by an act of the will at the first, and by a continued act of the will afterwards, that you first commence and then continue a prolonged examination into the grounds of an opinion. It is at the bidding of the will, not that you believe without evidence, but that you investigate the evidence on which you might believe. In all these cases the will either gives its consent, or withholds it. It cannot create the light of evidence any more than it can create the light of nature. But it lies with it whether the evidence shall be attended to or regarded with the eye of the mind, even as it lies with it whether the illuminated landscape shall be looked upon or regarded with the eye of the body. It is in your power to shut or to avert the mental eye, just as it is in your power to shut or to avert the corporeal eye. It is in no way your fault, that you do not see when it is dark. But it is in every way your fault that you do, not look when either the light of the natural heavens, or the light of Heaven's revelation is around you. It is thus that the will has virtually to do with the ultimate belief, just because it has to do with the various steps of that process which goes before it. Where there is candour, which is a moral property, the due attention will be given; and the man will arrive at the state of being right intellectually, but just because he is right morally. When there is the opposite of candour—a thing pronounced upon by all as a moral unfairness-the due attention will be refused; and the man will be landed in the state of

being wrong intellectually, but just because he is wrong morally.

You find a most impressive exemplification of this in the history of those very Jews whom we now are considering. During the whole of our Saviour's ministry upon earth they were plied with evidences, which, if they had but attended to would have carried their belief in the validity of His claims and credentials as a Messenger from heaven. But the belief was painful to them; and at all hazards they resolved to bar the avenues of their minds against the admittance of it. This was the attitude, the wilful, the hardy, the resolved attitude in which they listened to all His addresses and looked upon all His miracles. That unwelcome doctrine which so humbled the pride, and did such violence to the bigotry of their nation, was not to be borne with— and, rather than harbour a thing so intolerably offensive, they shut their minds against all that truth which lay both in the words and in the works of the Son of God; and they shut their hearts against all that tenderness as well as truth which fell in softest accents from a Saviour's lips, or beamed in mildness and mercy upon them from a Saviour's countenance. Who does not see that the will had a principal concern in all this opposition-that the pride and the passion and the interest and the ease, that these propensities of man's active and voluntary nature, had undoubted sway and operation in this warfare; that their love of darkness and their hatred of light affixed to their unbelief the stigma.

of a moral condemnation-their love of that which left a veil over their corruptions, their hatred of that which laid them open to the display and the disturbance of an exposure which they feared? It was on the strength of these moral perversities that they resisted and withstood the Saviour, and at length perished in the delusion which themselves had fostered. Theirs was not the darkness of men whom no light had visited, but it was the darkness of men who obstinately shut their eyes-who had lulled their own consciences asleep; and whom neither the voice of pitying friendship, nor the voice of loud and angry menace could again awaken. They were in this state when Christ wept over them, as He pronounced the doom of their approaching overthrow-a doom that fell upon them, not because of their mental delusion, but because this delusion was the fruit and the forthcoming of their moral depravity—not because they had minds that did not receive the truth, but because they had hearts that did not love and would not listen to it.

And this is for our admonition to whom the latter ends of the world have come. In this our day, the want of faith is still due, we believe, as heretofore, to the want of a thorough moral earnestness. Did we only prevail upon you to seek after; to enquire as you ought, we have no doubt that you would come to believe as you ought. If blind, we fear that you are wilfully blind; and if short of that faith which is unto salvation, it is because you are not honestly and, with all your heart in pursuit of

salvation. You are not giving earnest hee to the witness upon earth, that is to the Bible, which is a light shining in a dark place; and which at last would manifest its own truth and divinity to the conscience of him who attentively regarded it. And you are not sending forth earnest prayer to the witness in heaven, that is to the Holy Spirit, whose office it is to pour the light of a convincing and an affecting demonstration over the pages of the written record. You are not doing what you might if you so willed-and if you do not see the light of that evidence which belongs to the truth as it is in Jesus, it is positively because you are not looking for it. In other words, if you die in mental darkness, it is because you live in moral unconcern; and whatever the damnation be which rests on unbelief it is altogether due unto yourselves. Often are you visited with the misgivings of a conscience which tells you that your present state is far from satisfactory; but these you contrive to stifle and suppress. The whole business of your souls is postponed and wilfully postponed from one day and from one year to another; and, abiding in darkness because you choose the darkness, you remain to the end of your lives in a voluntary destitution of that knowledge for the lack of which men perish everlastingly.

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LECTURE LXXIX.

ROMANS, X, 3--5.

"For they being ignorant of God's righteousness, and going about to establish their own righteousness, have not submitted themselves unto the righteousness of God. For Christ is the end of the law for righteousness to every one that believeth. For Moses describeth the righteousness which is of the law, That the man which doth those things shall live by them."

THERE should be no difficulty in fixing whether the term righteousness in this passage must be understood according to its personal or its legal sense-whether that righteousness which designates a character that is marked by its virtues and its graces; or that which is pronounced by a judge, or him who is entitled thereby to its honours and rewards. In this place, as in others, the context clears up the text. For example in Matthew, v, 20-the righteousness which is there spoken of cannot be mistaken for any other than the personal-that being made obvious by the illustrations which follow, and whence it appears that its superiority over the righteousness of the scribes and Pharisees lies in the higher style of certain virtues which are there specified. And again in Galatians, iii, 21, there can be as little mistake, when we affix the legal or judicial meaning to the righteousness there spoken