say is affixed, from the pen of the Rev. Thomas Chalmers, D.D. I have extracted a part of this invaluable Essay, and you will, I doubt not, gratify and guide your numerous readers, if you will find a place for the insertion of the following. I will send it to you in three parts, that I may not ask you too much room in one number. EUSEBIUS.

January 31, 1829.

There are three different states of activity in the prosecution of our religious interests, to which we shall advert, all of which are exemplified in human experience; and we shall attempt to point out what is right and what is wrong in each of them.

The first state of activity is exemplified by those, who seek to establish a righteousness of their own; the second, by those who seek to be justified by faith; and the third, by those who seek under Christ, as the accepted Mediator, to attain that holiness without which no

man can see God-to reach that character, without which there is no congeniality with the joys or the exercises of heaven.

I. In the New Testament, the Jews are charged with a prevailing disposition to establish a righteousness of their own, but this formed no local or national peculiarity on the part of the Jewish people. It is the universal disposition of nature, and is as plainly and prominently exemplified among professing Christians of this day, as it ever was by the most zealous adherents of the Mosaic ritual. It is

true, that out of the multitude of its ceremonial observations, a goodly frame-work could be reared of outward and apparent conformities to the will of God; and nothing more natural than for man to enter into that which is the work of his own hands, and then to feel himself as if placed in a tabernacle of security. But there are other materials besides those of Judaism, which men can employ for raising a fabric of self-righteousness. Some of them as formal in their character as the Sabbaths and the Sacraments of Christianity-others of them with the claim of being more substantial in their character, as the relative duties and proprieties of life, but all of them proceeding on the same presumption, that man can, by his own powers, work out a meritorious title to acceptance with God, and that he can so equalize his doings with the demands of the law, as to make it incumbent on the lawgiver to confer on him the rewards and the favour which are due to obedience.

Now it is worthy of remark, that though few are prepared to assert this principle in all its extent, and though it even be disowned by them in profession, yet in practice and in feeling it adheres to them. To the question, What shall I do to be saved? it is the silent answer of many a heart. That there is something which I can do, and by the doing of which I can achieve my salvation. A sense of his own sufficiency lurks in the bosom of man, long after, by his lips, he has denied it; and it is a very possible thing to be most steadfast in the arguments, and most strenuous in the asseverations of orthodoxy, and yet practically to be so undisciplined by its lessons, as that the habit of the

whole man shall be in a state of real and effective resistance to them.

And thus it is, that, among the men of all creeds, and of all professions in Christianity, do we meet with the attempt of establishing a righteousness of their own. righteousness of their own. The question of our interest with God is no sooner entertained by the human mind, than it appears to be one of the readiest and most natural of its movements to do something for the object of working out such a righteousness. The question of, How shall 1, from being personally a condemned sinner, become personally an approved and accepted servant of God? no sooner enters the mind, than it is followed up by the suggestion of such a personal change in habit or in character, as it is competent for man, by his own turning and his own striving, to accomplish. The power of which I am conscious-the command with which I feel myself invested over both my thoughts and my doings—the authoritative voice which the mind can issue from the

place of fancied sovereignty where it sits, and from which it exacts both of the outer and the inner man an obedience to all its inclinations, -these are what I constantly and familiarly press into my service; and I find that, in point of fact, they are able to conduct me to many a practical attainment. Nor is it to be wondered at, that when the attainment in question is such a righteousness before God as may empower me to lift a plea of desert in his hearing, the presumption should still adhere to me, that this also I can achieve by my own strength -this also I shall win, as the fruit of my own energies, and my own aspirations.

Now, what stamps an utter hopelessness upon ficiency of every man's conduct from the resuch an enterprise as this, is both the actual dequirements of God's law, throughout that part of his history which is past, and the deficiency, full and equal obedience to the same requireno less obvious, of every man's powers from a ment, during that part of his history which is to come. Without entering into the abstract question of justice, whether the rigour of a man's future conformities should make up for the offence of his bygone disobedience, and deciding this question by the light of nature or of conscience, certain it is, that no man, under the revelation of the Gospel, can feel himself, even though it were on a most prosperous career of advancing virtue, to be in a state of ease in the sense of the guilt that has already been incurred, and of the transgressions which have already been committed by him. On this subject, there are certain texts of the Bible which look hard upon him-certain solemn announcements about the immutability of the law, which cannot fail to disturb, and, it may be, to paralyze him-certain damnatory clauses about the very least act of iniquity, on which he, conscious of great and repeated acts of iniquity, may well conclude himself to be a lost and irrecoverable sinner-certain mighty asseverations, on the part of God's own Son, about the difficulty of annulling the sanctions of his Father's government, and that it were easier for heaven and earth to pass away than for these to pass away, which may well fill the heart of every conscious offender with the assurance, that his condemnation is as unfailing as the

