from the skies-So that if you, arrested by all this power and closeness of application, shall venture your case on the calls and the promises of the gospel, there is not one call that will not be followed up, nor one promise that will not be fully and perfectly accomplished.

The

The thing offered in this passage is, that you shall be instated in the righteousness of Christ. Let me crave your attention to the substantial meaning and effect of such an overture. technicals of theology are so familiar to the ear, that they fail to arouse the understanding; and the thinking principle often lies in complete dormancy, while there is a kind of indolent satisfaction felt by the mind, at the utterance and the cadency of sounds to which it has been long accustomed. The proposal that Christ's righteousness shall become your righteousness in such a way, as that you will be honoured and rewarded and loved and dealt with by God, just, as you would have been, had this righteousness been yielded in your own person and by your own performances-this, ye hearers, is the very jet and essence of the gospel; and could we only prevail on you to entertain the wondrous proposal and to close with it, like a man translated from beggary to some exalted order of merit that had been won for him by another, might you instantly be clothed in the glories of a high and splendid investiture recognised by God Himself, and by all the subject ranks of His administration, as the occupiers of a dignity and a

constitutional standing, to which all the homage due to worth and excellence and lofty prospects may rightfully be paid. You would become kings and priests unto God; and, like many of those sublimities of nature where the noblest efforts often spring from the simplest of causes, is this princely elevation of guilty and degraded man brought about by the simple credence which he renders to the testimony of God respecting His Son-on which it is that he passes from death unto life, and according to his faith so is it done unto him.

This is the way of being translated into a condition of righteousness with God, and there is no other. We are aware of the tendency of nature to try another; and that, in the obstinate spirit of legality, it is her constant forth-putting to establish a righteousness of her own—an object, in the prosecution of which, she is ever sure, either to dissipate her strength in a fatigue that is unavailing, or at length to sink down into the repose of a formality that is altogether lifeless and unfruitful. This positively is not the way. The way is to lay your is to lay your confident 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 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 heart-and 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.

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LECTURE XXVIII.

ROMANS V, 20, 21.

"Moreover, the law entered that the offence might abound: but where sin abounded, grace did much more abound; that as sin hath reigned unto death, even so might grace reign through righteousness unto eternal life, by Jesus Christ our Lord."

It is good to mark, how, at certain intervals in the course of the apostle's argument, there is often the recurrence of some particular term, by which there may not only be evinced some reigning principle, which it is good for the reader to seize upon, but by which he may obtain a more connected view of the whole demonstration. In some former verses, the apostle insists on the mischief that was entailed upon our species, by the one offence of one individual-a mischief which fell even upon the heads of those who in their own persons violated no express commandment, as did Adam; and he now intimates to us the effect which an authoritative law, subsequently imposed upon mankind, had in turning the one offence into many offences, or in making the offence to abound-so that the power which restores us, must not only be of force enough to counteract the guilt of Adam's transgression, but be of force to counteract the guilt of all those innumerable actual transgressions, which are committed by those who sin against the known enactments of a rightfully proclaimed authority.

It sounds harsh to say of God, that He brought in a law, for the direct purpose of adding to the quantity of sin in the world; and it would soften this harshness, could we make it out to be the meaning of the apostle, not that there was any such design on the part of God-but simply that such was the effect of the law having been introduced among men. Moreover, the law entered, not with the intention by the Lawgiver of causing sin to abound, but with the consequence certainly among its subjects that sin did more abound. The law entered, and so sin became more abundant. In the Gospels we often read of a particular thing having been done, that it might be fulfilled what was spoken by some old prophet. It looks strange for the Saviour, to have gone out of His way, on purpose to bring about an adjustment of this kind, between the prophet in the Old Testament and the historian in the New, and therefore some translate the phrase thus-such a thing was done, and so was fulfilled what had been said by one of the prophets. In like manner, and to save the conclusion that God is the wilful author of sin, we would so render the passage before us-as that the law was brought in, not with the previous view of making sin abound, but only with this as the subsequent effect -"Moreover the law entered and thus sin did abound."

But it has also been alleged respecting the sense of this passage, that the law has made sin to abound, not by acting as a stimulant to sin, but merely as