ciety. It is not always in the spirit of pride that the aspirant after salvation falls in with this conception and acts upon it. He simply thinks it the direct way of going to work, that he should try to earn God's favour by deserving it; and accordingly he labours to be right, and to be even with the law, and to bring up his conduct to the level, or rather to the high standard of its acquirements. But in very proportion to his sincerity, and if his conscience be at all enlightened, the more he labours the more is he oppressed and borne down by a helpless sense of deficiency-heavy-laden under the weight of his past delinquencies, and wearied by efforts alike fruitless and fatiguing to recover his unmeasurable distance from God's lofty commandment. It is when thus toiling in pursuit of impossibilities, that the true understanding of these verses, as if by the letting in of light into his mind, dissipates every cloud, and at once releases him from his anxieties and fears. Let him only learn that the identical enterprise at which he now labours as in the very fire, the Only-begotten, the Son of the everlasting Father, Himself the Mighty God and Prince of Peace, hath already put His hand to; and left not off till, in the triumph of its full consummation, He called out that it was finished. He first had to descend from Heaven, that He might become sin for us, and in our nature bear the punishment that we should have borne; and then did ascend into heaven, having by His obedience unto death, completed the titles of entry

and inheritance there both for Himself and for all His followers-and so that, in the merit and accep tance of his high service, we might become the righteousness of God. Let the weary and the heavy-laden sinner but submit to this righteousness and be at rest-nor seek to establish for himself, that which cost the incarnation of our crucified, and has been rewarded by the exaltation of our risen Saviour. And thus would we explain these parenthetic clauses. Strength to do the thing implies a strength to wield the alone instrument that was adequate for the doing of it. I can no more make atonement for my own guilt, than I could have ascended into heaven, and there brought down Christ from above who has poured out his soul unto the death for me. I can no more earn or establish my own right to the high rewards of eternity, than I could have descended into the deep, and there brought up Christ again from the dead, who, in virtue of that everlasting righteousness, which Himself alone hath fulfilled, was raised to the Mediatorial throne which He now occupies, and from which He welcomes the approaches of all and casts out none who come unto Him. Let me say not in my heart then, that there is a strength in me commensurate to the work which called for either the one or the other of these movements; but dismissing the vain imagination, let me forthwith rejoice that it is a work no longer to do, because already done-that it is a work which has already passed through such able hands, even of

Him who travailed in the greatness of His strength for the full and finished performance of it-that a ready-made righteousness is now looking down upon me from heaven, made to my hand, and which I am simply invited to lay hold of that personally and practically, my concern now is not with the doing, but with the report of the doing-not with a work which is far above my reach, but with a word which is nigh unto me, and in which with the felt helplessness and docility of a little child, my only part is to acquiesce-a word now standing at the door, and soliciting admittance from every one of us; and which, when once it finds entrance into the home of a believer's heart, makes good his interest in the whole of this wondrous salvation.

The question and the remonstrance now held with the men of our fallen race is not, Who of you hath made good the righteousness of the law; but "Who hath believed our report, and to whom hath the arm of the Lord been revealed?"

We can at present expatiate no further on this high topic; but will conclude with a brief reply to one question which may have been suggested in the course of these explanations. If salvation, it may be asked, is brought so nigh and made so free to us, might not all exertion on our part cease? or if the righteousness of Christ be thus made to supersede the righteousness of man, then under such an economy as this, what place for human virtue is to be found? We answer, that all exertion for the object of establishing a valid and challengable

right, or of making good a judicial claim, or claim in law to the kingdom of heaven, ought to cease; and that because human virtue has no place in the titledeed, or forms no part of the price and purchasemoney by which that glorious inheritance has been earned for us. But if to be meet in law is indispensable for our entry into paradise, to be meet in character is alike indispensable; and though for the former, or the legal meetness, human virtue is of no possible avail, for the latter, or the personal meetness, human virtue is all in all. The truth is, that the doctrine of our justification, our forensic justification by faith, so far from acting as a drag or discouragement on the virtue of man, sets him at large, as if by the removal of an incubus, for the busy cultivation of all its graces, for the diligent performance and discharge of all its services. So long as the endeavour or the task, was to bring up his obedience to the standard of the jurisprudence of heaven, and so as at once to meet all the demands, and clear all the penalties of God's high and incommutable law, the burden of a felt impossibility weighed him down to inactivity and despair. But when told that the work on which in vain he might have wreaked, and wasted all his energies is already done-in other words, when told of the complete atonement and perfect righteousness of Christ-human virtue is not overborne or extinguished thereby; it is only turned away from the fulfilment of an object by itself impracticable, but now achieved in another way, and set

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forth on that more hopeful career along which it presses forward by successive footsteps from grace to grace, till it appears perfect before God in Zion. Man could not, in the strength of his own energies, either implement the obligations of God's perfect, or far less sustain so as to liquidate the penalties of God's violated law. But man can, with the aids of the all-powerful and regenerating Spirit, advance, and that indefinitely his own holiness. The righteousness of faith, so far from operating as an extinguisher on the righteousness of works, affords the only opening by which, under the impulse of gratitude, and the inspiration of a heaven-born hope, to enter with alacrity and comfort on the labours of a new obedience. "I am thy servant, I am thy servant, thou hast loosed my bonds, I will offer the sacrifices of thanksgiving, and call on the name of the Lord. I will pay my vows now unto the Lord in the presence of all his people." Justification is not the landing-place of Christianity. It is but the commencement, or the starting-post -where the emancipated children of love and liberty break forth on all the activities of a willing service. And so in our text, confession with the mouth is joined as the inseparable accompaniment to faith in the heart-such a confession as many of you witnessed yesterday1-Only, however, a good confession, if your walk and conversation afterwards be such as becometh the gospel of Christ. "Why ye me Lord, Lord, and do not the things which 1 Delivered on the day after a Communion Sabbath.

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