guage with the explanation which we have offered of that of St. James, is, that when St. Paul denies the instrumentality of works to our justification, he speaks of them with relation to the law, as distinguished from the Gospel. "By the works of the law," he affirms, "shall no flesh be justified." "A man is justified," he concludes, "by faith without the deeds of the law."* Now, the law exacts undeviating rectitude: it tolerates no partial obedience, and shuts out the penitent from the hope of forgiveness; inexorably decreeing, "Cursed is every one that continueth not in all things that are written in the book of the law to do them." The works of the law, or the works demanded by the law as the ground of justification, are comprised in nothing less than a conformity to the whole of its commandments, and are equivalent to unblemished purity of character. It follows, that as certain

*Rom. iii. 28.

St. Paul expressly affirmed that those who sought justification through the law, were, in order to be justified, necessitated to obey it entirely—" were debtors to do the whole law." (Rom. ii. 15; Gal, v. 3.) It was, indeed, because a tenacious adherence to the Mosaic ritual argued a dependence on the law for justification, and, thereby, a virtual rejection of salvation through the mediation of Christ, that he not only forbade, but deprecated, in the

as it is that "there is not a just man upon earth, that doeth good, and sinneth not,"* so certain it is that "by the works of the law shall no flesh be justified." St. Paul, we repeat, speaks of works as they are judged of and dealt with by the law-"the law of works," as he entitles it, inasmuch as it offered eternal life as the desert of our own works. He does not speak of works as they are enjoined upon us in the Gospel-that gracious constitution which offers eternal life as the "gift of God, through our Lord Jesus Christ," to be received by faith; and which he, therefore, designates "the law of faith."+ Consequently, the precise import of the doctrine of St. Paul, in its bearing upon the

strongest language, the observance of those ceremonies which the law had prescribed, and which had answered their purpose when the Gospel was promulgated; and spoke of those ceremonies in terms of intolerance, scorn, and detestation, which had they been simply useless, and not subservient to pernicious error, he would hardly have used with regard to ordinances which, in a former age, had borne the stamp of divine authority, and had been recently honoured by the observance of the Son of God himself. But, for the important reason stated, he does not scruple to describe those ordinances as no better than the very rites of Paganism, which the Galatian converts had abandoned, and stigmatizes the adoption of them as tantamount to a relapse into idolatry itself. Gal. iv. 8, 9.

* Eccles. vii. 20.

† Rom. iii. 27.

subserviency of works to our justification, as laid down by St. James, depends upon the sense which he intended to convey by the term "faith." There is, therefore, no discrepancy whatever in the argument of the two Apostles, but on one supposition; namely, that faith, in the apprehension of St. Paul, was a reliance on the merits of Christ for justification, and nothing more that it was not a belief of the declarations of Christ and his Apostles in general that it did not extend to and embrace a conviction of the permanent authority of those precepts in the divine word, which enjoin the love and practice of all rectitude towards God and towards our fellow-creaturesa conviction, moreover, assumed to exert a corresponding influence on the life of the believer. That this, however, was the comprehensive significance of the faith inculcated by St. Paul, in common with the sacred writers in general, was established, it is presumed, in a preceding discourse; and might, indeed, be proved by a single passage in one of his Epistles, as well as by the strain of his writings:"Know ye not that the unrighteous shall not inherit the kingdom of God? Be not deceived: neither fornicators, nor idolaters, nor adulterers, nor effeminate, nor abusers of them

selves with mankind, nor thieves, nor covetous, nor drunkards, nor revilers, nor extortioners, shall inherit the kingdom of God."* Can words be more effective to assure us that, in the judgment of St. Paul, an influential conviction of the obligation and necessity of being personally righteous, was an essential part and constituent of the faith which justifieth? Or must we infer that St. Paul has left his readers in the dilemma of concluding, that a man may be justified and admitted into the kingdom of God in virtue of his faith, and, notwithstanding, condemned and excluded from that kingdom on account of his unrighteousness?

The truth is, that the great Apostle, while he confutes and deprecates the notion that any one can be accounted righteous in virtue of his obedience to the law, or be exempted from condemnation through any other medium than the atonement of the Son of God, yet most distinctly recognises that broad line of separation, which the Scripture everywhere draws between the righteous and the wicked; notwithstanding it holds mankind to be universally transgressors, and dependent on the infinite mercy of God for life eternal. He most undeniably assumes, with the sacred

* 1 Cor. vi. 9, 10.

writers in general, the necessity of a comparative rectitude of character, in order to participate in the divine mercy to realize the benefits of our Saviour's mediation: to obtain that justification which no merit inferior to His could have challenged. And here it should be especially observed, that the design of the Apostle in insisting upon the depravity of our species, was not merely, or indeed specifically, to demonstrate the unquestionable guilt and degeneracy of every human being; but to dissipate a conceit which the Jews entertained, that, as a people, they were an exception to the common depravity; and to convince them that they were as certainly subject to condemnation by the law as the rest of mankind, and stood in need of a mediator no less than the Gentiles. That this was, strictly speaking, the aim of his reasoning, is clearly intimated in the following passage; and must be evident, in a moment, if we consider the language which he cited from the Psalmist, to establish his accusation against them as transgressors :-" What then? are we better than they? No, in no wise: for we have before proved, both Jews and Gentiles, that they are all under sin; as it is written, There is none righteous, no, not