this acknowledgment of guilt to make ourselves easy. We have the art of making small account of sins, and great account of duties; putting out the eye of conviction by the many good things we seemingly do, and teaching our consciences to say, they are not such mighty matters in which we are to blame. We have a strange dexterity in finding out excuses, and so letting the thing pass as if it were nothing; "It is true I was very angry, but they provoked me, and the like." We have a trick of forgetfulness; commit sin, and, in a day or two, all is as if we had never done amiss. We are very ready at comparisons; “O I would not do as such-an-one does for the world! What will the world come to? What! have people lost all shame ?" We are ready to put one thing against another, as the saying is; "True, I have done so and so, but then, in other things, no one can say any harm of me; for I am sure no one can say I am whore, thief, or drunkard." There is no end of those inventions which pride will be suggesting to patch up a sort of righteousness, upon which people will sleep as quietly as if the law had laid no charge against them, or as if they were secured under the righteousness of Christ. Now, brethren, are none of you upon this footing? Are none of you thinking pretty well of yourselves upon the whole, and for one thing and another hoping that you are in a tolerable case, although you have not seriously seen your lost condition as sinners, nor come to Jesus to save you from the wrath that is to come? This is no uncommon case, it is most certain; and if it were the case of none of us, we should not lead the cold, selfish, lukewarm, indifferent lives that too many of us do.

2.-But if we are really sensible that we have no righteousness of our own, are we not going about to seek one as well as we can ? It is a common language, I know, upon sick beds, "O, if I recover, I will never do as I have done." And, without question, what some do in sickness others practise in health, to wit, stifle convictions by resolutions.

Then, again, you may be apt to think in yourself, "Well, for my part, I have done with pleasures and company-keeping; it is not with me now as it was formerly; I have done with the world; I read my Bible, and keep my church, and say my

prayers. Surely things are altered with me much for the bet

ter."

Or you may go about to set up your own righteousness this way, "Come, I will be charitable, I will give to the poor," thinking to make amends for your sins by your liberality. Or this way again, "O, if I could but forsake and get the better of such a thing, if it were not for such a particular sin that I so often fall into ! That must be forsaken, and then all will be right." Devices of this kind are very natural to the pride of man, and which, I doubt not, every person here present has found his heart busily employed in at one time or other. But, in the mean time, they are but so many tricks to heal up the wounds of a gnawing conscience, to stop true conviction of sin, and to keep us from Christ, without whom we perish. Can any purpose, or even practice of reformation, with never so many good things performed by us, make up for old sins, that is (for nothing less will do), make them in truth to be none? If not, if they are still our sins, are not we still chargeable with them? Who should, but ourselves? And has not God said, The wages of sin is death? How then shall that sentence be annulled? There are two capital objections to this scheme which we are considering. The one is, that a perfect conformity to God's law now, could I attain it, would make no satisfaction for past iniquities; for, in that case, I should only do my present duty, and consequently leave the debt of old sins just where it was, absolutely undischarged. The other, that I do not in fact now. conform to God's law, no, nor ever shall, according to the strict spirituality of it; so that, in reality, the longer I live, the more I enlarge my debt, and the obligation to punishment. But, notwithstanding this, many still, who have not a righteousness of their own, will be for getting one as well as they can, vainly hoping to stand in it before God.

Now, in either of these cases, you must needs see there can be no real belief in Jesus Christ for pardon and acceptance with God. If either we conceit we have a righteousness of our own, or are seeking to get one, we are quite out of God's way, of justifying the ungodly by the righteousness of Jesus. And, I beseech you, let us consider; we say, we believe in Jesus but

