One would have thought, that the obvious answer to all this sophistry, was, that if you take away from God the prerogative of judging and condemning and inflicting vengeance, you take away from Him all the ultimate glory which He ever can derive, from the sinfulness of His own creatures that the very way in which the presence of sin sets forth the sacredness of the Deity, is by the abhorrence that He manifests towards it that the unrighteousness of man commendeth the righteousness of God, only by God dealing with this unrighteousness, in the capacity of a judge and of a lawgiver-that if you strip Him of the power of punishment, you strip Him of the power of rendering such a vindication of His attributes, as will make Him venerable and holy in the eyes of His own subjects-that, in fact, there remains no possibility of God fetching any triumph to Himself, from the rebelliousness of His creatures, if He cannot proceed in the work of moral government against their rebellion. And thus, if God may not find fault, and if His judicial administration of the world is to be overthrown, there will none of that glory come to Him out of human sinfulness, which the gainsayer of our text pleads in mitigation of human sinfulness.

This Paul might have said. But it is instructive to perceive, that, instead of this, he satisfies himself with simply affirming the first principles of the question. He counts it enough barely to state, that if there was anything in the reason ing of his opponent, then God's right of judging the world would be taken away. He holds this to be a full condemnation of the whole sophistry, that, if it were admitted, how then could God judge the world? With the announcement of what is plain to a man of plain understanding, does he silence an argument which can only proceed from a man of subtle understanding. And in reply to the maxim, 'let us do evil that good may come,' he enters into no depths of jurisprudence or moral argumentation upon the subject; but simply affirms that the condemnation of all who should do so were a righteous

condemnation.

It is not for us to enter on the philosophy of any subject, upon which Paul does not

that sound and humble and sober philosophy, which has conducted the human mind to its best acquisitions on the field of natural truth, than simply to say of it, that it ever prefers the certainty of experience, to the visions of a conjectural imagination-that it cautiously keeps within the line which separates the known from the unknown, and would never suffer a suspicion fetched from the latter region, to militate against a plain certainty that stands clearly and obviously before it on the former region. And when it carries its attention from natural to moral science, it never will consent to a principle of sure and authoritative guidance for the heart and conduct of man in the present time, to be subverted by any difficulty drawn from a theme so inaccessible as the unrevealed purposes of God, or from a field of contemplation so remote, as the glories which are eventually to redound to the character of God at the final winding up of His administration.

It is not for man to hold at obeyance the prompt decisions of moral sense, till he make out an adjustment between them and such endless fancies as may be conjured up from the gulphs of misty and metaphysical speculation. Both piety and philosophy lend their concurrence to the truth, that secret things belong to God, and revealed things only belong to us and to our children. He has written, not merely on the book of His revealed testimony, but he has written on the book of our own consciences the lesson, that He is rightfully the governor of the world, and that we are rightfully the subjects of that government. There is a monitor within, who, with a still and a small but nevertheless a powerful voice, tells that if we disobey Him we do wrong. There is a voice of the heart which awards to Him the place of sovereign, and to us the place of servants. If He ought not to judge, and may not impose the penalties of disobedience, this relationship is altogether dissolved. And it is too much for man to fetch, efther from the aerial region that is above him, or from the dark and hidden futurity that is before him, a principle which shall lay prostrate the authority of conscience, and infuse the baleful elements of darkness and distrust into its clearest intimations.

V. 9. BETTER,' in respect of having a righteousness before God. We have before charged Jews and Gentiles with being under sin. We affirmed it to their own conscience. We now prove it to the Jews from their own revelation. The following is the paraphrase of this passage.

What then! are we Jews better than those Gentiles in respect of our justification by our own obedience? Not at allfor we before charged both Jews and Gentiles with being under sin. And we prove it from God's written revelation, where it is affirmed, that there are none who have a righteousness that He will accept-noteven one. There are none who are thus satisfied with themselves, and feel no need of such a justification as we propose, that really understandeth, or truly seeketh after God. They are all gone out of the way and have become unprofitable, and there is none of them that doeth what is substantially and religiously good-no, not one. From their mouths there proceedeth every abomination; and they speak deceitfully with their tongues; and the poison of malignity distils from their lips; and their mouth is full of imprecation upon others, and of bitterness against them. And they not only speak mischief, but they do it; for they eagerly run to the shedding of blood; and their way may be tracked, as it were, by the destruction and the wretchedness which mark the progress of it; and they know not and love not the way of peace; and as to the fear of God, He is not looked to or regarded by them. Now all this is charged upon men by the book of the Jewish law. We are only repeating quotations out of their own Scriptures; and as what the law saith is intended for those who are under the law, and not for those who are strangers to it and beyond the reach of its announcementsall these sayings must be applied to Jews; and they prove that it is not the mere possession of a law, but the keeping of it which secures the justification of those over whom it has authority. Their mouths, therefore, must also be stopped; and the whole world, consisting of Jews and Gentiles, must all be brought in as guilty before God.'

