to the influence of that gratitude, which should lead us to love and to imitate and to obey Him. Thus shall we bring forth fruit unto God-even those fruits of righteousness which are by Jesus Christ unto His praise and unto His glory.

248

LECTURE XXXIX.

ROMANS, vii, 5, 6.

"For when we were in the flesh, the motions of sins, which were by the law, did work in our members to bring forth fruit unto death. But now we are delivered from the law, that being dead wherein we were held: that we should serve in newness of spirit, and not in the oldness of the letter."

THERE is a twofold change which takes place, at the moment of a believer's transition into the peace and privileges of the gospel. He in the first place passes into a new condition, as it respects his legal relationship with God; and he in the second place passes into a new character, as it respects the feelings and principles by which he comes to be actuated. You know what his relationship to God is, under the first economy in which he is situated. The moral Governor of our world ordained a law of rectitude, and authoritatively bound it on the observation of our species. That law has in every individual case been violated; and it were giving up the very conception of a moral government, for us to delude ourselves with the imagination, that a certain penalty shall not follow in the train of an offence, or that condemnation shall not follow in the train of disobedience. This in fact were stripping the jurisprudence of Heaven of its sanctions, and so reducing the divine administration to a nullity; and this is the perpetual, tendency of those who

have not yet been arrested by the awful realities of the question. They hurry themselves away from the contemplation of God's inviolable majesty, and uncompromising truth; and, in the pleasing dream of His tenderness for the infirmities of His erring children, would they lull themselves into a sweet oblivion of the alone elements, on which hinges the fate of their eternity. It is indeed most true, that God has all of the love and the compassion and the amiable kindness wherewith they have invested Him; and the gospel of Jesus Christ is the very development of these attributes-the very expression of a longing and affectionate Father after His strayed children, for the purpose of recalling them; but at the same time of recalling them in that one way, that shall illustrate the entire character and perfection of the Godhead. It is a dispensation of mercy free to all-only of mercy through the medium of righteousness-not of a mercy which dethrones the law, but of a mercy which magnifies that law and makes it honourable -not of such an indulgence as would pour contempt on the face of the Divinity, but such an indulgence as pours a deep and awful consecration over it. We sit under the economy of grace, but of grace in conjunction with holiness; and the overtures of reconciliation-coming to us as they do through the channel of a mysterious atonement, and an unchangeable priesthood, and a mediatorship sealed with the blood of an everlasting covenant-come to us, if I may so express it, through

such an intervening ceremonial, as serves to guard and to dignify the Sovereign, even in the freest exercise of His clemency to the sinful-So that they cannot by this path of access enter into peace with the Deity, without beholding Him in the awfulness of His purity, without feeling for Him the profoundest reverence.

From this rapid sketch of the great moral characteristics that sit on the economy of the gospel, you may come to understand how it is that the believer, on being translated into a new condition. is also moulded and transformed into a new character. It is easy to profess the faith, and a mere profession will induce no radical change on the habits or the history; but if a man actually have the faith, then he has that which never fails to be the instrument of a great spiritual renovation. It is upon this principle, that he is prompted to comply with the overtures of the gospel; and, in so doing, he is made to feel what Nature never feels, and that is a calm and confident sense of his own reconciliation with God. The man who has never experienced this sensation, will not adequately conceive of its delights and its influences; yet still may he have some distant imagination of the new feelings and the new impulses, to which it is the harbinger. On this single event in the history of a believer's mind-that, whereas formerly there was in it a distrust or a jealousy of God, there is now in it the assured conviction that the Almighty is his Friend-on this single event,

there is made to turn an entire revolution of its desires and its principles. In the language of the Psalmist, its bonds are indeed loosed; and, in place of that terror or that hopelessness which froze the soul into downright inactivity, is there now the freeness of a grateful and confiding spirit -the alacrity of a willing obedience. "I will run in the way of thy commandments" says David "when thou hast enlarged my heart." It is just this enlargement that is opened up to the disciple, on his accepting of Christ, and so being delivered from the fears and the fetters of legality. The mountain of a before inextinguishable debt is now liquidated; and a discharge is given by which, from a peculiar skilfulness in the method of our salvation, the very justice of God, as well as His mercy, is guaranteed to the acceptance of the sinner; and he now has a comfort and an expectation in the service of that Being, before whom he had hitherto stood paralyzed, as if in the hands of an unappeased and unappeasable creditor; and the holiness, which formerly he would have attempted in vain as his price or his purchase-money for that heaven the gate of which was shut against all his exertions, he now most cheerfully renders as his freewill-offering and his preparation for that heaven whose gate is now open to receive him ; nor can he look to the whole process and principle of his recalment to the favour of God, without seeing depicted therein the love which that God bears to righteousness, and the hatred which He