cal form of government." These are doubtless so many reasons for praising God, as they may be so many helps to holiness. But they are not holiness itself. And if they are separate from it, they will profit me nothing. Nay, they will leave me the more without excuse, and exposed to the greater damnation. Therefore if I build my hope upon this foundation, I am still building upon the sand.

2. You cannot, you dare not rest here. Upon what next will you build your hope of salvation? Upon your innocence? Upon your doing no harm? Your not wronging or hurting any one? Well; allow this plea to be true. You are just in all your dealings: you are a downright honest man. You pay every man his own: you neither cheat, nor extort: you act fairly with all mankind. And you have a conscience towards God: you do not live in any known sin. Thus far is well. But still it is not the thing. You may go thus far, and yet never come to heaven. When all this harmlessness flows from a right principle, it is the least part of the religion of Christ. But in you it does not flow from a right principle, and therefore is no part at all of religion. So that in grounding your hope of salvation on this, you are still building upon the sand.

3. Do you go farther yet? Do you add to the doing no harm, the attending all the ordinances of God? Do you at all opportunities partake of the Lord's supper? Use public and private prayer? Fast often? Hear and search the scriptures, and meditate thereon? These things likewise ought you to have done, from the time you first set your face towards heaven. Yet these things also are nothing, being alone. They are nothing without the weightier matters of the law. And those you have forgotten. At least you experience them not; faith, mercy, and the love of God: holiness of heart: heaven opened in the soul. Still therefore you build upon the

sand.

4. Over and above all this, are you zealous of good works? Do you, as you have time, do good to all men? Do you feed the hungry, and cloath the naked, and visit the fatherless and widow in their affliction? Do you visit those that are sick? Relieve them that are in prison? Is any a stranger, and you take him in? Friend, come

up

up higher. Do you prophesy in the name of Christ? Do you preach the truth as it is in Jesus? And does the influence of his Spirit attend your word, and make it the power of God unto salvation? Does he enable you to bring sinners from darkness to light, from the power of Satan unto God? Then go and learn what thou hast so often taught, By grace ye are saved through faith. Not by works of righteousness which we have done, but of his own mercy he saveth us. Learn to hang naked upon the cross of Christ, counting all thou hast done but dung and dross. Apply to him just in the spirit of the dying thief, of the harlot with her seven devils. Else thou art still on the sand, and after saving others, thou wilt lose thy own soul.

5. Lord! increase my faith, if I now believe! else, give me faith, though but as a grain of mustard-seed!But what doth it profit, if a man says he hath faith, and hath not works? Can that faith save him? O, no! That faith which hath not works, which doth not produce both inward and outward holiness, which does not stamp the whole image of God on the heart, and purify us as he is pure that faith which does not produce the whole of the religion described in the foregoing chapters, is not the faith of the gospel, not the Christian faith, not the faith which leads to glory. O, beware of this, above all other snares of the devil, of resting on unholy, unsaving faith! if thou layest stress on this, thou art lost for ever: thou still buildest thy house upon the sand. When the rain descends, and the floods come, it will surely fall, and great will be the fall of it.

6. Now, therefore, build thou upon a rock. By the grace of God, know thyself. Know and feel, that thou wast shapen in wickedness, and that in sin did thy mother conceive thee and yet thou thyself hast been heaping sin upon sin, ever since thou couldst discern good from evil. Own thyself guilty of eternal death and renounce all hope of ever being able to save thyself. Be it all thy hope, to be washed in his blood, and purified by his Spirit, who himself bore all thy sins, in his own body upon the tree. And if thou knowest he hath taken away thy sins, so much the more abase thyself before him, in a continued sense of thy total dependance on him for every good No. IX. thought

3 L.

thought and word and work, and of thy utter inability to all good, unless he water thee every moment..

7. Now weep for your sins, and mourn after God till he turns your heaviness into joy. And even then weep with them that weep: and for them that weep not for themselves. Mourn for the sins and miseries of mankind: and see, but just before your eyes, the immense ocean of eternity, without a bottom or a shore; which has already swallowed up millions of millions of men, and is gaping to devour them that yet remain. See here the house of God, eternal in the heavens; there, hell and destruction without a covering. And thence learn the importance of every moment, which just appears, and is gone for ever!

