strous iniquity that Christ died. It was to make it possible for God, with his truth unviolated, and his holiness untarnished, and all the high attributes of his eternal and unchangeable nature unimpaired, to hold out forgiveness to the world,-that propitiation was made through the blood of his own Son, even that God might be just, while the justifier of them who believe in Jesus. It is to make it possible for man to love the Being whom nature taught him to hate and to fear, that God now lifts, from his mercyseat, a voice of the most beseeching tenderness, and smiles upon the world as God in Christ, reconciling the world unto himself, and not imputing unto them their trespasses. It was utterly to shift the moral constitution of our minds,—an achievement beyond any power of humanity,-that the Saviour, after he died and rose again, obtained the promise of the Father, even that Spirit, through whom alone the fixed and radical disease of nature can be done away. And thus, by the ministratiou of the baptism of the Holy Ghost, does he undertake not only to improve but to change us,—not only to repair but to re-make us, not only to amend our evil works, but to create us anew unto good works, that we may be the workmanship of God in Christ Jesus our Lord. These are the leading and essential peculiarities of the New Testament. This is the truth of Christ; though to the general mind of the world it is the truth of Christ in a mystery. These are the parables which the commissioned messengers of grace are to deal out to the sinful children of Adam,-and dark as they may appear, or disgusting as they may sound in the ears of those who think that they are rich, and have need

of nothing, they are the very articles upon which hope is made to beam on the heart of a converted sinner and peace is restored to him,-and acceptance with God is secured by the terms of an unalterable covenant, and the only effective instruments of a vital and substantial reformation are provided; so that he who before was dead in trespasses and sins is quickened together with Christ, and made alive unto God, and renewed again after his image, and enabled to make constant progress in all the graces of a holy and spiritual obedience.

SERMON IV.

AN ESTIMATE OF THE MORALITY THAT IS WITHOUT GODLINESS.

JOB ix. 30-33.

"If I wash myself with snow water, and make my hands never so clean : Yet shalt thou plunge me in the ditch, and mine own clothes shall abhor me. For he is not a man, as I am, that I should answer him, and we should come together in judgment. Neither is there any day's-man betwixt us, that might lay his hand upon us both."

To the people of every Christian country the doctrine of a Mediator between God and man is familiarized by long possession; though to many of them it be nothing more than the familiarity of a name recognized as a well-known sound by the ear, without sending one fruitful or substantial thought into the understanding. For, let it be observed, that the listless acquiescence of the mind, in a doctrine, to the statement or to the explanation of which it has been long habituated, is a very different thing from the actual hold which the mind takes of the doctrine,insomuch that it is very possible for a man to be a lover of orthodoxy, and to sit with complacency under its ministers, and to be revolted by the heresies of those who would either darken or deny any of its articles,— and, in a word, to be most tenacious in his preference for that form of words to which he has been accus

tomed while to the meaning of the words themselves, the whole man is in a state of entire dormancy, and delighted though he really be by the utterance of the truth, exhibits not in his person, or in his history, one evidence of that practical ascendency which Christian truth is sure to exert over the heart and the habits of every genuine believer.

In the midst of all this dimness, and all this indolence about the realities of salvation, it is refreshing to view the workings of a mind that is in earnest ; and of a mind too, which, instead of being mechanically carried forward in the track of a prescribed or authoritative orthodoxy, is prompted to all its aspirations by a deep feeling of guilt, and of necessity. Such we conceive to have been the mind of Job, to whom the doctrine of a Redeemer had not been explicitly unfolded, but who seems at times to have been favoured with a prophetic glimpse of him through the light of a dim and distant futurity. The state of his body, covered as it was with disease, makes him an object of sympathy. But there is a still deeper and more attractive sympathy excited by the state of his soul, labouring under the visitation of a hand that was too heavy for him; called out to a combat with God, and struggling to maintain it; at one time, tempted to measure the justice of his cause with the righteousness of Heaven's dispensations; at another, closing his complaint with the murmurs of a despairing acquiescence; and at length brought, through all the varieties of an exercised and agitated spirit, to submit himself to God, and to repent in dust and in ashes.

There is a darkness in the book of Job. He, at

one time, under the soreness of his calamity, gives way to impatience; and, at another, he seems to recall the hasty utterance of his more distempered moments. He, in one place, fills his mouth with arguments; and, in another, he appears willing to surrender them all, and to decline the unequal struggle of man contending with his Maker. He is evidently oppressed throughout by a feeling of want, without the full understanding of an adequate or an appropriate remedy. Now, it does give a higher sense of the value of this remedy, when we are made to witness the unsatisfied longings of one who lived in a dark and early period of the world,-when we hear him telling, as he does in these verses, where the soreness lies, and obscurely guessing at the ministration that is suited to it,-nor do we know a single passage of the Bible which carries home with greater effect the necessity of a Mediator, than that where Job, on his restless bed, is set before us, wearying himself in the hopeless task of arguing with God, and calling for some day's-man betwixt them who might lay his hand upon them both.

The afflictions which were heaped upon Job made him doubt his acceptance with his Maker. This was the great burden of his complaint, and the recovery of this acceptance was the theme of many a fruitless and fatiguing speculation. We have one of these speculations in the verses which are now submitted to you; and as they are four in number, so there is such a distinction in the subjects of them, that the passage naturally resolves itself into four separate topics of illustration. In the 30th verse, we have an