thinks all is right because we have been baptized; I mean that earnest, living, leaning trust, which feels, as its very life, that there is nothing in the whole universe on which and by which one can be saved but in Christ Jesus; that faith that flees from a law that curses you, to a Saviour that blesses you: that faith that flees from self, with all its excuses, its accusations, its apologies, and sinfulness, and seeks peace through the blood of the everlasting

covenant.

Oh! happy and safe is that mother's son who has this faith h; for to him there is no condemnation, and nothing shall be able to separate him from the love of God that is in Christ Jesus! Act upon this faith; regard its objects as realities: go forth into the world, acting upon it, and honouring God, accepting all he is and says as substance: "Them that honour me, I will honour." Confidence in Jesus is happiness to man and protection from God. Suspicion of God is misery to the creature, and displeasing to his Maker.

If the atonement be thus complete, we have in this a right and scriptural view of the Lord's supper. What is the Lord's supper? It is a feast that follows the sacrifice. Let us revert to the Passover of old. There was first the slaughter of the lamb, which was the painful and the sacrificial part; there was the eating the prepared flesh of the lamb, which was the joyful or the festival part. In the ancient Passover both had of necessity to be combined; the same parties who enjoyed the pleasure of the feast had to go through the pain, year after year, of sacrificing the victim; but in our case these two have been divided; our blessed Lord has monopolized the painful, and bequeathed the pleasing only to us. The sacrifice is finished, the festival is continued daily; and we come this day to the Lord's table, not as to a painful tragedy, in which we are to sympathize with the weeping and agonized sufferer, but to the glad festival that succeeds the sacrifice, in which we are to participate with joyful and grateful recollections that Christ our Passover was sacrificed for us. The eucharist is not a fast, but a feast; not a sad and sorrowful sacrifice, but a festival after the sacrifice, for which, and in which, glad hearts and grateful and happy songs and bright hopes become us; not sadness, not gloom, not painful sympathies. Humbled

we may be, because of our sins; but glad we must be that these sins are all forgiven and blotted out through him that died for us and rose again. By appearing at the feast after the sacrifice, we profess our trust in the efficacy of that sacrifice-our not being ashamed of him that offered it—our gratitude to God that such a sacrifice was provided in his infinite mercy; and we say, every time we communicate, that dumb, but eloquent and significant act, “Whoever may be ashamed of the crucified, I am not; whoever may be ashamed of the cross, I glory in it: it is all my salvation, and all my desire." Those sins that rise in painful reminiscences even after you have renounced them—that past life over which you have mourned and grieved, and the errors and sins which, by grace, you have repudiated and abjured for ever, may indeed humble you, but should not make you feel unsafe. Recollect the Passover. When the Israelite father had sprinkled the blood of the Lamb upon the threshold of his door, he retired into the inner-room, and, in that memorable night, gathered his family around him. No doubt, many an Israelite father, when he heard the rush of the angel's wing, as he swept with the speed of the lightning through every street, and alley, and court of Rahab, felt his heart throb rapidly within him, and feared that the next stroke of the angel might be upon his own fairest and first-born one. But his trembling did not make the angel enter; not all his doubts, his fears, his suspicions, made the angel pause. The sprinkled blood was there: he minded not that there was a fainting, failing heart within; and on he swept till he found a threshold where no blood was sprinkled. It is not the weakness of your faith that weakens your interest in Jesus; it is not doubts, fears, suspicions, painful, sinful, unworthy as they are; your only safety in the whole universe is this—that the blood of sprinkling is on your hearts; if it be there-faith in the atonement of Jesus -all is well, all is safe, safe as the very throne and being of God himself.

You say, "How do I appropriate this blood? I cannot take literal blood and sprinkle it on a literal threshold." You are not asked to do so. Moral things are not less true than material. Many philosophers say that the material is unreal, and that the moral alone is the real. What you are asked to do is this-to

have faith in Jesus. But even that faith is not your Saviour. There is, I fear, a prevalent and very erroneous notion in this matter. The old formula was, "Do and live;" the new formula / many imagine in some degree the converse, "Believe and live.” They think that as the old formula was doing God's will, and thus obtaining life, so the new one is faith, or believing God's word, and thus gaining eternal life. It is not so If it were, it would be substituting rightness of creed for rightness of life; and in both cases it would be something of the creature's own. The fact is, God requires at this moment just what he required of Adam in Paradise before he fell- -a perfect obedience, or righteousness without flaw, or blemish, or short-coming in his sight. I say, the requirement that God makes in grace is just the requirement that God made in Paradise-perfect obedience to the law. Do not think that the gospel is simply diluted law, and that the New Testament is simply a lower Old Testament; that God will be satisfied with a sincere, though imperfect obedience, in the room of a perfect obedience. He demands now, as he ever demanded, and as he will never cease to demand, a perfect righteousness as the only title to heaven. You ask, Where then is the difference between our state and Adam's? In Adam's case it was

