admit

clearness and comfort of the gospel. If you any merit, or any innocence of your own, among the ingredients of your security before God-then all is thrown back again upon a questionable and precarious and uncertain foundation. The controversy between God and man is wakened up anew, by such a proceeding. You are again consigned, as before, among the old elements of doubt and distrust; and the question, what degree of comparative innocence is enough to admit your own righteousness into the plea of justification before God, will, by its ambiguous and unresolvable nature, remove you as far from any solid ground of dependence, as if there was no righteousness of another in which you might appear, and as if no propitiation had been made for you. If you want peace to your own minds, and a release to yourself from all its perplexities-better that you discard all the items of your own personal merit from the account of your acceptance with God. Go not to obliterate that clear line of demarcation which the apostle has drawn, between salvation by works and salvation by grace, and which he proposes to us as the only two terms of an alternative which cannot be compounded together; but of which, if the one be chosen, the other must be entirely rejected. The foundation of your trust before God, must either be your own righteousness out and out, or the righteousness of Jesus Christ out and out. To attempt a composition of them is to lean on a foundation, of which many of the

materials may be solid; but many of them also are brittle, and all of them are frailly cemented together with untempered mortar. If you are to lean upon your own merit, lean upon it wholly-If you are to lean upon Christ, lean upon Him wholly. The two will not amalgamate together; and it is the attempt to do so which keeps many a weary and heavy-laden inquirer at a distance from rest, and at a distance from the truth of the gospel. Maintain a clear and a consistent posture. Stand not before God with one foot upon a rock, and the other upon a treacherous quick-sand. And it is not your humility alone which we want to inspire -it is the stable peace of your hearts that we are consulting, when we tell you that the best use you can make of the law is to shut your mouth when it offers to speak in the language of vindication; and to let its requirements on the one hand, and your rebellion on the other, give you the conviction of sin.

In stepping over from the law as a ground of meritorious acceptance, step over from it wholly. Make no reservations. You are aware of the strenuousness with which Paul, in his Epistle to the Galatians, warded off the rite of circumcision from the church. He would admit of no compromise between one basis of acceptance and another. This were inserting a flaw and a false principle into the principle of our justification; and to import the element of falsehood were to import the element of feebleness. We call upon you, not to lean so

much as the weight of one grain or scruple of your confidence upon your own doings-to leave this ground entirely, and to come over entirely to the ground of a Redeemer's blood and a Redeemer's righteousness. Then you may stand firm and erect on a foundation strong enough and broad enough to bear you. You will feel that your feet are on a sure place; and we know nothing that serves more effectually to clear and disembarrass the mind of an inquirer from all its perplexities, than when the provinces of the law and the gospel, instead of mingling and mutually encroaching the one upon the other, come to be seen in all the distinctness of their character and offices. The law ministers condemnation and nothing else. The gospel, by its own unaided self, ministers that righteousness which finds acceptance with God. God has simply set forth Christ to be a propitiation. You have to look upon Him as such, and He becomes your propitiation. Make no doubt of its being an honest exhibition, which God makes of His Son. It is not an exhibition by which He intends to deceive you. And great will be your peace, when thus drawn away from yourself, and drawn towards the Saviour. It will be the commencement of a trust, that will establish the heart in comfort; and, though a mystery which cannot be demonstrated to the world, will it be the experience of every true believer, that it is the commencement of an affection which will establish the heart in the love and in the habit of holiness.

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LECTURE XII.

ROMANS iii, 27–31.

"Where is boasting then? It is excluded. By what law? of

Therefore we conwithout the deeds of

works? nay; but by the law of faith. clude, that a man is justified by faith the law. Is he the God of the Jews only? is he not also of the Gentiles? Yes, of the Gentiles also: seeing it is one God which shall justify the circumcision by faith, and uncircumcision through faith. Do we then make void the law through faith? God forbid: yea, we establish the law."

THE term law may often be taken in a more general acceptation, than that of an authoritative rule for the observation of those who are subject to it. It may signify the method of succession, by which one event follows another-either in the moral or the physical world; and it is thus that we speak of a law of nature, or a law of the human mind, thereby denoting the train or order of certain consecutive facts, which maintain an unvarying dependence among themselves. Both the law of works, and the law of faith, though the judicial character of God is strongly evinced in the establishment of them, may be understood here in this latter sense which we have just now explained. The law of works, is that law by which the event of a man's justification follows, upon the event of his having performed these works. The law of faith is that law, by which the event of a man's justification follows, upon the event of his con

ceiving faith-just as the law of gravitation is that law upon which every body above the surface of

the earth, when its support is taken away, will fall towards its centre. And as the law of refraction

is that, upon which every ray of light, when it passes obliquely from air into water, is bent from the direction which it had formerly.

V. 29. It is good, for the purpose of keeping up in your mind the concatenation that obtains between one part of the epistle and the other, to mark every recurrence of similar terms which takes place in the prosecution of its argument. He had in the second chapter, made a pointed address to the Jew who rested in the law, and made his boast of God. He now excludes his boasting; and in doing so reduces the Jew and the Gentile to the same condition of relationship with God.

V. 30. The term 'one' may either be taken numerically, or refers to the unity and unchangeableness of God's purpose.

By a preceding verse, the works of the law are set aside in the matter of our justification. And it comes in as an appropriate question-Is the law made void through this? What would have been consequent upon obedience to the law, is now made consequent upon faith; and does this nullify the law? No, it will be found that it serves to establish the law, securing all the honour which is due to the Lawgiver; perpetuating the obligation and authority of the law itself; and introducing into the heart of the believer such new principles