“What words can paint those execrable times,
The subjects’ sufferings, and the tyrant’s crimes!
That blood, those murders, O ye gods! replace
On his own head, and on his impious race:
The living and the dead at his command
Were coupled face to face, and hand to hand,
Till, choked with stench, in loathed embraces tied,
The lingering wretches pined away, and died.”
Dryden.
It is to this deplorable condition of a captive that the Apostle refers, in that pathetic exclamation, “O wretched man that I am! who shall deliver me from the body of this death?” Who shall rescue me, miserable captive as I am, from this continual burden of sin which I carry about with me; and which is cumbersome and odious, as a dead carcass bound to a living body, to be dragged along with it where-ever it goes?