=Away with the thought.= [Sidenote: Ver. 16.] =Do you not know that the party to whom you present,= surrender, =yourselves bondservants,= slaves, =so as to obey= him,--=bondservants you are,= not the less for the freewill of the surrender, =of the party whom you obey;= no longer merely contractors with him, who may bargain, or retire, but his bondservants out and out; =whether of sin, to death, or of obedience, to righteousness?= (As if their _assent_ (ὑπακοὴ) to Christ, their _Amen_ to His terms of peace, acceptance, righteousness, were personified; they were now the bondsmen of this their own act and deed, which had put them, as it were, into Christ's hands for all things.) [Sidenote: Ver. 17.] =Now (δὲ) thanks be to our (τῷ) God, that you were bondmen of sin,= in legal claim, and under moral sway; yes, every one of you was this, whatever forms the bondage took upon its surface; =but you obeyed from the heart the mould of teaching to which you were handed over.[98]= They had been sin's slaves. Verbally, not really, he "_thanks God_" for that fact of the past. Really, not verbally, he "_thanks God_" for the pastness of the fact, and for the bright contrast to it in the regenerated present. They had now been "_handed over_," by their Lord's transaction about them, to another ownership, and they had accepted the transfer, "_from the heart_." It was done by Another for them, but they had said their humble, thankful _fiat_ as He did it. And what was the new ownership thus accepted? We shall find soon (ver. 22), as we might expect, that it is the mastery of God. But the bold, vivid introductory imagery has already called it (ver. 16) the slavery of "_Obedience_." Just below (vers. 19, 20) it is the slavery of "_Righteousness_," that is, if we read the word aright in its whole context, of "the Righteousness of God," His acceptance of the sinner as His own in Christ. And here, in a phrase most unlikely of all, whose personification strikes life into the most abstract aspects of the message of the grace of God, the believer is one who has been transferred to the possession of "_a mould of Teaching_." The apostolic Doctrine, the mighty Message, the living Creed of life, the Teaching of the acceptance of the guilty for the sake of Him who was their Sacrifice, and is now their Peace and Life--this truth has, as it were, grasped them as its vassals, to form them, to mould them, for its issues. It is indeed their "_tenet_." It _holds them_; a thought far different from what is too often meant when we say of a doctrine that "we _hold it_." Justification by their Lord's merit, union with their Lord's life; this was a doctrine, reasoned, ordered, verified. But it was a doctrine warm and tenacious with the love of the Father and of the Son. And it had laid hold of them with a mastery which swayed thought, affection, and will; ruling their whole view of self and of God. [Sidenote: Ver. 18.] =Now (δὲ), liberated from your (τῆς) sin, you were enslaved to the