:

ness,

do we so, when we trust in ourselves? Is it possible I should make both my own righteousness and that of Jesus my foundation at once? The truth is, we do not go closely to the bottom with ourselves to see the truth of our case, we have and can have no legal righteousness. That God knows, and therefore in mercy has provided one for us in Jesus. But, if you doubt this, state the matter fairly before your own conscience. Have you ever answered, or can you now answer, the demands of the law? If you say, no; (and that you must say, if you know but never so little of God's law and of your own heart ;) then it is plain to your conscience that you are destitute of the laws of righteousand are a sinner. And thereupon the question is, how will you get God's favour? What! by your own righteousness, when you say you have and can have none? or by the righteousness of Jesus, which God has provided for you? God's favour is what you want. But then, since you are a sinner, you have no right to it, and must be thankful to take it in God's own way; otherwise you will go without it, and your sins, guilt, and punishment, rest on your own head. It is the thought of that should alarm you. O think of it with all soberness. You have sinned, and Death standeth at the door. How great a death! and how eternal! O think of your sins, and think of your sentence, and think how you can possibly escape, if you neglect so great salvation!

SERMON XIII.

ACTS xvi. 30, 31.

What must I do to be saved? And they said, Believe on the Lord Jesus Christ, and thou shalt be saved.

To believe in Jesus implies this, I believe in him as my Deliverer from all my spiritual enemies. The great spiritual enemy, under which all the others fight, and by means of which they bring us into any danger, is original sin, variously called, the flesh, the law of sin, the body of this death and of sin, and many times sin simply, by way of eminence: that principle of sin in fallen man, which, on the one hand, is enmity against God, not enduring either his service or his presence; and, on the other, is perpetually soliciting the soul to sensual, earthly, and devilish things; by its perverse motions filling the imagination with sinful and vain thoughts, and thereby blinding the understanding that it should not discern spiritual things, and biassing the will that it should not choose them. These effects, in the full power of them, does the principle of sin produce in the unregenerate; while they, who are indeed regenerate, experience the baleful influence of it still abiding in them, both in keeping them from that nearness and perfectness of heart with God which they earnestly long for, and ceaselessly exciting in them its motions of pride, worldliness, and carnality. It is by means of this principle that the men or things of the world have influence and power to stop and retard the believer in his progress to glory; or that the devil can gain any effectual opportunity to dismay or seduce us. Finally, to be delivered from this body of sin is the believer's first desire; "I shall be satisfied when I awake with thy likeness." But in the mean time, he earnestly wishes as well to be kept from the power of it (so that he may be always enabled to oppose its suggestions when

ever upon occasion, from without, of the world, or the devil, they rise up in him pleading for indulgence), as to find its influence abating and its strength declining from day to day.

This shows you what the believer means by his spiritual enemies. And the ground of his believing in Jesus for dominion over them is twofold; partly because he knows and finds that he cannot of himself either obtain or keep the mastery of them; and partly because he knows the Saviour can. - He knows he cannot himself, from the very nature of the thing, because it is the property of this principle of sin to keep him from God, and to lead him quite the other way in a course of indulgence, covetousness, and pride of one sort or another; and this principle is in him, and actually constitutes his present nature, so that it must of course, as every creature's nature does, reign over him, if left to himself, without either will or power in him to restrain it. Nor is this all the proof he has of his insufficiency hereunto. Experience has taught him, and does teach him, the same thing. The body of sin has had, and still has, its weight. It always keeps him from living so near to God as he would, and from being disposed towards him as he wishes and ought to be; while also he finds every day, that those sinful motions which are proper to it are too many, and too busy, that he should be able in any one instance to keep his conduct undefiled by them, or free, in many sad instances, from such success as abundantly shames and grieves him in seeing thereby what he is. Scripture also adds its testimony unto his absolute inability to subdue his spiritual enemies, asserting in the plainest terms, that without Christ we can do nothing, assuring us, that in us, that is, in our flesh, dwelleth no good thing, and ascribing all the good that is wrought in any of us unto God, who, it is said, himself worketh in us both to will and to do of his good pleasure.-But what he knows himself unable to do for himself, he knows Jesus is able to do for him, who was raised up, "that we should be saved from our enemies, and from the hand of all that hate us," so that being delivered" we might serve him, without fear, in holiness and righteousness before him all the days of our life." In which regard Jesus is said to be made of God unto us sanctification. This is a character in which he is represented by the prophet: " He shall sit as a refiner and