We here remark, in the first place, that Paul had already, in the second chapter, affirmed the guilt of the Jews, and condescended upon the instances of it. He can scarcely be said to have proved their guilt; he had only charged them with it; and yet through the conscience of those whom we address, it is very possible that a charge may no sooner be uttered, than a conviction on the part of those against whom we are directing the charge, may come immediately on the back of it. There is often a power in a bare statement, which is not at all bettered but rather impaired by the accompaniment of reasoning. If what you say of a man agree with his own bosom experience that it is really so, there is a weight in your simple affirmation which needs not the enforcing of any argument. It is this which gives such authority to those sermons even still, that recommend themselves to the conscience; and it was this, in fact, which gained more credit and acceptance for the apostles than did all their miracles. They revealed to men the secrets of their own hearts; and what the inspired teacher said they were, they felt themselves to be; and nothing brings so ready and entire an homage to the truth that is spoken, as the agreement of its simple assertions with the finding of a man's own conscience. This manifestation of the truth unto the conscience, which was the grand instrument of discipleship in the first ages of the church, arch, is the grand instrument still; and it is thus that an unlearned hearer, who just knows his own mind, may be touched as effectually to his conviction, by the accordancy between what a preacher says, and what he himself feels, as the most profound and philosophical member of an accomplished congregation. And thus that obstinacy of unbelief, which we vainly attempt to carry by the power of any elaborate or metaphysical demonstration, may give way, both with the untaught and the cultivated, to the bare statement of the preacher-when he simply avers the selfishness of the human heart; and its pride, and its sensuality, and above all its ungodliness.

But Paul is not satisfied with this alone dren of Israel. You meet with this style of argumentation on many distinct occasions, and often ushered in with the phrase as it is written.' It was thus that Christ expounded to his disciples what was written in the law of Moses, and in the prophets, and in the psalms, concerning Him; and that these disciples again went forth upon the Jews, armed for their intellectual warfare out of the Old Testament. In almost every interview they had with the Hebrews, you will meet with this as a peculiarity which is not to be observed, when epistles are addressed, or conversations are held, with Gentiles only. Thus Stephen gave a long demonstration to his persecutors out of the Jewish history; and Peter rested his argument for Jesus Christ, on the interpretation that he gave of one of the prophetic psalms; and Paul, in his sermon at Antioch, went back to the story of Egyptian bondage and carried his explanation downwards through David and his family, to the doctrine of the remission of sins by the Saviour, who sprang from him; and, in the Jewish synagogue at Thessalonica, did he reason with them three sabbath days out of the Scriptures; and before the judgment-seat of Felix, did he aver, that his belief in Jesus of Nazareth, was that of one who believed all the things that are written in the law and in the prophets; and in argumenting the cause of Christianity before Agrippa, did he rest his vindication on what Agrippa knew of the promises that were found in the Old Testament; and when he met his countrymen at Rome, it was his employment, from morning to evening, to persuade them concerning Jesus both out of the law of Moses and out of the prophets. He who was all things to all men, was a Jew among the Jews. He reasoned with them on their own principles, and no where more frequently than in this Epistle to the Romans-where, though he had previously spoken of their sinfulness to their conscience, he yet adds a number of deponing testimonies to the same effect from their own book of revelation.

It is this agreement between the Bible and a man's own conscience, which stamps upon the book of God one of its most satisfying evidences. It is this perhaps more than any thing else which draws the interest and the notice of men towards it. For after all, there is no way of fixing the attention of man so powerfully as by holding up to him a mirror of himself;

intimate and home-felt experience.

