couragements, or struggling with the difficulties peculiar to the one or the other of them.

I. Let us first take a view of the state of matters at the entrance of the two ways-when man, under the first effectual visitation of earnestness, resolves to go forth in busy search and prosecution after the good of his eternity. And here a consideration meets us at the very outset of the way of doing; and that is whether the condition of eternal life in that way be not already fallen from, and so the eternal life itself already forfeited. It is he who doeth all things that shall live. Have we hitherto done all things? Are we in circumstances now, for making a clear outset on this enterprise for heaven? It is not enough that there be the purpose of universal, of unreserved, obedience in all time coming. There must have been the performance of an obedience alike universal, alike unreserved, throughout all the stages of the history that is past. Can the memory and the conscience of any man living depone to this? Can he lay his hand upon his heart, and say without misgivingthat throughout all the successive days of his past existence in the world, there has ascended to heaven the continuous incense of a pure and sinless offering? Has he altogether loved God as he ought? Has he altogether lived among his fellows as he ought? Has his hand done all that it might in the services of benevolence? Has his heart been filled as it should have been-if not with the sensibilities, at least with the purposes and the aspira

tions of piety? Has the will of the Creator, in no one instance, made place for his own waywardness? Has that law, every jot and tittle of which must be fulfilled, had this unfailing this unswerving this unexcepted fulfilment rendered to it by him? Can he appeal to every hour of his by-gone history; and confidently speak of each, having, without one flaw or scruple of deviation, been pervaded by that loyalty of principle, by that grateful recollection, by those duteous conformities of a heart ever glowing with affection and of a hand ever glowing with activity, which the creature owes to the Creator who gave him birth? These are questions which must be settled, ere he can advance one hopeful footstep on this way to heaven by the deeds of the law. Should there be one single deed either of sin or of deficiency to soil the retrospect of his past experience, it nullifies the enterprise. By a single act of disobedience the power of making good our eternity in this way is gone, and gone irretrievably. Heaven may still become ours by a deed of mercy. But that it should be ours by a judicial award of law, and of law sitting in cognisance over our deserts and our doings, is a thing impossible.

If the conscience be at all enlightened, this will be felt as a difficulty which overhangs the entrance of the proposed journey to heaven in the way of obedience. The sense of a debt which no effort of ours can possibly lessen, and far less extinguish— the sense of a guilt that by ourselves is wholly inexpiable-the sense of an impassable gulf between

us and God, seeing that when viewed as our Lawgiver and ere reparation for the injury of His outraged law shall have been made, His attributes of truth and justice and holiness unite to lay an interdict on any terms or treaty of reconciliation-these are what paralyse the movements of a conscious sinner; and just because they paralyse his hopes. The likest thing to it in human experience is, when a decreet of bankruptcy without a discharge has come forth on the man who has long struggled with his difficulties, and is now irrecoverably sunk under the weight of them. There is an effectual drag laid upon this man's activity. The hand of diligence is forthwith slackened when all the fruits of diligence are thus liable to be seized upon-and that by a rightful claim of such magnitude as no possible strenuousness can meet or satisfy. The processes of business come to a stand or are suspended-when others are standing by ready to devour the proceeds of business so soon as they are realised, or at least to divert them from the use of the unhappy man and the good of his family. The spirit of industry dies within him when he finds that he can neither make ought for himself, nor, from the enormous mass of his obligations, make any sensible advances towards his liberation. In these circumstances he loses all heart and all hope for exertion of any sort; and either breaks forth into recklessness or is chilled into inactivity by despair. And it is precisely so in the case of a sinner towards God. If he feel as he ought, he

feels as if the mountain of his iniquities had separated him from his Maker. There is the barrier of an unsettled controversy between them, which, do his uttermost, he cannot move away; and the strong though secret feeling of this is a chief ingredient in the lethargy of nature. There is a haunting jealousy of God which keeps us at a distance from Him. There is the same willing forgetfulness of Him, that there is of any other painful or disquieting object of contemplation. God, when viewed singly as the Lawgiver, is also viewed as the Judge who must condemn as the rightful creditor whose payments or whose penalties are alike overwhelming. We are glad to make our escape from all this dread and discouragement into the sweet oblivion of Nature. The world becomes our hiding-place from the Deity -and in despair of making good our eternity by our works, we work but for the interests of time; and, because denizens of earth, we, estranged from the hopes of heaven, never once set forth in good earnest upon its preparations.

These are the impossibilities, which, at the very commencement, beset this way of making good your eternity by your doings; and from which there is no release to the spiritual bankrupt, till the gospel puts its discharge into his hands. By this gospel there is a deed of amnesty made known, to which all are welcome. There is revealed to us a surety who hath taken the whole of our debt upon Himself—having fulfilled the ample acquittance of all our obligations, and so made us clear with God. Even

to the worst and most worthless of sinners the offer of this great deliverance is made. It is our faith in the reality of this offer which constitutes our acceptance of it; and whereas in the way of doing, the very entrance was impracticably closed against us—this initial obstruction is entirely moved aside from the way of believing. In the language of the Psalmist, the bond is loosed; and restored to hope, we are restored to alacrity in the bidden services and preparations of eternity. With the conscience lightened, `through the peace-speaking blood of Jesus, of its guilt and of its fears-we are made to walk with the feeling, with the hopeful inspiration of men at liberty. can start anew in that enterprise for heaven, on which but for the ransom of the New Testament, there lies a burden of utter impotency and despair. Like the emancipated debtor to whom the fruits of all his future toil and diligence are now fully assured to him, a weight is taken off from the activities of nature. Our labour is no longer in vain-because now it is labour in the Lord; and every effort becomes a step in advance towards heaven, when thus the old obedience of the law is exchanged for the new obedience of the gospel.

The debt is cancelled; and we

II. But we might imagine the conscience of man not to be enlightened at the outset of his religious earnestness; and that therefore, instead of the stillness of his despair under a sense of nature's insufficiency for the righteousness of the law, he actually sets forth in the pursuit of this righteousness,