may be rescued from the condemnation of those offences for which He was delivered, that you may be lightened of all that fearful endurance which He has borne.

'And raised again for our justification.' We are not fond of that repulsive air which has doubtless been thrown around Christianity, by what some would call the barbarous terms and distinctions of schoolmen. But it will, we think, help to illustrate the truth of the matter before us, that we shortly advert to the theological phrases of a negative and positive justification. The former consists of an acquittal from guilt. By the latter a title is conferred to the reward of righteousness. There are two ways in which God may deal with you—either as a criminal in the way of vengeance, or as a loyal and obedient subject in the way of reward. By your negative justification, you simply attain to the midway position of God letting you alone. He does not lay upon you the hand of retribution for your evil deeds; but neither does He lay upon you the hand of retribution for any good deeds. You are kept out of hell, the place of penal suffering for the vicious. But you are not preferred to heaven, the place of awarded glory and happiness for the virtuous. Now the conception is, that the Saviour accomplished our negative justification by bearing upon His own person the chastisement of our sins -He was delivered for our offences unto the death. But that to achieve our positive justification, He did more than suffer, He obeyed. He accumulated as it were a stock of righteousness, out of which He lavishes reward on those whom He had before

abode of

It is because heaven

siness. It is because every heart

nevolence, that in every heart there peakable. It is love to God that aiahs of ecstacy which ring eterIn a word, it is not an animal

but a spiritual festival, which is preparing for us in the mansions above; and in these mansions below, a foretaste is felt by those, who, through patient continuance in well-doing, seek for glory and immortality and honour. The real disciples of the Saviour on earth, can testify, that if they had holiness enough they would have happiness enough; and a still more affecting testimony to the truth, that the atmosphere of goodness is of itself an atmosphere of gladness and of light, may be seen in the mental wretchedness of those who mourn some deadly overthrow from that purity of heart which at one time guarded and adorned themwho have fallen from peace, and that simply because they have fallen from principle—and feel in their bosoms the agonies of hell, and that without another instrument of vengeance to pursue them than a sense of their own native and inherent worthlessness. The following is the paraphrase of this short passage.

'Now it was not for the mere sake of Abraham that righteousness was reckoned to him because of his faith-but for us also to whom it shall be reckoned, if we believe on Him who raised up Jesus our Lord from the dead-who was delivered up unto the death as an atonement for our offences; and was then raised that He might confer upon us the fruits of His own achievement, the rewards of His own obedience.'

We have little more than time to remark that the faith of Christians, is as little an inert or merely speculative principle, as the faith of Abrahamthat it is followed up by a practical movement just

as his was, and has its footsteps just as his had— that if the outset of his was marked by a violent separation from all the habits and attachments of nature, the outset of ours is marked by a separation from our old tastes and our old tendencies in every way as violent-that if in the progress of his he had to obey the requirement which laid upon him the sacrifice of his dearest possessions upon earth, in the progress of ours we may be called upon to cut off a right hand or to pluck out a right eye-that if he was bidden to wander afar from the scenes of his infancy, and to abandon all the endearments of his wonted society; so also we, without having to describe one mile of locomotion, are bidden to enter upon a new spiritual region, and by so doing, to be deserted by the congeniality and approbation of all our ungodly friends and all our worldly companionships. In a word, the faith of Christianity, like the faith of the patriarch, is not a mere metaphysical notion—neither are the blessings of Christianity a reward for the soundness of it. The faith both of the one and of the other is just such a practical sense of the reality of unseen and eternal things, as leads us to go in actual request of them according to a prescribed course; and, in so doing, to renounce present things whatever be the force and whatever be the urgency of their allurements. The faith that was in the patriarch's heart, originated such doings in the history of his life, as declared plainly that he sought a country. And our faith is nothing, it is but the breath of an empty profession, but the utterance of a worthless orthovy, if it be not followed up by such measures and

such movements as plainly declare that immortality is the goal to which we are tending—that the world is but the narrow foreground of that perspective which is lying at our feet and, with the eye stretching forward to the magnificent region beyond it, that we are actually keeping on the straight but single path which conducts to this distant heaven, though set at every footstep with thorns, and hemmed on the right and on the left with difficulties innumerable.

Go forth with this text upon actual society, and make a survey of that mighty throng that move upon our streets, and frequent in thousands our market places-behold every individual in the busy and anxious pursuit of some object which lies in the distance away from him-meet him at any one hour of his history, and ascertain if possible whether the thing on which his heart is lavishing all its desirousness be placed on this or on the other side of death: And if, in every instance, the character of the occupation shall plainly declare that the region of sense which is near engrosses every feeling, and that the region of spirit which is distant is not in all his thoughts-then, if faith, instead of a barren dogma, be indeed the substance of things hoped for and the evidence of things not seen on this very day might not the question and complaint of our Saviour be preferred, “verily when the Son of man cometh shall he find faith upon the earth?"

It just occurs to us before we are done, that we may gather from the history of Abraham, and that by no very circuitous process of inference, the efficacy of affliction in promoting the conversion of a soul to God. For any thing that appears, he, at