his work; in our case it is our acceptance. Adam had to do it; we have to accept it as already done, already achieved, already perfected. It is faith's province simply to accept. Adam had to do, to be righteous, and be entitled to heaven; we have to accept the righteousness Christ has provided, and thus be saved. Hence faith is not the ground of salvation: it is the eye that sees, the ear that hears, the feet that run, the hand that grasps; it is the means, not the end. It believes that Christ was cut off, "but not for himself." And if he died for sinners, why not for me? Not, "Why for me?" but, "Why not for me?" Thus resting and believing, it has peace with God through Jesus Christ.

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LECTURE XXV.

THE MISSION OF THE MESSIAH.

"Seventy weeks are determined upon thy people and upon thy holy city, to finish the transgression, and to make an end of sins, and to make reconciliation for iniquity, and to bring in everlasting righteousness, and to seal up the vision and prophecy, and to anoint the most Holy."-Daniel ix. 24.

I Do not discuss the chronology of this prophecy in my present lecture; this I reserve for the next, in which I hope to demonstrate, with irresistible conclusion, that Jesus Christ is the Messiah pointed out by the prophet, and that in him the prediction I have read is gloriously fulfilled.

I have already shown that the prediction, "The Messiah shall be cut off, but not for himself," was realized in Christ. I have now to prove that the prophecy, that he shall "finish the transgression, make an end of sin, make reconciliation for iniquity, bring in everlasting righteousness, seal up the vision and the prophecy, and anoint the most Holy," has been fulfilled in the mission of the Lord Jesus Christ, and therein alone. And when I have shown that the moral import of the prophecy is fulfilled in him, and afterward that the chronology of the prophecy finds its termination also in him, I shall have given you the clearest possible demonstration, if any additional be required, first, that Jesus is the Messiah promised to the fathers, and, next, that Daniel spake as he was moved by the Holy Spirit of God.

The first work which Christ is here predicted to accomplish is to "finish the transgression." By looking at the margins of your Bibles, you will see that the stricter and more accurate translation (for such the marginal translation always is) is, “to restrain transgression." We are taught therefore, in this clause,

that one great effect of the mission of the Messiah will be to "restrain transgression." Its next result will be to make an end of sin; next, to make reconciliation for iniquity; next, to bring in everlasting righteousness, to seal up the vision and the prophecy and lastly, to anoint the most Holy.

Let us contemplate the first-to restrain transgression. I restrict myself here to the one view of his mission here specified -viz. its sin-restraining influence. It is not here said it shall be the result of his work to create holiness in the hearts of his own; this, it is true, is otherwise, and clearly stated; but it is declared that the effect of the mission of Jesus, of the word that he should preach to the people, and the work he should do for them, will be to restrain or curb transgression. Has not this been the historical result of Christianity, wherever it has been effectually proclaimed? On those who have not embraced its truths with saving faith, it has yet exercised a restrictive moral power that has made them, even in its twilight, different from what they would have been if Christianity had never been preached;-in other words, there is an indirect influence of the gospel, where its direct power is not felt, which has restrained, and still restrains the gross and palpable transgressions that degraded and defiled mankind previous to its announcement, and still degrade those that are ignorant of it. It requires but the most superficial acquaintance with the history of the world to prove that it is so. Before the introduction of Christianity, weak and deformed children were invariably cast out to perish in the streets; and this not in barbarous, but in civilized and cultivated lands. What has arrested this? Not civilization; for the Roman code is so civilized that it has been more or less widely adopted by numerous modern nations. It was the restraints, or the indirect influence of Christianity alone. In heathen and in ancient times, fathers had absolute power over their sons, and, if possible, still more over their daughters; they might sell them, or dismiss them, as they might their slaves. In ancient and heathen times, a husband's power over his wife was despotic; he might dismiss her for the least offence; he might have put her to death, and it would not have been murder. In ancient times the marriage contract had not half its sacredness, nor a tithe of