night-secretly, doubtingly, fearful, half-hearted, and ashamed. If we have not done so, if we will not do so, are we not answerable? This we should not say of Nicodemus, if, after hearing and acknowledging what he did, he had appeared against his teacher at Pilate's judgment-seat. "But if ye have not been faithful in the unrighteous mammon, who shall commit to your trust the true riches?" If you have not used your natural faculties for that to which they are perfectly competent, why should the mysteries of the glorious Gospel be laid open to you? Alas! it is not at the beginning only the Gospel has to meet the wilful, the responsible, the guilty resistance of the natural heart. If man is a free consenting agent while he serves the powers of darkness, he is a free consenting agent likewise under the leading of the Holy Spirit. How free, alas! sometimes to be found fighting against the Spirit, against the word, against himself: how free with his Master's name upon him, to be found serving in the enemies' ranks, or carousing in the enemies' tents: to be missing in the field, in the house, at the table! Perhaps the wilful resistence of the natural heart is in no way more fully proved, than by what remains of it in a state of grace: as the deep-seated malignity of disease is developed in the slowness and difficulty of recovery. The fleshly nature, that without grace takes refuge in necessity, as a passive victim of untoward fate when grace is received, discovers its independence, by active opposition to it. A few Christians I have met with, who hold themselves irresponsible still: and grieving perhaps the Holy Spirit within them, and sinning from day to day against their holy calling in Christ Jesus, do still say they cannot help it; it is

:

Satan-it is the old Adam-it is God-they do not mean so, but to this their words amount: it is God, who gives them not sufficient grace to overcome their enemies. I believe they do not perceive the result of their own argument; for if the principle were to be carried out, believers would make themselves from first to last such mere machinery, as to be incapable of contracting any guilt; while from day to day they are asking pardon and remission for it, as if it were their own. Is it not another instance of the practical simplicity of truth's most inexplicable mysteries, that the very disputant who argues against his own free will, till, whether working together with the Spirit by grace, or in opposition to it by nature, he would seem to think himself as irresponsible as childhood or idiotcy, falls down before his Maker in his closet, and forgetting his argumentative conclusions in the deep anguish of a burthened and a broken heart, lays claim to every sin he has committed from his birth to the present hour: and mourns the weight and owns the shame, and asks mercy in the name of Jesus, as for guilt and misery that are all his own. Why? because he feels it so: feels the things that he has done are things he need not have done; the things he has left undone, are what he might have done.

The remembrance, why so grevious? The burden, why so intolerable? "Pardon mine iniquity, O Lord, for it is great." The iniquity of his birth-right? The sin of his nature? Original, derived, imputed sin? No: there never was but One that felt the weight of sin which was not his; the shame without the guilt, the agony without the consciousness of evil. True, there is

a sense in which the believer's sins are

not his own,

for they have been made over to another: he has dipped

them in the blood of the dove that was slain; he has laid them on the head of the dove that was let go; they have been borne off to a land unknown, where neither an accusing angel nor an accusing conscience can find them, to claim them for him, and say that they are his. "Who shall lay any thing to the charge of God's elect? It is God that justifieth." But it is then, exactly then, when the sinner stands by, and sees his substitute charged, convicted, sacrificed; when the debtor looks on, while the accumulated sum is counted in drops of mortal anguish from a guiltless forehead; it is then, and then only, that he knows, because he feels, the whole weight of responsibility to be his own; lays claim to the vileness inherited of his fathers, and abhors -not his nature, his destiny, his condition, but himself. And oh ! to be so ransomed, so forgiven! I do not like to say what pardoned sinners feel hearts are so different but I think that he to whom the five hundred was forgiven, did not try to persuade himself he owed but fifty, and was overcharged the rest; and she who loved much for much forgiven, did not plead with her love against the extortionate requital. No, the full hatred the believer gives himself, the full love that he gives and likes to give his Saviour, speaks truth in the heart while the lips dispute it: and hearts that grow stout in argument against their own responsibility, in secret lie crushed and broken beneath the weight of it.

True, there are sins-unconsented to, resisted, hated sins, of which St. Paul could say, and every believer with him, "It is no more I that do it, but sin that dwelleth in me." "Without are fightings, within are fears," says the same Apostle. In the long conflict with external temptation and indwelling sin, in which the re

generated nature is engaged, not against Christ, but with Christ against the world, the devil, and the flesh, our wounds, our falls, our discomfitures, and disgraces, are oftentimes but the disasters of a warfare which is the very test and condition of our discipleship, and our preparation for the world to come. Many a sinful thought, as abhorrent to ourselves as to Him who made us, and has pity on us for it: many a temptation of the evil one, that tortures the soul it cannot subjugate ; many a thorn in the flesh, the messenger of Satan, which must be endured, because it cannot be overcome; the offspring all of inbred sin, are the guiltless miseries of the unconsenting and resisting soul, wherein He that made us remembers of what we are made, and has pity on us that we are but dust.

Happy is he who, when overcome by sins resisted, when borne down and put to shame by sins unconquered, can truly say, "It is no more I that do it”—it is not my too venturous approaches to temptation—it is not my self-confidence and insobriety, and too much connivance in the world's practices and opinions, that exposes me to be defeated by the evil that I would not, and brought into captivity to the sin that I allow not.

CHAPTER VI.

IN HIS REGENERATING SPIRIT.

We could not find the beginning of the purpose of Redemption: with finite understandings, and sense-limited perceptions, we were forbidden to come up hither, and lose ourselves in the transactions of infinity and eternity. Opinions have been formed and widely controverted, respecting the pre-Adamic covenant; of the supralapsarian and sublapsarian schemes: whether man fell that he might be redeemed, or was redeemed because he fell : whether He who foresaw all, and had his remedy prepared, administered the antidote before or after the deadly poison had been swallowed: whether man was found before he was lost, and pardoned before he had transgressed, and saved before he was a sinner.

It is hard for the creatures of time, in the language of time, to discuss things that were before all time, and will be when time shall be no longer. God speaks of things that are not as if they were: of things purposed, as if accomplished,—ordained, as if done. The Apostle Peter speaks of Christ as a lamb without blemish and without spot, "who verily was foreordained before the foundation of the world ;"--and St. John, in the prophetic vision, heard of "names written in the book of life, of the Lamb slain from the foundation of the world.”