the works and perfections of the Godhead. The cross of Jesus Christ is not merely the place of breaking forth into peace and reconciliation, but it is also the place of breaking forth into the love and new obedience of a regenerated nature. He who hath blotted out the handwriting of ordinances that was against us, which was contrary to us, and took it out of the way, nailing it to His cross-it is He who hath slain in our hearts their enmity against God-and now that we can love God because He first loved us, and sent His Son into the world to be the propitiation for our sins—now, and now only, can we serve Him in the newness of the spirit, and not in the oldness of the letter.

It should be our aim then to keep our hearts in the love of God-and this can only be done by keeping in memory the love that He hath borne unto us. With this affection all alive in our bosoms, and seeking how most to please and to gratify the Being whom it regards-let us never forget that this is His will, even our sanctification: that like as He rejoiced at the birth of nature, when, on the work being accomplished, He looked upon every thing that He had made, and saw in the beauty, and luxuriance, and variety, which had just emerged from His hands, that all was very good-in like manner, and much more, does He rejoice in that new creation, by which moral loveliness, and harmony, and order, are made to emerge out of the chaos of our present degeneracy. The righteous Lord loveth righteousness, and the spectacle of our worth and excellence is to Him a pleasing spectacle—and what He wants is, to form

and to multiply, by the regenerative power of His Spirit, the specimens of a beauty far higher in kind than all that can be exhibited on the face of visible nature and our truth and our charity, and our deep repentance for sin, and our ceaseless aspirations after loftier degrees of purity and godliness-these imprint so many additional features of gracefulness on that spiritual creation over which the holiness of His character most inclines Him to rejoice; and we knowing that this is the mind of the Deity, and loving to gratify the Being whom we love, are furnished with a principle of obedience, more generous, and far more productive of the fruits of righteousness, than the legal principle which only seeks to be square with the Lawgiver, and safe from the thunders of His violated authority. There is no limitation to such an obedience. The ever-urging principle of love to God is sure at all times to stimulate and to extend it: and what with a sense of delight to the work itself, and with the sense that God whom we love delights in the work also and rejoices over it, is there a newness of spirit given to obedience under the economy of the gospel, altogether diverse from the oldness of the letter, which obtained under the economy of nature and of the law.

But, thirdly, there is nothing perhaps that will better illustrate the distinction between service rendered in the newness of the spirit, and service rendered in the oldness of the letter, than one simple reflection upon what that is which is the great object of the dispensation we sit under-to be made like unto God, like unto Him in righte

ousness, and like unto Him in true holiness. Now just think what the righteousness of God is like. Is it righteousness in submission to the authority of a law? Is it righteousness painfully and laboriously wrought out, with a view to reward? Is it righteousness in pursuit of any one pleasure or gratification that is at all distinct from the pleasure which the Divinity has in the very righteousness itself? Does not He desire righteousness simply because He loves it? Is not He holy, just because holiness is the native and kindred element of His Being? Do not all the worth and all the moral excellence of the Godhead, come direct from the original tendencies of His own moral nature? And would either the dread of punishment or the hope of remuneration be necessary to attach Him more than He already is, by the spontaneous and unbidden propensities of His own character, to that virtue which has been His glory from everlasting, and to that ethereal purity in which He most delights to expatiate ? It is not at the beck of a governor-it is not with a view to prepare Himself for an appearance at some bar of jurisprudenceit is nothing else in fact but the preference He bears for what is right, and the hatred He holds for what is wrong-it is this, and this alone, which determines to absolute and unerring rectitude all the purposes and all the proceedings of the Deity. And to be like unto Him, that which is a task when done under the oldness of the letter, must be done in newness of spirit, and then will it be the very transport of our nature to be engaged in the doing What is now felt, we fear, by many as a

of it.

bondage, would, were we formed anew in the image of him who created us, become a blessedness. The burden of our existence would turn into its beatitude and we, exempted from all those feelings of drudgery and dislike which ever accompany a mere literal obedience, would prosecute holiness with a sort of constitutional delight, and so evince that God was assimilating us to Himself, that He was dwelling in us, and that He was walking in us.

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And the Christian disciple who is thus aspiring after that obedience, which while it fulfils the demands of the law in the letter, is also rendered in newness of spirit, will find in the following Treatise, SCUDDER'S CHRISTIAN'S DAILY WALK IN HOLY SECURITY AND PEACE," a valuable companion and counsellor to guide him in every condition of life, and under all the vicissitudes to which life is subject to instruct him how to prosecute his daily walk, so as to secure his peace, and to possess his soul in patience, in his journey through life, and to render the circumstances of his lot, whether prosperous or adverse, subservient to the still higher purpose of promoting his holiness and his growth in the divine life, to fit him for the heavenly rest which awaits him at the close of his earthly pilgrimage. In this Treatise, the Christian disciple will learn to combine a service the most rigid in the letter, with those principles of the renewed heart which render it at the same time a delightful and an acceptable service. He will learn how to walk with God, while engaged in the service of man. It is the production of a man who had reached to great attainments in the spiritual life,

and whose wise and experimental counsels are well fitted to guide him amidst the doubts and difficulties which may beset his path in the Christian warfare. It has received the approving testimony of two of the most eminent Divines of a former age, Dr Owen and Richard Baxter, and we know of no work which better merits the high commendation which these competent judges have bestowed on it.

But without expatiating on the excellencies of a work, the value of which can only be estimated by those who have devoted themselves to a serious perusal of its pages, we shall conclude with two inferences from the prefatory observations with which we have introduced this Treatise to the notice of our readers. The first is, that virtue, so far from being superseded by the gospel, is exalted thereby into a far nobler, and purer, and more disinterested attribute of the character than before. It becomes virtue, refined from that taint of sordidness which formerly adhered to it; prosecuted not from an impulse of selfishness, but from an impulse of generosity-followed after for its own sake, and because of the loveliness of its native and essential charms, instead of being followed after for the sake of that lucre wherewith it may be conceived to bribe and to enrich its votaries. Legal virtue is rendered in the spirit of a mercenary, who attaches himself to the work of obedience for hire. Evangelical virtue is rendered in the spirit of an amateur, who, in attaching himself to the work of obedience, finds that he is already in the midst of those very delights, than which he