There can be no communion with the Father, and the Son, only by the influences of the Holy Spirit; no delight in the great and dear Redeemer; no sense of need of, or putting on the best robe of his righteousness; no bathing in his blood, or real repentance unto life; no choosing God as the effect of his choosing us; no casting our daily burden upon the Lord; no rising above ourselves and our sins, but through him who makes willing in the day of his power. Well may the apostle say, "the love of Christ passeth knowledge." We can form but faint conceptions of it. He must love his saints most dearly, value them highly, thus to commune with them. But many, very many, are saying, I am such a sinner, so very sinful, that I dare not go to God, to hold communion with him; I fear his anger, for I deserve it; I dread his curse, for I have most justly merited it; and past offences do indeed pain my eyes. Well, to you is the word of this salvation sent. That Christ has out of love to his bride, took all their guilt, and curse, and anger away; by his death he redeemed his church, he discharged every claim, and his death is all-sufficiently meritorious to obtain every blessing a burdened soul needs. So that the gospel holds out a most kind and hearty welcome to the poor, to come and be enriched; to the naked, to come and be clothed; to the filthy, to come and be washed; to the fool, to come and be made wise; to the hell-deserving, to come and freely receive peace and pardon; to all who feel their need, to come and hold communion with the Father and the Son. The poorer the wretch, the welcomer here. Your sins are mighty, but his grace is almighty. The salvation that Christ has completed, is the salvation of a God, and none ever trusted in him and were confounded. And many who find nothing but sin, and death, and hell within them, are enabled by faith to hold communion with him the Lord, who became man that he might take the sinner's place, and be made the sinner's sin; and yet without blemish or spot, he groaned under the weight of guilt imputed, and the curse inflicted. He profusely bled, to make a fountain deep enough to purify his chosen, and drown their sins; and when the Sun of righteousness shines, it is no longer night, but day. Thick clouds may come between, but will again be soon dispersed; and in all these changes of frame, the state is secure, and there is an unchanging God to fly to, and an unchanging promise to lean upon and to plead, a righteousness unchanging to take shelter under, and admits into heaven all who have it on. Hampstead. JAMES. (For the Spiritual Magazine.) LETTER TO THE EDITOR IN REPLY TO "VIATOR." Mr. Editor, I CANDIDLY avow to you, that had I foreseen the extent of discussion which my plain observations on Viator's first letter to you 66 my has produced, I should certainly have held my peace; for I am no scribe," no "disputer," and still less do I feel qualified to interfere with the dread mysteries connected with the atonement of Christ, but rather to deserve the punishment of presumption than the reward of zeal; for none but hallowed, consecrated hands might touch the ark, even to defend it. Yet, Sir, in spite of reluctance to engage in theological discussion, I am yet more indisposed to be silent, lest my silence should procure for me the imputation of meanly deserting a position I undertook to defend, or be construed into acquiescence, in the arguments of which I see neither the justice nor the strength. And, moreover, I write this letter in the full determination that it shall be the last with which I shall trouble you on the subject; and that this may not subject me to the charge of disingenuousness, I assure you that it is made only because further correspondence on my part would consist entirely of repetition. I might vary expression and illustration, but I should be unable to produce a new reason in addition to those which I have already given. I should in fact "spin out the thread of my verbosity finer than the staple of my argument," and so fall into the complicated fault of tedious inutility. Before entering upon the subject, I must take leave to request Viator to recollect, and (if he can) to retrace the mental process by which he drew from my remarks, strength to his original opinions: such a re-examination may convince him that he has concluded hastily, and greatly facilitate his arrival at a consistent and settled view of the question. In the first place, Viator, taking the high vantage ground of God's omnipotence, asks if he could not inflict pains which in common only arise from the actual commission of sin?' and would, it seems, infer from the necessarily affirmative answer that must be given to this general question, that therefore God could have inflicted the torments of a guilty conscience upon Jesus Christ. But, Sir, such a conclusion