union with God; that is the present gift that the love of God holds
out to every one of us. That life, in its very incompleteness here,
carries in itself the prophecy of its own completion hereafter, in a
higher form and world, just as truly as the bud is the prophet of the
flower and of the fruit; just as truly as a half-reared building is
the prophecy of its own completion when the roof tree is put upon it.
The men that here have, as we all may have if we choose, the gift of
life eternal in the knowledge of God through Jesus Christ His Son,
must necessarily tend onwards and upwards to a region where Death is
beneath the horizon, and Life flows and flushes the whole heaven.
Brother! do you put out your whole hand to take the poisoned gift
from the claw-like hand of that hideous Queen; or do you turn and
take the gift of life eternal from the hands of the queenly Grace?

III. How this queenly Grace gives her gifts.

You observe that the Apostle, as is his wont--I was going to
say--gets himself entangled in a couple of almost parenthetical or,
at all events, subsidiary sentences. I suppose when he began to write
he meant to say, simply, 'as Sin hath reigned unto death, so Grace
might reign unto life.' But notice that he inserts two
qualifications: 'through righteousness,' 'through Jesus Christ our
Lord.' What does he mean by these?

He means this, first, that even that great love of God, coming
throbbing straight from His heart, cannot give eternal life as a mere
matter of arbitrary will. God can make His sun to shine and His rain
to fall, 'on the unthankful and on the evil,' and if God could, God
would give eternal life to everybody, bad and good; but He cannot.
There must be righteousness if there is to be life. Just as sin's