then is our God not only a loving Father but a righteous Judge; then can no riches of his goodness secure to favor those whom justice demands for punishment; and then will the punishment of those who die in impenitence, under the guilt of rejecting his grace superadded to that of refusing his authority, be alike certain and dreadful.

3. Revealing the forgiving mercy of God, in harmony with his punitive justice, it pacifies the conscience and melts the hearts of those who cordially believe in it. It brings them to the throne of grace, confessing their sins; assures them that he who gave his Son to die for them when enemies, will not reject them coming to him reconciled; that in pardoning them through his blood, there is no sacrifice of righteousness; that his justice itself has no pleasure in their death, and asks only that the law be sustained in their forgiveness, and that, satisfied with the honor done it in Christ, it sits partner with mercy in forgiving and saving to the uttermost all who come unto God by him. No matter how great is their guilt, no matter how absolute their conscious destitution of righteousness, and their despair of working out any, they are made welcome as though they were like the angels; for the righteousness of God is unto and upon all them that believe, with no difference. it is that melts the heart while it tranquillizes the conscience,-dissolves it in penitence under the sense of sins so great freely forgiven. You have heard the story of the poor ignorant Greenlanders, who, as the missionaries told them of the power and Godhead of the Creator, turned away with stupid indifference; but when pointed to the cross, were softened and subdued. So it is everywhere. The goodness of God leadeth us to repentance; and where is the goodness of God seen as on the cross, pardoning sins so great as to require such an expiation?

And this

Finally, bringing us into peace with God, awakening delight in him, and gratitude to him, it transforms us after his image. We love him because he first loved us. Knowing and believing the love which he hath toward us, we admire what we see, and would be what we admire; we love as we are loved; we forgive as we are forgiven; the same mind is in us which was in Christ Jesus. We look not every one on his own things, but every one also on the things of others, and very specially on the condition of lost souls, and desire their fellowship with us in the great salvation. The love of Christ constraineth us; because we thus judge, that if one died for all, then were all dead: and that he died for all, that they which live should not henceforth live unto themselves, but unto him that died for them and rose again."

In conclusion, 1 remark,—

1. The doctrine of the atonement is fundamental in the Christian system. The preaching of this doctrine is indispensable to the preaching of the gospel, and belief in it, to believing unto salva

tion. Preaching Christ merely as our teacher, or as our example, or as sealing his testimony with his own blood, or as the brightest manifestation of the love of God, is not preaching the cross, and will not answer the end of the preaching of the cross. It will not save men. It may move the sensibilities, but it will not awaken the conscience or subdue the will. Nor will it heal the wounds of the contrite, or enthrone Christ in hearts devoted to the world. Jesus died, and died for us. He who was in the form of God, and counted it no robbery to be equal with God, took upon him our griefs and carried our sorrows; he whose throne is forever and ever, and whom all the angels of God do worship, took part with us in flesh and blood, that through death he might save us from death. This is the only doctrine that can at once awaken and tranquillize the conscience; subdue and constrain the will; produce in souls alienated from God the images of his holiness, and through them reproduce in others the same images to his glory. Ye who would be saved, ye who feel the power of sin, and are striving in vain for deliverance, hearken to him who from the cross proclaims, "Look unto me and be ye saved, all the ends of the earth." That is the only object, the view of which can change the slave into a child, the rebel into a friend.

2. The doctrine of the cross is a doctrine of great simplicity. Christ died for us. He died for our sins,-the just for the unjust. He redeemed us by his blood,--redeemed us from the curse of the law, being made a curse for us. Such is the doctrine as it lies in the Scriptures. A child may understand it, though it involves relations into which angels look. The child, whose heart is opened to it, does understand it, and feels its power; so does the Greenlander and Hottentot, and is saved by it,-weeps and prays, and hopes, and loves, and rejoices, in the light of the glory of God, which shines upon him from it. But men have adopted other forms of statement. They have said that our sins were imputed to Christ, that he was punished for them,-that he suffered the wrath of God on account of them,-that he suffered the curse of the law in our stead,--that his sufferings and death were the penalty of the law for our sins,-that he suffered and died to satisfy divine justice,-to satisfy and cancel the penal demands of the law. By such forms men would explain what God has not explained, or would distinguish their own views, the one from the other, of what they suppose that he has revealed. Doubtless some, even all these may be understood in accordance with the doctrine as it lies in the Scriptures; but they may be, and sometimes are, understood in a way that corrupts and perverts it; and this at least is certain, that whatever is peculiar to them is not the power of God in saving those who hold to it, as is demonstrable from the fact, those who are saved are not agreed in them. Luther, and Baxter, and Edwards, in preaching the doctrine, employed dif

ferent forms of statement, while they all preached the doctrine itself; and to themselves, and those who heard them, it was the power of God.

Brethren, how peculiarly it becomes us as preachers of the cross, proclaiming our own dependence on the infinite sacrifice, to be tolerant towards each other, united in the same faith, differ though we may in cherished forms of statement; and the more especially, since it is not by any doctrinal belief or doctrinal preaching, without its appropriate influence in our hearts, that we shall ourselves be saved, or can expect to save others. The kingdom of God is not in word, but in power. It has not been by any merely verbal statements made with logical exactness, settled in councils, inscribed on parchments, and deposited in ecclesiastical archives, that the doctrine of the cross has come down to us through generations buried in dust; but it has been through souls, in all these generations, made alive to God and the concern of salvation by its power; and it must be by our own experience of that power, "working in us mightily," if, when we lie sleeping in dust, it will have saved us, and, through us, been transmitted to those who will succeed us, and spread abroad for the salvation of a dying world. The doctrine is important,-is indispensable as the medium of communication with its object-the true doctrine of the cross, and not another under the name; but woe to us if we rest in the doctrine; if we look not through the doctrine to the object; if we communicate not with it in the deep sympathies, and fervent aspirations, and applications of our inner man; if we give it not its appropriate place in our hearts;, if we live not upon it, the life of godliness; if it be not in us, in the matter of our salvation, the power of God.