is as dangerous in itself as it is unwarranted by the premises. The bare fact of omnipotence, will not, I say, justify the conclusion, and that because it is associated in the Deity with infinite justice and infinite goodness: all these eternal attributes co-operate in perfect harmony. He is omnipotent to that only which is good. We have his own invincible authority that "he CANNOT lie," and that "he could do nothing" until Lot had become thither." Thus Omnipotence itself is powerless when its exertion would oppose the covenants of infinite integrity. And it is by the same line of reasoning, that I arrive with the utmost reverence at the firm belief that God the Just could not inflict the agonies of a guilty conscience upon him who stood in the lawplace of those who had incurred the penalties of disobedience to his law, inasmuch as that was no part of the punishment pronounced by the law, but the simple result of reflection, by them, on their crime and its consequences. Innocence may undergo the punishment due to guilt, but it can not endure its attendant remorse. But, Viator may say, the mere sufferance of the punishment of sin will not clear the conscience of the sinner; and as Christ does this for his people, how is it accomplished unless he endured a burdened conscience? By bearing their sin, as well as their punishment, he takes away the cause, (sin) and the effect (a guilty conscience) ceases. I trust this is sufficient to prove that it was not necessary that the blessed Jesus should suffer the pains of a guilty conscience, in order completely to pay the rigid satisfaction due to the law of God for the infraction of its commands. However, more clearly to illustrate my arguments, allow me to advert to the well known story of Damon and Pythias, and to meet the case in point, to substitute for the fact that Damon was the victim of a tyrant, the supposition that he was justly devoted to death for his crimes. Pythias having surrendered himself as hostage for the return of Damon to suffer execution, would have undergone the punishmeut due to Damon had he failed to fulfil his promise: but it is quite evident that the remorse Damon must be supposed to have endured on account of his crimes, could not have been transferred to Pythias; and yet the latter would have secured the freedom of his friend by having endured the punishment affixed to his crime, and so satisfy the law which had admitted of his substitution for Damon. To sum up on this head, I can only repeat, that the immaculate innocence of the Son of man rendered him incapable of enduring the pains of an accusing conscience. And as he is set forth as a complete Saviour, this would be alone sufficient to prove that their infliction was unnecessary. As to the endurance of despair,-Viator has merely contented himself with stating that I have averred too much in denying that the exclamation quoted by him was prompted by its influence, without replying to the reasons I gave for my opinion, and I therefore think it needless to repeat them, and quite sufficient to refer him to my first letter. I must, however remark, that he strangely errs in supposing it to be my opinion, that the weaknesses of humanity exhibited by the Saviour of men were derogatory to his character. As this is a gratuitous assumption of Viator's, and not inferable from any thing I have written, I content myself with this plain denial of its correctness. : "Viator should very carefully distinguish between intellectual and moral infirmity of the former kind, and those springing from a tender and sympathetic heart, were all those which ever the Son of God exhibited during his sojourn on earth. To assert that he was subject to moral weakness is unqualified blasphemy, and a direct admission of the stalking heresy of the day, technically and disgustingly designated the peccability of the human nature of Christ.' I have now, Sir, to take leave of Viator, and the subject; but previously to so doing, I wish to point out an inconsistency in Viator, of which, perhaps, he is not himself aware. He admits that the eternity of punishment was not, nor necessary to be endured by the great Surety; and this because the fact is so plain as not to admit of being questioned, and yet holds the contrary with respect to the horrors of conscience and despair, when the very same qualities and circumstances that create exemption from the first particular, do equally exempt from the two latter, but from their nature, this effect is not so easily demonstrable. With unaffected pleasure I now make my escape from my adventurous attempt, my unfitness for which I have all along been sensible of; and remain, Mr. Editor, Very faithfully, your humble servant, and " mere layman," (For the Spiritual Magazine.) ON THE CONSTITUTION OF THE CHRISTIAN CHARACTER. So long as the authority and divine origin