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hold on the merit of Christ as your plea of acceptance with God. It is to take your determined stand on the basis of His obedience, all the rewards and all the reckonings of which are held out to you in the gospel. It is to go at once to the justification that Christ hath wrought out for all who believe in Him; and, entering upon that region which is lighted up by the Sun of righteousness, there to offer yourself to the notice of the Divinity, not in that tiny lustre which is created by the feeble sparks of your own kindling, but in that full irradiation which is caught from the beams of a luminary so glorious. God, to see to you with complacency, must see you not as shining in any native splendour of your own; but as shone upon by the splendour of Him who is full of grace and truth. It is only when surrounded with this element, that a holy God can regard you with complacency; and, to complete the triumphs of the gospel administration, it is only when breathing in this atmosphere, that you inhale the delights of an affectionate and confiding piety-that the soul breaks forth in the full triumph of her own emancipated powers, on the career of devoted and aspiring obedience that life and happiness shed the very air of heaven around a believer's heartand make the service of God, before a drudgery, its most congenial employment—Evincing, that, as to be in Christ is to have no condemnation, so to be in Christ is to become a new creature with whom all old things are done away, and all things have become new.

before he obtained such an apprehension of God's law as to make him feel that it was sinful to be so; but when the law came, sin revived, not that the law made Paul covetous, but made him sensible that, in consequence of being so, he was indeed a sinner. It is not the tendency, say some, to make a man sinful, but to show him to be sinful. It discovers

the tinge of guiltiness where no such tinge was seen or suspected before. The effect of the commandment is not to create sin, but to convince of sin; and to make it evident to the conscience, that it is indeed exceedingly sinful. And we have no doubt, that this is one great purpose which has been served by the entering in of the law. It has shed a much stronger light on that contrast or diversity, which obtains between the character of God and the character of man. It has given a more plentiful demonstration of human guilt and human ungodliness. It has brought home with greater effect upon the conscience that great initiatory lesson-the learning of which is of such importance in Christianity, that the law which furnishes this lesson has been called a schoolmaster to bring us unto Christ. And this is certainly a most valuable purpose that is accomplished by the law.

The application of an even rule to any line or surface, may not create the inequalities; but it will make known the inequalities. And, in like manner, whether or not the law is any way the cause of those crooked deviations from the even rule of rectitude which so abound in the character of man, it certainly is the discoverer of those deviations; and makes known to those, who are

acquainted with the exceeding length and breadth and constancy of its obligations, how much more iniquities abound in the world, than men of unenlightened conscience and no moral delicacy are at all sensible of.

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At the same time, we do think that the law has done more than reveal sin to the conscience. It has positively added to the amount and the aggravation of sin upon the character. It has laid a heavier responsibility on those to whom it made known its enactments; and, on the principle of " to whom much is given of them shall much be required," has a deeper guilt been incurred by those transgressors who do sin in the face of clear and impressive remonstrances from a distinct law, than by those who do it ignorantly and in unbelief. Father, forgive them," says the Saviour, "for they know not what they do." The man who lives under the light of a proclaimed commandment, has no benefit from such an intercession. They sin with their eyes open; and after having fought a pitched, and a determined, and perhaps a long sustained battle, with a conscience well informed. They may do the very same things and no more, than he who has nothing but the feeble guidance of nature to regulate his footsteps; and yet their sin may abound a hundred-fold, and that just because the law has entered with its precepts and its requisitions among them. And beside all this, we do further think, that the law may cause sin actually to abound in the world-not merely by investing forbidden crimes with a deeper hue of sinfulness than they would otherwise have had, but by posi

tively and substantially deepening the atrocity of these crimes, and adding to the frequency and the amount of them. This is perhaps an effect unknown, or not easily conceived by those, who possess no tenderness of conscience; and are not feelingly alive to the guilt which attaches, even to the slighter violations of principle and propriety. But give us a man, into whose heart there has entered such a sense of the law, as to feel the discomfort even of a minutest aberration-whose force, or whose delicacy of conscience, are such, that what would bring no compunction into the hearts of other men, is sure to overwhelm his with a conviction of guilt in its darkest imagery, and its most brooding and fearful anticipations—who figures himself to have fallen, and perhaps irrecoverably fallen; and that by a slip, which, giving no concern to the feelings of ordinary mortals, would still leave them in possession of all the complacency and all the conscious uprightness that they ever had, or that they ever care for—We say of such a man, that, if without help and comfort from the gospel, the law, in all the strictness he sees to be in it, is all he has to deal with-he is positively in greater danger from the lesser delinquency into which he has fallen, than the other is from his transgression of tenfold enormity. For to him so sensitive of guilt, it has been a more grievous surrender of principle; and to him so tender of character, has there been the infliction of a sorer and more mortifying wound; and to him so conversant in the sanctions and obligations of righteousness, does it look a more desperate overthrow, that he ever came to have forgotten them; and to him so unhackneyed

in the ways of transgression, will one distinct instance of it, however venial it may have looked to others, look to him as a vile and virulent apostacy. And thus, till the blood of Christ be felt in its cleansing and its peace-speaking power, may the man, from his very scrupulosity, be in hazard of abandoning himself, in utter regardlessness, to the habit of living forthwith without God, even as he now lives without hope in the world. The very exquisiteness of his moral sense, furnishes sin with more frequent opportunities for inflicting upon him the humiliation of a defeat; and, in the agony of that humiliation, may he the more readily be led to give up the contest in despondency; and thus, such is the sad fatality of our condition under the law, that, failing as we are sure to do of a perfect obedience to its requisitions, the more tremblingly alive we are to a sense of its obligations, the greater may be the advantage that sin has for plunging us into total and irretrievable discomfiture-thus turning the law into a provocative of sin, and, through the weakness of our flesh, causing that to abound against which it has passed its most solemn and severe denunciations.

And even after the gospel has come in with its hopes and its assistances this is a fact in our moral nature which may be turned to most important account, in the great work of our sanctification. There can be no doubt, that, as that work prospers and makes progress, the soul will become more delicately alive to the evil of sin; and so more liable to the paralysing influences of humiliation and discouragement, when sin in however

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