is supreme. When so much as this is gained, it gives assurance of that progressive sanctification, which will finally eradicate all the infusions of sin, and present the soul faultless before the divine throne with exceeding joy.

CHAPTER X.

OF

THE SAME SUBJECT CONTINUED.-NECESSITY CONCENTRATING OUR APPLICATIONS OF TRUTH ΤΟ THE SINGLE POINT OF PRODUCING FAITH AND ITS CONCOMITANT GRACES.

SINCE a voluntary surrender of himself, on the part of the sinner, to God's will as it is revealed in the gospel, is the thing short of which the moral power of the church would fail of its object, how dangerous is it to suffer ourselves to be diverted from it! How simple, how plain is the object before us! How ought ministers to frame all their sermons to the ungodly, with reference to gaining it! What an awful spectacle is that, of a minister standing in the pulpit to expatiate on topics in general, throwing in a beautiful passage here, and another there, with little reference to the object in which he must succeed, or an endless hell will be the portion of his hearers!

If a special ambassador to a foreign court, charged with business involving the peace and security of all nations, should spend his time in

rambling over the fields of general science and literature; should devote himself to painting and poetry; or live there to display his fine person and equipage; and, in the midst of it all, should forget the errand on which he had been sent, and should return without doing it; he would not present to his country and the world so shocking a specimen of recreancy to duty, as that minister who allows any thing in God's universe, to divert him from his work of producing faith among his impenitent hearers. Or, if he even magnifies a subsidiary point into the place of the principal one, and gives greater prominence to something else, than the surrender of the soul to God in a new and everlasting covenant, he may expect upon himself the curse of an unfaithful watchman, who saw the enemy coming, but gave not the alarm.

How shocking is the thought, that some should be so gross, as to make an external rite, imposed on helpless infancy or adult age, the thing which is decisive of salvation! Millions are now resting their hopes of heaven on their baptismal regeneration, hopes which are to be dashed in everlasting disappointment. O ye, who encourage them in these delusive hopes, how will ye dare to meet their wailings at the judgment seat?

Others go a little further, and connect with

baptism a speculative faith in the gospel, and outward conformity to its moral code. Others. lay great stress upon being able to convince sinners that they ought to repent and believe. Sermon after sermon is preached with this object in view, when the great majority of the hearers, are perfectly aware of their duty. They know they ought to forsake their evil ways. Even devils believe and tremble. There is not a drunkard in the land who is not, in his sober moments, convinced that his habits are ruinous, and that he ought to break them off. But he will not, till something shall be presented to his mind, that shall make it seem feasible for him to resist his appetite and regain his character. And happy indeed is it for the cause of humanity, that we have learned to supply this desideratum in that reform. Now, this is the very thing that the church must present to the mind of a sinner, before she can secure upon him a still greater, more benign and more lasting reformation.

induce sinners to reCan resolves to do a

It is not enough that we solve that they will believe. thing suffice, when the gospel requires the thing itself? "Hell is paved with good resolutions." We cannot resolve or will our sins away from It is a law of God's moral government, as we have already seen, designed no doubt to pro

us.

tect its great interests, that when a sin is committed, it should throw all the elements of the soul into malignant play. The understanding is darkened, the conscience corrupted, the desires inflamed, and the moral leprosy strikes its roots into the deep foundations of the soul. And the sinner could as easily have willed himself into being originally, as he can will himself into a state of holiness. There is no basis in him for such a will, no fulcrum for the Archimedean lever, because every imagination of the thoughts of his heart is only evil continually.

Hence, the cure is neither in a visible rite, nor in a speculative faith, nor in a conviction of what we ought to be, nor in an effort of the will to dislodge sin from the soul; but in such a surrender of the mind to that image of goodness and truth, which is held up in the preaching of Christ and him crucified, as transforms us into its likeness, from glory to glory even as by the Spirit of the Lord. As in the healing of our bodily diseases, the virtue is in the medicine, and not in the act of taking it; so in the cure of our souls, the virtue is in the truth believed and in the Holy Spirit accompanying that truth, and not in the act of believing it. This act, however, is indispensable in the case, and Christ as the good physician, can cure only those who will submit to his prescriptions.