My brethren, it is a blessed privilege to be preachers of the cross,-to dwell around the cross, as David desired, like the priests of old time, to dwell always in the house of the Lord,-but to be also living examples of the efficacy of the cross, and preachers of it in churches, where, through us, its efficacy is conspicuous; and in view of what it has wrought in ourselves and in these, to be able to say to a perishing world,--See what it has done! to us who are saved it is the power of God,--to what higher blessedness could a sinful mortal aspire?

Brethren, I am happy to meet you on this occasion. Almost all whom I used to greet in these fraternal assemblings are gone. In the prospect of soon following them, I rejoice to know that the preaching of the cross will not cease, but, as it is now shedding heavenly glory over benighted nations, so, at no distant period, it will be known and acknowledged, by all our perishing race, as the power of God unto salvation.--Amen.

XVIII.

GOD'S VOICE TO THE NATION.*

BY REV. A. B. VAN ZANDT,

PASTOR OF THE TABB STREET PRESBYTERIAN CHURCH, PETERSBURG, VA.

"Cease ye from man, whose breath is in his nostrils; for wherein is he to be accounted of ?”— ISAIAH ii. 22.

THE world has nothing to fear from any degree of influence which the ministry may attain, and the cry of priestcraft will become obsolete, or at least unmeaning, so long as the Pulpit is confined to its legitimate themes. The sacred office was for ever dissevered from the strifes of politics and of parties, by that declaration of the Master at the bar of Pilate: "My kingdom is not of this world." Fully asserting his regal character, he yet exalted his mission, and the mission of his ambassadors, far above the petty conflicts of a secular ambition. Preferring himself the crown of thorns to the imperial diadem, and the robes of sepulture to the robes of state, he has also taught us, from the stand-point of his cross, to look down upon all the factitious distinctions of life, and to regard all mankind alike, as sinners to be saved or lost. The end of his coming into the world, and the end of our office, have respect to man as a spiritual being. We are called to study the diversities of his temporal condition, only as they bear upon his present character and his eternal prospects. And though not blind to the essential differences among men, yet unswayed by these, our faith must equally discern beneath the tinsel of rank, the insignia of power, and the rags of beggary, a guilty immortal spirit. The high argument of that spirit's loss and recovery carries us far beyond and above the range of topics suited to the Senate and the Forum; and instead of aiming to concentrate and sway popular opinion upon the agitating questions of human interest and policy, it is the office of the Pulpit to withdraw the minds of men to the transcendent interests of eternity, to the thoughts of God, and to the sublime economy of Redemption.

Our own country is a happy illustration of the truth, that governments have least to fear from clerical interference or priestly usurpation, when the Pulpit is left to the free and untrammelled

* A sermon occasioned by the death of Zachary Taylor, President of the United States.

exercise of its functions. It is where the Church has been drawn into an unholy alliance with the State; where it has been degraded into a mere appendage to temporal power; or has ingloriously consented to be subsidized by and dependent upon governmental patronage, that with the loss of its spiritual and heaven-born dignity, it has sought to cover itself with the robes of secular power, and the tinsel of earthly aggrandizement. Yet, even then, the degradation which would hide itself beneath the unseemly habiliments of external grandeur, has been induced in the first instance by the encroachments of the civil upon the ecclesiastical power, and not by any inherent tendencies in the latter. With all due allowance for that personal ambition, from which even the purest minds are not exempt, and the influence of which has always been felt upon the ministry, as well as upon all other classes of men, yet the desire "to be greatest" never would have drawn the sacred office as a party into the arena of political strife, but for the seductive influences of the State itself, alternately bribing and coercing the Church to a participation in her conflicts. The mitre had never been joined with the sceptre, but that the regal first laid its hand upon the sacerdotal office, and sought to add another jewel to its crown, by arrogating the prerogative of Christ-the headship of the Church.

It is a history which deserves to be studied by those who would cloak their carnal enmity to the gospel under the witless and wornout cry of "priestcraft," the record of the origin and progress of that hated and hateful union of Church and State. Side by side with that record let them study the relation of these two, which have so long been unjustly regarded as antagonist powers, as that relation exists in our own country. The ministry have here no civil power. Their profession is in many States a disqualification for office. They are nowhere pensioners upon the public purse. Precluded from the hopes of preferment, they have no temptation to a fulsome adulation of the great. Exempt from all civil and secular interference with their office, they need not connive at wickedness in high places, or withhold the sternest sanctions of the truth from any who may come under its rebukes. And yet in no country in the world has the sacred office a more extended and legitimate influence over the people than in this; whilst, at the same time, we may appeal to facts when we assert, that in no country in the world is it so entirely free from the charge of mingling and meddling in questions foreign to the great end of its institution! Individual exceptions there may be, of those who have mistaken their calling, and have carried into the pulpit the language and spirit of the hustings. But we aver, without fear of contradiction, that in the discharge of its peculiar duties, and the utterance of the simple truths of the Bible, the ministry of this land has thrown around its rulers the surest guarantee of public respect for their persons and offices; has given to law its strongest hold