Now, Jesus applied the Divine law directly to the soul, and laid its obligation upon the movements of the will and the desires. He taught that all wrong thoughts and feelings were acts of transgression against God, and as such would be visited with the penalty of the Divine law. Thus he made the law spiritual, and its penalty spiritual, and appealing to the authority of the supreme God, he laid its claims upon the naked soul. He entered the secret recesses of the spirit's tabernacle; he flashed the light of the Divine law upon the awful secrets known only to the soul itself; and with the voice of a God, he spoke to the 'I' of the mind: 'Thou shalt not will, nor desire, nor feel wickedly.' When he had thus shown that all the wrong exercises of the soul were sin against God, and that the soul was in a guilty condition, under the condemnation of the Divine law, he then directs the attention to the spiritual consequences of this guilt. These he declared to be exclusion from the kingdom and presence of God, and penalty which involved either endless spiritual suffering, or destruction of the soul itself. The punishment which he declared to be impending over the unbelieving and impenitent spirit, he portrayed by using all those figures which would lead men to apprehend the most fearful and unmitigated spiritual misery. Before the impenitent and unpardoned sinner there was the destruction of the soul and body in hell--consignment to a state of darkness, where the worm dieth not, and the fire is not quenched--cursed and banished from God into everlasting fire, prepared for the devil and his angels--agonising in flame, and refused a drop of water to mitigate the agony. Now, these figures, to the minds both of Jews and Gentiles, must have conveyed a most appalling impression of the misery that was impending over the soul, unless it was relieved from sin, and the consequent curse of the law. Jesus knew that the Jews, especially, would understand these figures as implying fearful future punishment: he therefore designed to do, what was undoubtedly accomplished in the mind of everyone that believed his instruction, which was, to produce a conviction of sin in the soul, by applying to it the requirements of the spiritual law of God, and by showing that the penalty consequent upon sin was fearful and everlasting destruction. We say, then, what everyone who has followed these thoughts must perceive to be true, that the instruction of Jesus would necessarily produce, in the mind of everyone that believed, a conviction that he was a guilty and condemned creature, and that an awful doom awaited his soul, unless he received pardon and spiritual deliverance.