right, they, by giving an obedient hand to the work of righteousness, rectified their own moral frames; restored to themselves that image of holiness in which they were originally formed; became saints in taste and principle, from being at the first rather only saints of performance. The obedience of the hand reached a sanctifying influence upon their hearts; and a perseverance in holy conduct made them at length to be holy creatures. This is the very process laid down in the verse before us. In virtue of having become servants to God, they had their fruit unto holiness. We have no doubt that there is a germ of holiness, at the very outset of the new life of the new creature in Christ Jesus. But still a coarser principle of it, if I may be allowed the expression, may predominate at the first; and the finer principles of it may grow into establishment afterwards. The good things may be done, somewhat doggedly as it were, at the will of another; but the assiduous doing of the hand may at length carry along with it the delight of the heart, and the same good things be done at our own will. It may become at length a more spontaneous and pleasurable service; and this certainly marks a stage of higher and more saintly advancement in personal Christianity. It evinces a growing assimilation to God-who does what is right, not in force of another's authority; but who does what is right, in force of the free and original propensities of his own nature to all that is excellent. And in like manner does it forward our resemblance to

Him—when, on our first becoming subject to His imperative control, we at length like the service which we aforetime laboured in-when that way, to which at His word of command we have betaken ourselves, becomes a way of pleasantness—when that path, to which we constrained our footsteps because He had prescribed it, is felt by us to be a path of peace. By such a blessed progress of sanctification as this, do we at length cease to be servants and become sons; the Spirit of adoption is shed upon us; and we feel, even here, somewhat of the glorious liberty of God's own children. A thing of labour is transformed into a thing of love. Our duty becomes our inclination. And, by the heart and spirit being enlisted thereinto, what was before of constraint is now of congeniality and most willing accord. The feeling of bondage wears away; and that which might once have been felt as a burden, is now felt as the very beatitude of the soul. It is thus that the process of the text is realised; and when the transition is so made that the work of servitude becomes a work of felicity and freedom-then is it that man becomes like unto God, and holy even as He is holy.

One most important use to be drawn from this argument is, that you are not to suspend the work of literal obedience, till you are prepared by the renewal that has taken effect on the inner man, for rendering unto God a thoroughly spiritual obedience. There are some who are positively afraid of putting forth their hand on the work of

the commandments at all, till they are qualified for the service of God on sound and evangelical principles. Now, in every case, it is right to be always doing what is agreeable to the will of God. There may be a mixture at first of the spirit of bondage -there may be a remainder and taint of the leaven of legalism-there may be so much of nature's corrupt ingredient in it at the outset, that the apostle would say of these babes in Christ who had just set forth on their new career, I speak unto you not as unto spiritual but as unto carnal.' Yet still it is good to give yourselves over, amid all the crude and embryo and infant conceptions of a young disciple, to the direct service of God. Break loose from your iniquities at this moment. Turn you to all that is palpably on the side of God's law. Struggle your way to the performance of what is virtuous, through all those elements of obscurity and disorder which may fluctuate long in the bosom of a convert. Do plainly what God bids, and on the direct impulse too of God's authority; and the fruit of your thus entering upon His service, will be the perfecting at length of your own holiness such a holiness as shall be without spot and wrinkle-purified from the flaw of legal bondage, or of mercenary selfishness-a holiness that finds its enjoyment in the service itself, and not in any remuneration that is distinct from or subsequent to the service-a holiness that is upheld, not by the future hope of the great reward which is to come after the keeping of the

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commandments; but a holiness upheld by the present experience, that in the keeping of the commandments there is a great reward.

Yet mark it well, my brethren, that not till you are made free from sin, can you enter even upon the first rudiments of a fruitful and acceptable obedience-not till you are delivered from him, who, like the executioner for a debt, could at any time seize upon all your gains, and thus render all care and effort and industry on your part of no avail. The analogy holds between him who has the power of pursuing you with diligence, because of what you owe; and him who has the power of inflicting death as the condemnatory sentence upon you, because of what you have incurred as a transgressor of the law. The man who has not gotten his discharge, is bereft of every motive to economy or to labour-because the creditor is on his watch, to lay hold of the entire proceeds; and, by every movement he makes towards him, he can add to the expense of the business, and so plunge him into more hopeless and irretrievable circumstances than before. And so it is of the great adversary of human souls-invested with power as the grim executioner of the sentence; and invested also with the power of aggravating that sentence, by the corrupt sway that he has over the affections of his enslaved votaries, by the command which belongs to him as the god of this world over all the elements of temptation, by his ill-gotten empire in the hearts of the fallen

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posterity of a fallen ancestor. To be freed from this hateful tyranny, there must be recourse to Christ as your surety-so that this arch-bailiff shall no longer have the right to pursue you, for the heavy arrears of all the negligence and all the misconduct that are past; and there must also be recourse upon Christ as your strength and sanctifier-so that this arch-betrayer, shall be as little able to subjugate you to the power of sin as to exact from you its punishment. So that faith, and justification by faith, and our interest in that promise of the Spirit which is given to faith-this after all forms the great introductory step to a life of hearty, because to a life of hopeful obedience. A more literal obedience at the first, may be the steppingstone to a more spiritual obedience afterwardsbut faith is the essential stepping-stone to all obedience. Without faith, the sense of a debt, from which you are not yet free, will ever continue to haunt and to paralyse you. Without faith, God remains the object, not of love, but of dread; and thus an immovable interdict is laid upon the service of the affections. Without faith, all the helps and facilities of obedience are withheld from the soul; and the weary unproductive struggle of him who is not yet freed from the law which is the strength of sin, terminates, either in a deceitful formality, or in the abandonment of a task now felt to be impracticable, or finally in the utter wretchedness of despair. Faith opens a gate of conveyance through all these obstructions. It cancels the