the Spirit." Rom. 8:3, 4. It is in this sense that Christ has become "the end [object] of the law for righteousness to every one that believeth." Rom. 10:14. Not that when men believe the law it comes to an end, but to those who believe He becomes a means of forgiveness of sins. By faith we obtain a union with him as the head of the body of which we are members; and as virtue from Christ is imparted to us, our "fruit" is "unto holiness"—obedience to God's moral law. But now for the bearing of all this on your question. The apostles do not claim in their epistles that they are framing laws, or giving a new edition of the law of God, but they are proclaiming, through Christ, the way of pardon for transgressors of God's law. In doing this, they tell us that "by the law is the knowledge of sin," for the reason that "sin is the transgression of the law." 1 John 3:4. Thus they have taught the moral law as a whole. When these epistles were written there was no controversy as to the day of the Sabbath, the Jews, and the Christian converts still keeping the seventh day on the authority of the fourth commandment. The Jewish converts were in danger of still clinging to their ceremonies, and the law of ordinances, but the apostles, in the council at Jerusalem (recorded in Acts 15), and in their epistles, have dealt plainly with this matter, teaching that those "carnal ordinances" are "blotted out," while of the moral law, their united testimony is well expressed by St. James: "So speak ye, and so do, as they that shall be judged by the law of liberty." James 2:12. The apostles have not given any of the commandments over again; but when they quote them, it is on the authority of the law as they found it. Why is there any necessity of giving the fourth commandment over again? especially as the testimony is so plain that the ten commandments were not repealed by the death of Christ. The remaining questions in your letter will be answered next week.