But you will say, 'There is one word in the text which you overlook, the word, your: Except your righteousness shall exceed,' &c.

Answ. What God freely bestows on us, becomes ours: we receive the abundance of grace, and the gift of righteousness, Rom. v. 17. And God, who gives this righteousness to us, calls it ours: "This is the heritage of the servants of the Lord, and their righteousness is of me, saith the Lord." They have no righteousness but what is of me, saith the Lord; and that is an imputed one, freely given, and freely bestowed. And Christ himself shews this plainly in the chapter out of which my text is taken; and that any man may clearly see that ever was enlightened at all. "Blessed," saith Christ, "are they which do hunger and thirst after righteousness, for they shall be filled." Which shews three things;

First, That these poor souls had no righteousness of their own; feeling which made them hunger and thirst.

Secondly, The righteousness there meant comes by promise: They shall be filled.

Thirdly, That righteousness must be perfect and complete, answering every demand of law and justice; and every end and expectation of the distressed sinner; such as, delivering him from guilt and wrath, fear and torment, death and damnation. And it must procure God's favour here, and secure glory hereafter, otherwise the sinner never can be satisfied, much less filled with it.

This is the righteousness meant in my text, that far enough exceeds the righteousness of the scribes and Pharisees. And this righteousness gives right and title to the kingdom: for Christ is made of God unto us wisdom, righteousness, sanctification, and redemption. No other righteousness, reader, shall ever admit any soul living, either into the kingdom of grace, or the kingdom of glory. In this raiment of needle-work shall the church be brought unto the King, and shall enter into the King's palace; and they that are not found in this wedding-garment shall be cast into outer darkness. Reader, beware of the leaven of the Pharisees, which is hypocrisy.

I come now to shew the righteousness of the scribes and Pharisees, and the excellency of Christ's righteousness, which is unto all, and upon all, that believe. The scribes were writers and expounders of the law and the prophets, and pretended to very extraordinary wisdom. The Pharisees were very observant of the lesser matters of the law, in which their self-righteousness chiefly stood; and they pretended to no small degree of sanctity, on which account others were not allowed to touch the hem of their robes. The scribe and the Pharisee were the two first, in the judgment of the poor and ignorant Jews, that would enter the kingdom of heaven; but Christ displaces them, and sets the publican and the harlot in their room. They walked in long robes, and were very desirous of it; they made many

long prayers; they observed numbers of feasts and fasts; they loved greetings in the markets, and chief rooms at feasts; they appeared very righteous before men, and loved to be called Rabbi, Rabbi; they practised a deal of washing of feet, hands and head, cups and platters; they compassed sea and land to make converts, and sounded a trumpet before them when they gave their alms; they bound grievous burdens on men's shoulders, but never touched one part of the load; they got into Moses's seat, to give laws, and contradicted in life all that they said by word. "They say, and do not.” This was their righteousness; and now you shall see their zeal in defence of it. They were desperate enemies to the power of godliness, the truth of the gospel, and the wisdom that comes from above. They were implacable opposers of antinomians, bad spirits, and all that were not the professed disciples of Moses. They ridiculed the God of heaven, calling him Beelzebub; they cursed the objects of his choice, blasphemed the Holy Ghost, and required a sign from heaven. They traduced Paul as profaning the temple, and giving licence to sin, by preaching up evil that good might come; and with teaching people to forsake Moses, with being a heretic, a turner of the world upside down, a mover of sedition, and a ringleader of the sect of the Nazarenes: but after the way which they called heresy, so worshipped Paul the God of his fathers. They opposed the Apostles in every city, in every town,

in every synagogue, and in every house, with the doctrine of the law as the only rule of life; "Except ye be circumcised and keep the law of Moses, ye cannot be saved." They came in privily to spy out the saints' liberty, that they might bring them into bondage. They opposed the gospel, rent their clothes, cast dust into the air, gnashed their teeth at the saints, resisted and blasphemed, and abused the name of the Saviour upon madmen and devils; and all this in zeal for the law, for purity, and for inherent holiness. They went about to establish their own righteousness, as those do who exclude the righteousness of Christ from my text; and so stumbled at the Rock of ages, were broken off by unbelief, and scattered into all winds, and remain to this day without a king, without a priest, without a prophet, without an ephod, without a teraphim, and without a sacrifice. And all that they got by their religion, and for their pretended zeal for the law, was the destruction of themselves, as a church, state, and nation; and, what is more dreadful, they imprecated and procured the innocent blood of Christ and the curse of heaven upon their own offspring, from age to age, yea, to more than twenty generations. But I have no call to go any further in describing a Pharisee, for the church of Christ swarms alive with them; and in this glass the reader, if he has any eyes, may see his hundreds, if not his thousands.

But the righteousness of the saints far enough

exceeds the righteousness of the scribes: for they receive the blessing from the Lord, and righteousness from the God of their salvation. "This is the generation of them that seek him, that seek thy face, O God of Jacob," Psalm xxiv. 5, 6. The righteousness that God bestows on his saints is a divine, a perfect, and an everlasting one; and without a perfect righteousness no soul can stand in God's presence, or find access to him in this world: for, if we have access with confidence, it is by the faith of Christ; and if we enter heaven, and see God's face with acceptance in the world to come, it is because we are made righteous in our elder brother, and hold the truth as it is in him. "Open ye the gates, that the righteous nation which keepeth the truth may enter in." This is the wisdom of God, and the glory of the saints; the other is the invention of men, and the snare of fools: but "their rock is not as our Rock, our enemies themselves being judges." So I preach, and so you believe; and neither such preaching, nor such believing, shall ever be in vain in the Lord.

We have seen what the Redeemer says of the weighty matters of the law; which is the first table, and which respects God: and we find those things are wrought in all the saints.

We have seen, likewise, the lesser matters, or the least commandments; which are the second table, and respect brethren and neighbours: and we find that they are the Pharisees in heart, and