us and God, seeing that when viewed as our Lawgiver and ere reparation for the injury of His outraged law shall have been made, His attributes of truth and justice and holiness unite to lay an interdict on any terms or treaty of reconciliation-these are what paralyse the movements of a conscious sinner; and just because they paralyse his hopes. The likest thing to it in human experience is, when a decreet of bankruptcy without a discharge has come forth on the man who has long struggled with his difficulties, and is now irrecoverably sunk under the weight of them. There is an effectual drag laid upon this man's activity. The hand of diligence is forthwith slackened when all the fruits of diligence are thus liable to be seized upon-and that by a rightful claim of such magnitude as no possible strenuousness can meet or satisfy. The processes of business come to a stand or are suspended-when others are standing by ready to devour the proceeds of business so soon as they are realised, or at least to divert them from the use of the unhappy man and the good of his family. The spirit of industry dies within him when he finds that he can neither make aught for himself, nor, from the enormous mass of his obligations, make any sensible advances towards his liberation. In these circumstances he loses all heart and all hope for exertion of any sort; and either breaks forth into recklessness or is chilled into inactivity by despair. And it is precisely so in the case of a sinner towards God. If he feel as he ought, he

feels as if the mountain of his iniquities had separated him from his Maker. There is the barrier of an unsettled controversy between them, which, do his uttermost, he cannot move away; and the strong though secret feeling of this is a chief ingredient in the lethargy of nature. There is a haunting jealousy of God which keeps us at a distance from Him. There is the same willing forgetfulness of Him, that there is of any other painful or disquieting object of contemplation. God, when viewed singly as the Lawgiver, is also viewed as the Judge who must condemn-as the rightful creditor whose payments or whose penalties are alike overwhelming. We are glad to make our escape from all this dread and discouragement into the sweet oblivion of Nature. The world becomes our hiding-place from the Deity -and in despair of making good our eternity by our works, we work but for the interests of time; and, because denizens of earth, we, estranged from the hopes of heaven, never once set forth in good earnest upon its preparations.

These are the impossibilities, which, at the very commencement, beset this way of making good your eternity by your doings; and from which there is no release to the spiritual bankrupt, till the gospel puts its discharge into his hands. By this gospel there is a deed of amnesty made known, to which all are welcome. There is revealed to us a surety who hath taken the whole of our debt upon Himself-having fulfilled the ample acquittance of all our obligations, and so made us clear with God. Even

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to the worst and most worthless of sinners the offer of this great deliverance is made. It is our faith in the reality of this offer which constitutes our acceptance of it; and whereas in the way of doing, the very entrance was impracticably closed against us-this initial obstruction is entirely moved aside from the way of believing. In the language of the Psalmist, the bond is loosed; and restored to hope, we are restored to alacrity in the bidden services and preparations of eternity. With the conscience lightened, through the peace-speaking blood of Jesus, of its guilt and of its fears-we are made to walk with the feeling, with the hopeful inspiration of men at liberty. The debt is cancelled; and we can start anew in that enterprise for heaven, on which but for the ransom of the New Testament, there lies a burden of utter impotency and despair. Like the emancipated debtor to whom the fruits of all his future toil and diligence are now fully assured to him, a weight is taken off from the activities of nature. Our labour is no longer in vain—because now it is labour in the Lord; and every effort becomes a step in advance towards heaven, when thus the old obedience of the law is exchanged for the new obedience of the gospel.

II. But we might imagine the conscience of man not to be enlightened at the outset of his religious earnestness; and that therefore, instead of the stillness of his despair under a sense of nature's insufficiency for the righteousness of the law, he actually sets forth in the pursuit of this righteousness,

and makes the weary struggle it may be of months or of years in order to attain it. It is oftenest in this way that the first movements are made under the first powerful visitation of seriousness. The law in its unsullied purity-the law in its uncompromising rigour-the law in its unexcepted right of sovereignty over every desire of the heart and every deed of the history-These may not be adverted to at the time of the soul's incipient concern about these things; and so the attempt might fairly be made, to compass such an obedience as might found a claim or title to the rewards of eternity. In the prosecution of this object there may be the forth-putting of great strenuousness the anxious feeling of great scrupulosity-the new habit, at least of toiling at the servilities, if not the new heart which had a taste for the sanctities of religion. At all events, many laborious drudgeries might be gone through. The regularities both of private and family prayer might be instituted. There might be

allotted hours for the exercises of sacredness; and these in full tale and measure may be observed most rigidly. In short, a thousand punctualities may be rendered and all with the view to establish a merit in the eye of heaven's Lawgiver, which never can be effectually done without a full and faultless adherence to Heaven's law. Now, we say, that if conscience feel as it ought, there will throughout this whole process be a festering, an inappeasable disquietude-a self-jealousy, and a self-dissatisfaction which no doings or deserts of

our own can terminate-a feeling of unworthiness which in spite of every effort will adhere to our best services, and turn all into hopelessness and vexation-For, let it be observed, that, reach what elevation of virtue we may, there will in proportion as we advance and we ascend, be further heights and distances in moral excellence beyond us and above

us.

The higher we proceed in this career, we shall command a farther view of the spaces which still lie before us; or, in other words, we shall be more filled with a sense of the magnitude of our own shortcomings. The conscience, in fact, grows in sensibility, just as the conduct is more the object of our strict and scrupulous regulation; and so, with every advance we make towards the perfection of the law, does the law appear to rise upon us with her exactions and we feel as if more helplessly behind than at the outset of our enterprise. The presumptuous imagination of our sufficiency comes down when we thus bring it to the trial; and that impotency of which we were not aware at the outset, we are made to know and to feel experimentally. Meanwhile that is a sore drudgery in which we are implicated; and all the more fatiguing that it is so utterly fruitless-that the peace which we seek to realise by our obedience recedes at every step to a greater distance, because new heights of obedience are ever rising on the view, and baffling every effort to substantiate a valid plea for the rewards of immortality. This is that law-work, of whose aspirations and toils and frantic unavailing