legal reward; and incurred every legal penalty— So that the whole of this economy must be set aside, and man be approached by some new power, and be plied with some new expedients, ere he can be restored to the holiness and the excellence in which he was created. Meanwhile it is the will of God that he should be restored; and just as He rejoiced at every step in that process, whereby the chaos of matter was evolved into a fair and orderly system-so does He rejoice in that process by which we grow unto the stature of perfect men in Christ Jesus; and He looks with intent eye on the church that. He is now forming out of the world and on every member of it-So that, released though you all be from the old legal enforcements of that commandment which is contained in ordinances, still is it the thing which His heart is set upon, and still do you testify your love to God and your desire to comply with His will, that you keep His commandments.

It is thus, and on this principle, that God wills you to be holy and just and good; but these are the very attributes which the text gives to the law, or to the commandment-so that though the old relationship between you and the law is dissolved, still it is this very law with the requirements of which you are to busy yourselves, during the whole of your abode in the world; and with the graces and accomplishments of which you must appear invested before Christ at the judgment-seat. It was written first on tables of stone, and the process

was then that you should fulfil its requisitions as your task, and be paid with heaven as a reward. It is now written by the Holy Ghost on the tablets of your heart; and the process is now that you are made to delight in the law after the inward man-and when released, as you will be by death, from the corruptions of the outward man, heaven will be open for your admission as the only place that is fitted to harbour and to regale you. You know of gold that it has two functions. With gold you may purchase a privilege, or with gold you may adorn your person. You may not be able to purchase the king's favour with gold; but he may grant you his favour, and when he requires your appearance before him, it is still in gold he may require you to be invested. And thus of the law. It is not by your own righteous conformity thereto that you purchase God's favour; for this has been already purchased by the pure gold of the Saviour's righteousness, and is presented to all who believe on Him. But still it is with your own personal righteousness, that you must be gilded and adorned. It is not the price wherewith you have bought heaven, but it is the attire in which you must enter it; and thus do we answer the question, why it is that the law is still kept up in authority and importance, and obedience to it is as strenuously required, and a conformity of character to it is held as indispensable, under the new dispensation as under the old one.

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LECTURE XLI.

ROMANS, vii, 14—25.

"For we know that the law is spiritual: but I am carnal, sold under sin. For that which I do I allow not: for what I would, that do I not; but what I hate, that do I. If then I do that which I would not, I consent unto the law that it is good. Now then, it is no more I that do it, but sin that dwelleth in me. For I know that in me (that is, in my flesh) dwelleth no good thing; for to will is present with me: but how to perform that which is good I find not. For the good that I would I do not: but the evil which I would not, that I do. Now, if I do that I would not, it is no more I that do it, but sin that dwelleth in me. I find then a law, that, when I would do good, evil is present with me. For I delight in the law of God after the inward man: but I see another law in my members warring against the law of my mind, and bringing me into captivity to the law of sin which is in my members. O wretched man that I am! who shall deliver me from the body of this death? I thank God, through Jesus Christ our Lord. So then with the mind I myself serve the law of God, but with the flesh the law of sin."

ERE I enter into detail upon these verses, let me come forth with a preliminary argument upon that which appears to be the subject of them.

There is one thing which the common experience of all, whether they be in the faith of the gospel or not, must have made perfectly familiar to them; and that is the exceeding difference whichthey have often felt, between the whole tone and temper of their mind at one time from what it is at another time,

There are many of you who can recollect, that in church, and when under the influence of a powerful demonstration from the pulpit-you caught something like the elevation and purity of heaven upon your souls; and that then when you passed into another atmosphere, whether at home in the midst of your family, or abroad among the collisions of society and business, the whole of this ethereal temperament went into utter dissipation; and you became a peevish and sensual and earthly creature. Some of you may have marked it well how differently it fares with you in the hour of your devotional retirement, and in the season of your exposure to the manifold urgencies of the world-how the heart seems to have passed as entirely into another mood by the transition, as if it had been transformed into another heart altogether -that in the one state you can rise on the wings of divine contemplation, and breathe of the air of the upper sanctuary; and in the other you sink down to the common-place of tame and ordinary life, and become as other men. We think that this may have been the finding of many who are not, in the spiritual and substantial sense of the term, Christians at all; but who, in the mere fervency of natural emotion, can be put into something like a glow of sacredness, whether by a certain power of sympathy with the preacher, or in the musings and meditative exercises of their own solitude. It will not surprise them when they are told of two principles in our moral constitution-which, by the

ascendancy of the one or the other of them for the time being, may cause the same man to appear in two characters that are not only different, but are in total and diametric opposition. Of this their own piety, meagre and capricious and merely sentimental though it be, may have given them a very strong experimental illustration: And so have convinced them how possible it is, that, in one and the same individual of our species, there may be one set of tendencies, which if followed out, would liken him to the seraph who revels among the choirs and extacies of Paradise; and also another set of tendencies, which, if also followed out, would liken him to the veriest grub-worm that moils for lucre upon earth, or finds all his satisfaction in the basest and most sordid gratifications.

But we further conceive that the same thing may be rendered palpable to those, who are so far alienated in worldliness, as to be totally unobservant of piety-whether in its private or in its public observations; and who, apart from every experience of their own frame either at church or in the closet, may still have been sensible to other exhibitions of themselves, which might reconcile them to the doctrine which we shall forthwith labour to establish. Even they have often been admitted to such a view of human nature upon their own personal character and history, as might prove how strangely compounded it is of diverse and opposite inclinations. So extensive in our day is the class of novel-readers,-that we may have the