that you are not on the path to heaven. And if you believe not the Scripture, when it announces a new spirit as your indispensable preparation here, there may be a dazzling and deceitful imagination, but there is no real belief of what it announces, or of what it promises, about paradise hereafter.

It is thus that we would try the faith of Antinomians. Fancy is not faith. A wilful and determined adherence of the mind to some beatific vision, in which it loves to indulge, is not a believing assent of the mind to what a professed Teacher from heaven has revealed to us of the coming immortality. How can we believe, upon His authority, that we are to enter this region of purity and peace, if we believe not, on the same authority, that the road which leads to it, is a road of mortification, and of new obedience, and of strenuous conflict with the desires and urgencies of nature? If the eye of faith, or of the understanding, be opened on some field of truth that is laid before it, it will not overlook the propinquities of this contemplation, while it only admits the objects which lie on the remoter part of the territory. It is evidence which opens this eye; and that evidence which has failed to open it to what is near, will equally fail to open it to what is distant. But though the eye of the understanding be shut, the eye of the imagination may be open. This requires no evidence, and the man who is without faith in the realities which lie on the other side of death, may nevertheless be all awake in his fancy to those images of bliss with which he has embellished it, and may even possess his own heart with the

pleasing anticipation of it as his destined inheritance. It is not upon his fancy, however, but upon his faith, that the fulfilment of this anticipation will turn,-a faith which, had it been real, would have had respect unto the prescribed road, as well as unto the revealed inheritance, a faith

which would have found him in holiness here, as well as in heaven hereafter. That semblance of it which the Antinomian has is a mere vagary, that may amuse or may harden him in the midst of his present worldliness, but which will be dissipated into nought at the judgment-seat, when for the treacherous phantom which deceived him in time, a tremendous reality will be awarded to him for eternity.

We like not that writer to be violently alleged against, who expounds, and expounds truly, the amount of Christian holiness, because he says not enough, it is thought, of the warrants and securities that are provided in the gospel for Christian hope. We think, that to shed a luminousness over one portion of the divine testimony, is to reflect, at least, if not immediately to shed, a light on all the other portions of it. The doctrine of our acceptance, by faith in the merits and propitiation of Christ, is worthy of many a treatise, and many are the precious treatises upon it which have been offered to the world. But the doctrine of regeneration, by the Spirit of Christ, equally demands the homage of a separate lucubration-which may proceed on the truth of the former, and, by the incidental recognition of it, when it comes naturally in the way of the author's attention, marks the

soundness and the settlement of his mind thereupon, more decisively than by the dogmatic, and ostentatious, and often misplaced asseverations of an ultra orthodoxy. And the clearer revelation to the eye of faith of one article, will never darken or diminish, but will, in fact, throw back the light of an augmented evidence on every other article. Like any object that is made up of parts, which we have frequently looked to in their connexion, and as making up a whole-the more distinctly one part of it is made manifest, the more forcibly will all the other parts of it be suggested to the mind. And thus it is, that when pressing home the necessity of one's own holiness, as his indispensable preparation for heaven, we do not dissever his mind from the atonement of Christ, but in reality do we fasten it more closely than ever on the necessity of another's righteousness, as his indispensable plea for heaven.

Such we apprehend to be the genuine influence of a Treatise that is now submitted anew to the Christian public. It certainly does not abound in formal and direct avowals of the righteousness which is by faith, and on this account we have heard it excepted against. But we know of no reading that is more powerfully calculated to shut us up unto the faith-none more fitted to deepen and to strengthen the basis of a sinner's humility, and so reconcile him to the doctrine of salvation in all its parts, by grace alone-none that, by exhibiting the height and perfection of Christian attainments, can better serve the end of prostrating the inquirer into the veriest depths of self-abasement, when, on

the humbling comparison of what he is, with what he ought to be, he is touched and penetrated by a sense of his manifold deficiencies. It is on this account that the author of such a work may, instrumentally speaking, do the office of a schoolmaster to bring us unto Christ: nor do we know at what other time it is, than when eyeing from afar the lofty track of spiritual and seraphic piety which is here delineated, that we more feel our need of the great High Priest, or that His peacespeaking blood and His perfect righteousness are more prized by us.

But it is not enough that we idly gaze on the heavenly course. We must personally enter it; and it is most utterly and experimentally untrue, that, in the prosecution of this walk, we meet with any thing to darken the principles on which are made to hinge a sinner's justification in the sight of God. He who looks most frequently to Christ, for the purpose of imitation, will also gather most from him on which to prop his confidence, and that too on the right and evangelical basis. There is a sure link of concatenation in the processes of divine grace, by which a growing spiritual discern ment is made to emerge out of a growing conformity to the will and the image of the Saviour. These two elements act and re-act the one upon the other. “He that keepeth my commandments to him will I manifest myself." "He whose eye is single shall have his whole body full of light."* "The Holy

By singleness of eye here, is meant not a single intentness of the mind upon one truth, but, as is evident from the context, that singleness of aim after an interest in heaven, which is not perverted or seduced from its object by the love of a present evil world.

Ghost," who acts as a revealer, “is given to those who obey him." "To him who hath, more shall be given." All proving that there is a procedure in the administration of divine grace, by which he who giveth himself up unto all righteousness is guided unto all truth.

And, it is to be hoped, that while the doctrine of justification is not argued, but rather enhanced and recommended by the perusal of such a work, its own distinct object will be still more directly subserved, of leading some to a more strict and separate devotedness of life, than is often to be met with in this professing age. The severities of Christian practice, which are here urged upon the reader, are in no way allied with the penances and the self-inflictions of a monastic ritual, but are the essentials of spiritual discipline in all ages, and must be undergone by every man who is transformed by the Holy Ghost from one of the children of this world to one of the children of light. The utter renunciation of self-the surrender of all vanitythe patient endurance of evils and wrongs-the crucifixion of natural and worldly desires-the absorption of all our interests and passions in the enjoyment of God-and the subordination of all we do, and of all we feel, to His glory,-these form the leading virtues of our pilgrimage, and in the very proportion of their rarity, and their painfulness, are they the more effectual tests of our regeneration. And one of the main uses of this book is, that while it enforces these spiritual graces in all their extent, it lays open the spiritual enjoyment that springs from the cultivation of them-revealing