undergo the punishment of his iniquities; and thus He deals. with unbelievers whom He will punish in their own persons for their transgressions; or else He appoints them to undergo the punishment of their sins mystically, as being by faith made one with the Lord Jesus Christ, who Himself hath borne our sins in His own body on the tree. Now pardon of sin doth not remove the mystical appointment of a believer unto punishment, for he hath suffered it; for Christ hath suffered it, and Christ and he are one mystical person by faith. God never pardons but He punishes the very sin that He pardons; He punishes it in our Surety and Undertaker when He forgives it to the believer. Pardon of sin, therefore, removes only that guilt which consists in our own personal appointment and designation to punishment; the sin doth always in itself necessarily deserve death, though that death hath been inflicted upon Christ, and therefore upon believers in Him, as members of Him."—Ibid.

"The heathen will not be judged by the written law of Judaism, neither will they be judged out of the things that are written in the Scriptures of Christianity. God will not, in their case, charge them with the guilt of a sin for that which they were not taught and could not know to be sinful. It is not their helpless ignorance, and it is not the fatality of their birth, and it is not the thick moral envelopment that has settled itself over the face of their country which will condemn them. It will be their sin, and that coupled with the circumstances of their knowing it to be sin, which will condemn them. And we have already remarked in one lecture, that there do exist, even in the remotest tracts of Paganism, such vestiges of light, as, when collected together, form a code or directory of moral conduct-that there are still to be found among them the fragments of a law, which they never follow but with an approving conscience; and never violate but with the check of an opposing remonstrance,

that by their own wilfulness and their own obstinacy is overborne-in other words, that they are a law unto themselves, and that their own conscience vests it with an authority, by bearing witness to the rightness and obligation of its requirements. So that, among the secret things which will be brought to light in the great day of revelation, will it be seen that all the sin for which a heathen shall be made to suffer was sin committed in the face of an inward monitor, which warned him through time, and will condemn him at his outset upon eternity."-Dr. Chalmers on the Romans.

"To a man wedded to his vices, what a prodigious, but false relief is it to think--if he can persuade himself. to think so that it is possible he may shun the worm that dieth not, and the fire that shall not be quenched. Under this notion how does the depraved spirit feel itself at ease in a course of sin! How charitable, and noble, and liberal does this plan seem, which delivers a man from slavish fear of punishment, and allows him to practise sin without terror, though it insults the majesty and holiness of God! Then he has attained what many call true liberty of soul. How in our times has this spirit grown to its height! If the depression and contempt of the clergy were the only bad consequence of it, we ought to bear them with patience. But precious souls are, in this way, ruined to eternity. For let it be remembered that our Saviour, in Mark ix, six times expressly asserts the eternity of hell torments; and thence infers the duty and necessity of cutting off the hand and foot, and plucking out the eye that offends. If it be not true, what shall we say of Him who has told us so? Poor wretched sinner! thy hope of being saved in thy sins is vain; as vain as it is to hope that Christ, the eternal Truth, shall prove false in what He has said! Despair then of this hope, and seek, through His grace, to mortify thy vices."Rev. Jos. Milner.

473

GOOD WORKS.

"By the works of the law shall no flesh be justified:" GAL. II, 16.

"IF thou, Lord, shouldest mark iniquity, O Lord, who shall stand?' There have been great disputes one way and another about the merit of good works; but I truly think they who have laboriously engaged in them have been very idly, though very eagerly, employed about nothing; since the more sober of the schoolmen themselves acknowledge there can be no such thing as meriting from the blessed God, in the human, or, to speak more accurately, in any created nature whatsoever; nay so far from any possibility of merit, there can be no room for reward any otherwise than of the sovereign pleasure and gracious kindness of God. But why should I enlarge here, when one single circumstance overthrows all those titles? The most righteous of mankind would not be able to stand, if his works were weighed in the balance of strict justice; how much less then could they deserve that immense glory which is now in question! Nor is this only to be denied concerning the unbeliever and the sinner, but concerning the righteous and pious believer, who is not only free from all the guilt of his former impenitence and rebellion, but endowed with the gift of the Spirit. The interrogation here expresses the most vehement negation, and

signifies that no mortal, if called to the strict examination of Divine justice, without daily and repeated forgiveness, could be able to keep his standing, and much less could he arise to that glorious height. That merit,' says Bernard, 'on which my hope relies, consists in these three things-the love of adoption, the truth of the promise, and the power of its performance.' This is the threefold cord which cannot be broken."-Abp. Leighton.

"It may seem somewhat extreme, which I will speak; therefore let every man judge of it, even as his own heart shall tell him and no otherwise; I will but only make a demand if God should yield to us, not as unto Abraham, if fifty, forty, thirty, twenty, yea, if ten good persons could be found in a city, for their sakes that city should not be destroyed, but if God should make us an offer thus large, search all the generations of men since the fall of your father Adam, find one man, that hath done any one action, which hath passed from him pure, without any stain or blemish at all; and for that one man's one only action, neither man nor angels shall feel the torments which are prepared for both; do you think that this ransom, to deliver men and angels, would be found among the sons of men? The best things we do have somewhat in them to be pardoned. How then can we do anything meritorious, and worthy to be rewarded? Indeed, God doth liberally promise whatsoever appertaineth to a blessed life, unto as many as sincerely keep His law, though they be not able exactly to keep it. Wherefore we acknowledge a dutiful necessity of doing well, but the meritorious dignity of well-doing we utterly renounce. We see how far we are from the perfect righteousness of the law; the little fruit which we have in holiness, it is, God knoweth, corrupt and unsound: we put no confidence at all in it, we challenge nothing in the world for it, we dare not call God to a reckoning as if we had Him in our debt books; our

continual suit to Him is, and must be, to bear with our infirmities, to pardon our offences."-Hooker.

Merely human virtues, whether considered in the heathen philosophers, or in such as by the world are called worthy people, are indeed fine flowers, but they have a worm within them. Whatever has not grace for its principle, whatever is not of faith, and is done without love to God, without a reference to Him, but with a view to ourselves only, is a dead work in the sight of God.

"Yet how many people have been, and are still, deceiving themselves in this point. The heathen sages, undoubtedly, believed themselves possessed of exquisite and solid virtues ; they did not suspect that their hearts were deceitful, and their virtues spurious. How many of such as are called Christians possess heathen virtues only, without being aware of it, without being willing to suspect their hearts of imposing on them! Human virtues are like false coin, which is good in appearance, and indebted for its currency to the misery of mankind. But, is it not astonishing, that not those only among whom this false coin is circulated, take it for genuine; but even those who coined it are so much blinded, as to esteem and look upon it as sterling." -Superville.

"Verily,' wrote Luther to Duke George of Saxony, 'I was a devout monk. If ever monk entered heaven by his monkish merits, certainly I should have obtained an entrance there. Luther was not the first monk who had passed through these conflicts. The cloisters often enveloped in their dark walls abominable vices, which would have made an upright mind shudder if they had been revealed; but often they concealed virtues, which grew up beneath the shelter of salutary retirement; and which, if they had been brought forth to view, would have been the admiration of