Now this is not the class that we have chiefly had in our eye. The men to whom we principally allude, are those who run, but without hope, and without satisfaction-men who fight, but without any cheering anticipations of victory. They are seeking a righteousness by works; and are, at the same time, disheartened, at every step, by the consciousness of no sensible advancement towards it. Unlike the latter, they think_more truly and more adequately of the law. The one class see it only in the light of a carnal commandment. The others see it according to the character of its spiritual requirements. The one, without an enlightened sense of the law, are what the apostle represents himself to have been when without the law, alive; even like all those religious formalists, who looked forward to eternal life on the strength of their manifold and religious observations. The others, with this enlightened sense, are what the apostle represents himself to have been after the law came, dead; or they feel all the helplessness of death and of despair, even as he did, when amid his strenuous but unavailing struggles, he was forced to exclaim, "O wretched man that I am, who shall deliver me?" And thus it is, we believe, with many whose hearts have at length been struck by a sense of the importance of eternal things-who have begun to feel the weight of their everlasting interests-who are sensible that all is not right about them, and are seeking about for that movement of transition, by which they may be carried forward from a state of wrath to a state of acceptance-who, in obedience to the first natural impulse, strive to amend what is wrong in conduct, and to adopt what is right in conduct, but find, that after all their toil, and all their carefulness, that relief is as far from them as ever-who set up a new order in their lives, and propose to find their way to peace on the stepping stones of many and successive reformations, but find, that as they pile their offerings of obedience the one upon the other, the law rises in its exactions; and what with a claim of satisfaction for the past, and of spiritual obedience for the future, it exhibits itself to their appalled imaginations, in the dimensions of such a length, and a breadth, and a height, and a depth, as they never can encircle -who, in the very proportion, it may be, of their pains and their earnestness, are ever acquiring more tremendous conceptions, both of the extent of its requisitions, and the terrors of its authority-who thus feel, that by every trial of obedience, they are just multiplying their failures, and swelling the account of guilt and of deficiency that is against them-who feel themselves in the hopeless condition of men, whose every attempt at extrication, just thickens the entanglements that are around them, and whose every effort of activity fastens them the deeper in an abyss of helplessness. This is the real process, we will not say of all, but of many a convert to the light and power of the gospel. This is the sure result with every man who seeks to establish a righteousness of his own, if, along with this attempt, he combines an adequate conception of the law in the spirituality of its demands, of the law in the certainty of its exactions. He feels urged, on the ene hand, by its menacing and authoritative

voice, to do. He feels convinced, on the other, by a sense of the guilt or inadequacy which attaches to all his doing. He feels himself in the hand of a master issuing an impracticable mandate, and lifting at the same time an arm of powerful displeasure, for all his past and all his present violations. He cannot sit still under the power and frequency of the applications which are now making to his awakened conscience. He flies for deliverance, but it is like the flight of a desperado from his sure and unrelenting pursuers.

In the olden books of Scotland, and in that traditional history, which is handed down from the pious of one generation to another, we meet with this very process, not unaptly described under the term of law-work. It is well delineated in the lives of Brainerd and Halyburton. There is an intermediate period of darkness, and despondency, and distress, in many an individual history, between the repose of nature's indifference, and the repose of gospel peace and gospel anticipations. The mind, in these circumstances, is generally alive to two distinct things: first, to the truth and immutable obligation of God's law; and, secondly, to the magnitude and irrecoverable evil of its own actual deficiencies. It is at one time urged on by an impulse of natural conscience, to a set of active measures for the recovery of its lost condition. It is at another time mortified into a despairing sense, that all these measures are utterly fruitless and unavailing. And thus, amid the agita tions of doubt, and terror, and remorse; and sinking under the weight of an oppressive gloom, which is ever deepening, and ever aggravating around it, it is at length practically and experimentally convinced, by many a weary but unsuccessful struggle, that in itself there is no strength, that the man who runs upon his own energies, runs uncertainly ; and that he who fights with his own weapons, fights as one that beateth the air.