of the volume of revelation are held with sceptical tenacity, or subjected to the caprice of unhallowed reason, in vain will the shattered intellect of fallen man attempt to fathom the profound abyss of a mysterious providence, or essay to account for the misery and moral degradation of man, upon physical or philosophical principles: in vain will the sceptic or the devotees of a spurious theology attempt the solution of a problem like this, "How came moral evil, with all its direful consequences, into this our world?" and how the subsequent renovation and reconciliation of man to his offended Creator is to be effected whilst their intellectual sagacity discards as a chimera that revelation which" is able to make them wise unto salvation through the faith of the Lord Jesus." The profundity of its mysteries leads the attentive observer and humble enquirer after truth to an acknowledgment of the fact, (to which faith alone will bow assent) that the truths of revelation are better comprehended by believing, than believed by comprehending. Beloved! let no man beguile you from the simplicity of the gospel of Christ, through a vain philosophy, which would teach you that the truths to which you subscribe are untenable because they are incomprehensible! Every subject which involves the being, attributes, and perfections of Jehovah, or his wondrous works in creation, providence, and grace, is infinitely beyond the ken of human reason; and it is a fact incontrovertibly established, that both the physical and spiritual world teem with mysteries; but infidel science and the unsanctified intellect of man, receive the former as facts because they are ocular, while they discard the latter as incompatible with their circumscribed powers of mental perception. But without controverting the point, we cordially acknowledge the mysteries of the holy religion of the Son of God to be incomprehensibly glorious and sublime, but “the wayfaring man, though a fool, shall not err therein." If we consider rightly the evanescent nature of every thing with which we are surrounded, we shall not fail to discover that among the almost endless variety of subjects with which we, as the intelligent part of the creation of God, are conversant, it will be difficult to find one which ever bath been, and still is, of such paramount importance to the individual interests of mankind as that of eternity. Man, though brought forth in a state of moral and spiritual death, and under the vassalage of the usurper of God's universe, is by nature capacitated to endure a state of existence commensurate with that of eternity,—an existence, the nature of which is destined to consist either in the enjoyment of heaven, or the torments of hell: -the former a place of ineffable bliss and uninterrupted happiness, -the latter, a state of unparalleled misery and unutterable despair, "where their worm dieth not, nor their fire ever quenched." Hence it becomes a subject of the greatest importance and earnest solicitude for us to know whither we are tending, seeing "A point of time, a moment's space, Removes us to that blissful place, But, in consequence of his lapsed condition, man has his mental vision so impaired by the god of this world, that his solemn responsibility and the awful realities of eternity are hidden from his view, while the trifles of time, and the sensual gratifications of his corrupt nature, are esteemed as the only objects which have any claim upon his notice, or demand his pursuit. Thus it is that thousands who laugh to scorn the humble followers of the meek and lowly Lamb of God, are lulled to sleep in the arms of satannic enchantment, and awake not from their lethargy, till they find it to be" a fearful thing to fall into the hands of the living God;" and this will be the direful case of all "who know not God, and obey not the gospel of our Lord Jesus Christ;" for the voice from heaven proclaims," he that believeth shall be saved; but he that believeth not shall be damned." Here then the all-important interrogation forces itself upon our notice, what is it to be a christian? or, in other words, how is man, lost, helpless man to escape the wrath denounced against transgressors, and be restored to the manifestative favour and enjoyment of God? Upon a scriptural and experimental solution of this, hangs the comfort of very many of the objects of Jehovah's predestinating grace and sustaining care, the little ones of "the household of faith," who frequently have their hearts saddened by the heterogeneous sounds of "Lo here!" and "Lo there!" or vainly attempting to reach the standard raised by men of like passions with themselves, without searching for the mind of the Spirit in his revealed word, and tracing therein the line of demarkation that eternally separates the altogether from the almost christian. If this were |