through the power of His own grace, that He Himself may be pleased with your loving and faithful service. Nay, more! Though you may never be able to see it, and though you may to the last be humbled to the dust for your shortcomings, He may still fulfil in you, and towards you, the prayer which St. Paul prayed for the Thessalonians: ‘That the name of our Lord Jesus Christ may be glorified in you and ye in Him, according to the grace of our God and the Lord Jesus Christ.’ Aim then at the highest possible standard. Never settle down contented with anything that falls short of it. Never consider that your case is too difficult for the Lord, the Deliverer, but trust Him so to abide in you with power, that His own words may be fulfilled: ‘Herein is my Father glorified, that ye bear much fruit.’ EXPOSITORY NOTES. NOTE A.—ROMANS, VII. I BELIEVE that a great deal of the difficulty felt respecting the seventh chapter of the Epistle to the Romans, arises from a mistaken idea that the different chapters are descriptive of consecutive periods of the Christian life. Persons are supposed to be justified in the fifth, brought to a new life in the sixth, and to be living in perfect peace in the eighth, and thus the conflict of the seventh is thought to be out of place. But surely there is no such consecutiveness to be found in the passage. Both the sixth and seventh chapters are an answer to the question in the first verse of the sixth, ‘Shall we continue in sin?’ And this answer is founded on the principle that we must not do so, because such conduct would be inconsistent with the great change that has taken place in us. This change is then described under three figures. (1.) A death unto sin through the death of our Lord Jesus Christ. (Ch. vi. 3–15.) (2.) A change of service. (Ch. vi. 16–23.) (3.) A release from the law, as a woman is loosed from the law of her husband when he dies (Ch. vii. 1–6); the result of which is that, therefore, we are now free from condemnation, etc. (Ch. viii. 1). The ‘therefore’ of this verse depends on the deliverance described in ch. vii. 6, and the intermediate passage (ver. 7–25) is a parenthesis. It is in the parenthesis that the difficulty is supposed to lie; and by the place which that parenthesis occupies in the argument that it must be explained. In his argument the Apostle had connected sin with the law, which of course suggested the idea that the law was sinful; an idea which would have been shocking to Jewish minds, and was entirely contrary to his own. In accordance, therefore, with his usual style, he broke off from the direct line of his argument, in order to protect the truth against any such objection; and thus introduced the parenthesis. This consists of two questions, with their respective answers.