8. Now add to your seriousness, meekness of wisdom. Hold an even scale as to all your passions, but in particular, as to anger, sorrow and fear. Calmly acquiesce in whatsoever is the will of God. Learn in every state wherein you are, therewith to be content. Be mild to the good: be gentle toward all men ; but especially toward the evil and the unthankful. Beware not only of outward expressions of anger, such as calling thy brother Raca, or thou fool! but of every inward emotion contrary to love, though it go no farther than the heart. Be angry at sin, as an affront offered to the Majesty of heaven; but love the sinner still like our Lord, who looked round about upon the Pharisees with anger, being grieved for the hardness of their hearts. He was grieved at the sinners, angry at the sin. Thus be thou angry and sin not.

--

9. Now do thou hunger and thirst, not for the meat that perisheth, but for that which endureth unto everlasting life.Trample under foot the world and the things of the world; all these riches, honours, pleasures. What is the world to thee? Let the dead bury their dead: but follow thou after the image of God. And beware of quenching that blessed thirst, if it is already excited in thy soul, by what is vulgarly called religion, a poor, dull farce, a religion of form, of outside show, which leaves the heart still cleaving to the dust, as earthly and sensual as ever. Let nothing satisfy thee but the power of godliness, but a religion that is spirit and life; the dwelling in God, and God in thee; the being an inhabitant of eternity: the

entering

entering in by the blood of sprinkling within the veil, and sitting in heavenly places with Christ Jesus.

10. Now, seeing thou canst do all things through Christ strengthening thee, be merciful, as thy Father in heaven is merciful. Love thy neighbour as thyself. Love friends and enemies as thy own soul. And let thy love be long-suffering, and patient towards all men. Let it be kind, soft, benign: inspiring thee with the most amiable sweetness, and the most fervent and tender affection. Let it rejoice in the truth, wheresoever it is found, the truth that is after godliness. Enjoy whatsoever brings glory to God, and promotes peace and good-will among men. In love cover all things; of the dead and the absent speaking nothing but good: believe all things, which may any way tend to clear your neighbour's character: hope all things, in his favour, and endure all things, triumphing over all opposition. For true love never faileth, in time or in eternity.

11. Now, be thou pure in heart; purified through faith from every unholy affection, cleansing thyself from all filthiness of flesh and spirit, and perfecting holiness in the fear of God. Being through the power of his grace, purified from pride by deep poverty of spirit, from anger, from every unkind or turbulent passion, by meekness and merciful'ness, from every desire but to please and enjoy God, by hungering and thirsting after righteousness; now love the Lord thy God, with all thy heart andwith all thy strength.

12. In a word. Let thy religion be the religion of the heart. Let it lie deep in thy inmost soul. Be thou little and base, and mean and vile, (beyond what words can express) in thine own eyes; amazed and humbled to the dust, by the love of God which is in Christ Jesus. Be serious. Let the whole stream of thy thoughts, words, and actions flow from the deepest, conviction, that thou standest on the edge of the great gulf, thou and all the children of men, just ready to drop in, either into everlasting glory, or everlasting burnings. Let thy soul be filled with mildness, gentleness, patience, long-suffering towards all men: at the same time that all which is in thee is athirst for God, the living God; longing to awake up after his likeness, and to be satisfied with it. Be thou a lover of God and of all mankind. In this Spirit

3 M 2

Spirit do and suffer all things. Thus shew thy faith by thy works: thus do the will of thy Father which is in beaAnd as sure as thou now walkest with God on earth, thou shalt also reign with him in glory.

SERMON XXXIV.

THE ORIGINAL, NATURE, PROPERTY, AND USE OF THE LAW.

ROM. vii. 12.

Wherefore the law is holy, and the commandment holy, and just, and good.

I.

•PERHAPS there are few subjects within the whole

compass of religion, so little understood as this. The reader of this epistle is usually told, by the law, St. Paul means the Jewish law and so apprehending himself to have no concern therewith, passes on without farther thought about it. Indeed some are not satisfied with this account: but observing the epistle is directed to the Romans, thence infer, that the apostle in the beginning of this chapter, alludes to the old Roman law. But as they have no more concern with this, than with the ceremonial law of Moses, so they spend not much thought, on what they suppose is occasionally mentioned, barely to illustrate another thing.

2. But a careful observer of the apostle's discourse, will not be content with these slight explications of it. And the more he weighs the words, the more convinced he will be that "St. Paul by the law" mentioned in this chapter, does not mean either the ancient law of Rome, or the ceremonial law of Moses. This will clearly appear to all who attentively consider the tenor of his discourse. He begins the chapter, "Know ye not, brethren (for I speak to them that know the law," to them who have been instructed therein from their youth) "That the law hath dominion over a man, as long as he liveth?"