happiness was only to be found in the pleasures and pursuits of this world. It engaged you in the chase of innumerable vanities. You" followed after your lovers, but could not overtake them; fled from one refuge to another, till, to speak in the language of the prophet, "You were wearied in the multitude of your way." In the mean time, to all pleasant and delightful intercourse with the Father of spirits, to the soothing accents of peace and pardon issuing from Christ, and to all the consolations of piety, you were utter strangers. In your more serious and reflecting moments, your heart meditated terror; death, judgement, and eternity, were awful sounds in your ears, and you only felt a delusive and sickly repose, while you forgot they had any existence. On a calm review of your conduct, you felt an uneasiness, which you were conscious was so just and well founded, that you seldom dared to reflect. Surely you will acknowledge, that you, at least, are not debtors to the flesh. And what has the flesh to plead for its services, which will bear for a moment to be weighed against these great evils? What has Satan to plead, who, by means of it, "rules in the children of disobedience?" Will he venture to mention a few vain and sinful amusements, a wanton arbitrary liberty, or a few transient guilty pleasures, which, I trust, you are so far from wishing to repeat, that you never think of them without blushing before God? How are you more indebted to the flesh, since you had reason to

hope you formed a saving acquaintance with God? The partial indulgence to its dictates has robbed you of your comfort, has retarded your progress to heaven, and made you pass many a day sad and disconsolate, when, but for this, the joy of the Lord would have been your strength.

The more we observe what passes around us with a serious mind, the more we shall be convinced how little men are indebted to the flesh. Look at that young man, the early victim of lewdness and intemperance, who, though in the bloom of life, has "his bones filled with the sins of his youth." Survey his emaciated cheek, his infirm and withered frame, and his eyes sunk and devoid of lustre; the picture of misery and dejection. Hear his complaint, how he mourns at the last, now his flesh and his body are consumed: "How have I hated instruction and my heart despised reproof, and have not obeyed the voice of my teachers, nor inclined my ear to them that instructed me!-I was almost in all evil in the midst of the congregation of the assembly." Is he a debtor to the flesh? Behold that votary of the world, successful as he has been in the pursuit of it, and stained by no flagrant crime. Yet he has lived "without God in the world;" and now his days are drawing to a close, he feels himself verging to the grave, and no hope animates, no pleasing reflection cheers him. The only consolation he receives, or rather, the only relief of his anguish, is in grasping the treasures he must shortly quit. Is he a debtor to the flesh?

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III. We shall examine the claims of the flesh by the aspect they bear on our future interests. Before we engage in the service of a master, it is reasonable to inquire into the advantages he stipulates, and the prospects of futurity attendant his service. In the ordinary concerns of life, we should consider the neglect of such an inquiry chargeable with the highest imprudence. Dreadful is it, in this view, to reflect on the consequences inseparably annexed to the service of corruption. "If ye live after the flesh," says the apostle, ye shall die."* "The wages of sin is death."† And, to demonstrate the close and unavoidable connexion subsisting between them, he adds, "If ye sow to the flesh, ye shall of the flesh reap corruption." It is not an incidental connexion, it is an indissoluble one, fixed in the constitution of things. "Lust, when it is conceived, bringeth forth sin, and sin, when it is finished, bringeth forth death."§ If we live in the indulgence of carnal appetites, if we comply habitually with the dictates of corrupt nature; the word of God has assured us of what will follow: "The end of these

things is death." || "Let no man deceive you with vain words; for because of these things cometh the wrath of God on the children of disobedience."¶ "Be not deceived, God is not mocked: whatsoever a man soweth, that also shall he "** For this

reap.

Gal. vi. 8. ¶ Ephes. v. 6.

reason we can never be debtors to the flesh to live after the flesh; the very reason assigned in the clause immediately following the text. We can never be under obligations to obey such a master, who rewards his services with death; death, spiritual and eternal. The fruits of sin, when brought to maturity, are corruption: his most finished production is death; and the materials on which he works the fabric of that manufacture, if we may be allowed so to speak, consist in the elements of damnation. To such a master we can owe nothing but a decided rejection of his offers, a perpetual abhorrence, and an awful fear of ever being deceived by his stratagems, or entangled in his snares.

XI.

ON THE CAUSE, AGENT, AND PURPOSE OF
REGENERATION.

JAMES i. 18. Of his own will begat he us with the word of truth, that we should be a kind of firstfruits of his creatures.

In this chapter the apostle endeavours to fortify the minds of the professors of christianity, under the various trials and persecutions to which their religion exposed them, by assuring them of the happy fruits, in their spiritual improvement, they might expect to reap from them here, and the more abundant reward which awaited them here

My brethren, count it all joy when ye fall into divers temptations, knowing this, that the trying of your faith worketh patience."

Lest any might be induced to relax in their vigilance, under an idea that the circumstances of their trial were too arduous, and that if they shrunk in the combat they might excuse themselves from the consideration of its being disproportioned to their strength, and that they were, therefore, in fact, tempted of God, he takes pains to repel this insinuation, and to shew, that the success of any temptation whatever is solely to be imputed to the unbridled corruption of the human heart. It is, he tells us, "when a man is drawn away by his own heart's lust, and enticed," that he is "tempted;"† this sinful corruption has its origin in his own heart only; nor is in the smallest degree to be imputed to God, as though he impelled to it by a direct agency, or so ordered things, in the course of his providence, as to render it unavoidable. The sum of his doctrine on this head appears to be this, that all evil is from ourselves, and from the disordered state of our hearts, on which temptation operates; while, on the contrary, all moral and spiritual good is from God, and "cometh down from the Father of lights, with whom there is no variableness, neither shadow of turning." The communications of grace are emphatically denominated, "good and perfect gifts," by way of asserting their immeasurable superiority to the blessings which

James i. 14.

James i. 17.