The question then before us is-Does the passage now read bear such an accordancy with the real character of man, as that which we are now alluding to? It abounds in affirmations of sweeping universality, and a test of their truth or of their falsehood is to be found in every heart. The apostle has here made a most adventurous commitment of himself-for, however much he may have asserted about matters that lay beyond the limits of human experience without the hazard of being confronted, the matters which he has here touched upon all lie within the familiar and well-known chambers of a man's own consciousness. And the positive announcements that he has made are not of some but of all individuals so that could' a single specimen be discovered of a natural man, who was righteous, and who had the fear of God before his eyes, and who either understood or sought after Him, and who was free of all malignity and cruelty and censoriousness-then would this be a refutation in fact of what the apostle assumes and pronounces in argument; and though it requires a minute and multiform and unexcepted agreement between the book of revelation and the book of experience, to make out an evidence in behalf of the former-yet would one single case of disagreement be enough to overthrow all its pretensions, and to depose the apostles and evangelists of Christianity, from all the credit which they have ever held in the estimation of the world.

You know that the apostle's aim in the whole of this argument, is to secure the reception of his own doctrine; and that, for this purpose, he is addressing himself to those who need to be convinced, and are therefore not yet convinced of it. They who have actually submitted themselves to the truth which he is urging, and have come under its influence, have arrived at the very understanding of God which he is labouring to establish. These are in the way to which he is attempting to recal the whole human race, and must therefore be excepted from the charge of being now out of the way. There are many such under the new dispensation; and there were also some such under the old who must also be regarded as being on the side of the apostle, but of whom the apostle affirms, that ere they came over to that side, as he does of every one else, Testament age, who were within the pale of the gospel; and of whom, in consequence, it cannot be affirmed that they exemplified the description which is here set before us. But though, from the nature of the case, such a withdrawment must be conceded in behalf of those who are under the gospel, we are prepared to assert that the inspired writer has not overcharged the account that he has given of the depravity of those who are under the law-whether it be the law of conscience, or of Moses, or even of the purer morality of Christ-Insomuch that all who refuse the mysteries of His grace, are universally in the wrong: And if they who are believers, still a very little flock, are regarded as constituting the church; and they who are not believers, still a vast and overbearing majority, are regarded as constituting the world-then is it true, that, from one end to the other of it, it lieth in wickedness, and that all the world is guilty before God.

Be assured then, that there is a delusion, in all the complacency that you associate with your own righteousness. It is the want of a godly principle which essentially vitiates the whole: And additional to this, with all the generosities and all the equities which have done so much for your reputation among men, there is a selfishness that lurks in your bosom; or a vanity that swells and inflames it; or a preference of your own object to that of others, which may lead you to acts or words of unfeeling severity; or a regard for some particular gratification, coupled with a regardlessness for every interest which lieth in its way-that may render you, in the estimation of Him who pondereth the heart, as remote a wanderer from rectitude as he on the path of whose visible history there occurred in other times the atrocities of savage cruelty and savage violence. It were barbarous to tell you so had we no remedy to offer for that moral disease which so taints, and

very sensibilities, which open up for it the avenues of enjoyment, expose it ere long to the heavier distress; and the friends who in other years gladdened the walk of our daily history, have left us unsupported and alone in the midst of a toilsome pilgrimage. And it were really cruel to add to the pressure of a creature so beset and borne in upon, by telling him of his worthlessness-did we not stand before him charged with the tidings of his possible renovation to the high prospects of a virtuous and holy immortality. Let him therefore cast the burden of his despondence away; and, if there be a novelty in the views that have been offered of his present condition, let it but allure him to further inquiry; and if any conviction have mingled with the exercise, let him betake himself to the great fountainhead of inspiration; and if he have found no rest in all his former unceasing attempts after happiness, let him try the new enterprise of becoming wise unto salvation. Should this Bible be his guide; and prayer his habitual employment; and the great sacrifice, with the intimation of which Paul follows up his humiliating exposure of the wickedness of man, be his firm dependence-with these new elements of thought, and this new region of anticipation before him, he will reach a peace that the world knoweth not; and he will attain in Christ a comfort that he never yet has gotten in any quarter of contemplation to which he has turned himself; and this kind Saviour, touched with a fellow-feeling for his sorrows, both knows and is willing to succour him, so as to replace even in this world all the deductions that he now mourns over, and at length to bear him in triumph to that unfading country where there is no sorrow and no separation.*

• Our more copious illustration of this passage, is to be found in the 15th of the Commercial Discourses' already referred to; and which, therefore, we have not re peated in this place.