constructed rather after his own high sentiments, than for their imperfections; making almost every crime punishable with death-idleness having the same punishment as murder -which caused it to be said, that Draco's laws were written with blood. When these laws came to be executed, the judge found that it was not in the heart of man to inflict punishment by the letter; they gradually relaxed them, silently apportioning the punishment to the measure of the delinquency. This could not pass unobserved; the people began to calculate on it, and to pass beyond it in their calculations. In a short time, the laws (though from any account we have of them, and from the hallowed estimation of their author, they were of the purest, justest, wisest character) soon fell into contempt, and were trampled under foot, merely because they misgave in the execution, though up to that point they were blameless.

That the same effect with regard to the laws of God will follow the notion that they are to be reduced in the judgment, and that none of their excellent qualities set forth in the former discourse will bear them up against such a loss of authority, we not only have no doubt, but we have the clearest manifestation of the fact to offer. Wherever the doctrine is taught that God will swerve from his threatened punishment, and in the end bring all men out of thraldomas it is in unitarian pulpits; wherever the doctrine is taught that God will lower his demand to our performance, and take what we have to give, passing by the rest-as it is in the pulpits of our fashionable and accommodating divines; then mark the effect upon the hearers. They fall away from the constant sense of God's authority, they fall away from the spiritual interpretation of his laws, they come to hold religion as a regular formal thing done at stated times, and to stand by their honesty, their honour, their goodness of heart, their charities, or some other criterion which exists in human nature or civilized society quite independent on God's right to interfere, or his actual interference in our affairs. Such preachers never get a purchase upon their people to lift them out of the resting-places where they found them. They swear by their honour still, they build upon their honesty, and decency, and respectable character, as they were wont to do. They are in soul the same as before they heard of God's law, with this difference, that they follow religious customs instead of irreligious customs, and so in France they would follow French customs; in the city, city customs; and in the country, country customs.

The law, therefore, must stand wholly, or it must fall wholly; such is the nature of all legal institutions. Yet man cannot keep it wholly. How, then, is man to escape? Here we find ourselves again at a stand, from which I challenge human reason to deliver us, or afford us the shadow of a shelter. If God had not written out a law, sustaining our own conscience of good and evil, in all its purest judgments, and passing clean beyond into a region of superhuman, unclouded, celestial purity, there would have been a way of escape. You might have alleged against conscience what has been alleged by the jurisconsult, (noticed in the preceding discourse,) that it was a varying faculty in various minds, and not to be accounted of as a standard of the right and wrong. And there I think that jurisconsult is right, as he is also in seeking for something tangible which may be submitted to calculation by the lawgiver and expounded in the shape of statute, not left in the fluctuating uncertainty of private feeling. Which seeing that God hath done giving us fixed and formal statutes upon (I will not say) calculations of utility, but most certainly issuing therein, there is no eluding or shunning of them; they must stand altogether, or altogether fall-they must be rejected altogether, or altogether be adopted.

If Christ had done no more than promulgate the code detailed above, then at this point I should have shut up this argument of judgment to come, as not being able to make out of it any thing but universal condemnation to man, even though he should have done his best. I should have advised to preserve it for its good qualities in sustaining all the wholesome sentiments of the heart, and all the advantageous relationships of life-but as an instrument to judge upon I should have been altogether dumb in its defence. But to his immortal praise, and our unspeakable deliverance from threatening judgment, he added to this constitution a second part, which removes this barrier impassable by human reason, and lifts us into new capacities of obedience. This second part of his constitution we are now to unfold.

Here we have to introduce an idea, which will be new, and therefore may sound strange to such of our readers as are unacquainted with the Gospel of Christ; but we beg of them not to break off, but to hear us to an end; for we must proceed according to the rule which we laid down for the conducting of our argument, gathering the matters of fact out of the revelation, and showing that the whole is conducive to every good and noble and gainful end.

Next to the existence of God, the truth most frequently revealed in Scripture, is that Christ is a Saviour from sins. Whether you take the prophets who spake of him before, or the apostles who spake of him after his coming, or his own account of himself, they are harmonious upon this point, that the great object of his coming was to save men from the consequence of transgressions. Isaiah hath it so written in many places," All we, like sheep, have gone astray, and the Lord hath laid upon him the iniquity of us all." Jeremiah, describing the æra of his coming, or, as he calls it, of the New Covenant, puts these words into the mouth of God, "I will forgive their iniquity and remember their sin no more.' So also Ezekiel, when speaking of the same event. Daniel describes Messiah the prince as coming to "finish transgression, and to make an end of sin, and to make reconciliation for iniquity, and to bring in an everlasting righteousness." So also it is written in Micah, Zechariah, and Malachi. When he was announced by the angel to Joseph, it was in these words, "His name shall be called Jesus, for he shall save his people from their sins." At his birth, the angels rejoiced over him as a Saviour. Zacharias sung of him as a Redeemer. Simeon hailed him as "Salvation arrived to all people." John the Baptist announced him as "the Lamb of God which taketh away the sins of the world." He announced himself as such in almost every miracle, saying, "Thy sins be forgiven thee." He put his miracles forth as evidence of the same, "That ye may know the Son of man hath power to forgive sins." The last act of his life was "the forgiveness of sins." Peter first preached him to the Jews "as justifying them from all things from which they could not be justified by the law of Moses;" to the Gentiles as being the Son of God, "through faith, in whose name there is remission of sins." Paul gave no other name to the jailor of Philippi for forgiveness of sins but Christ's, and declares there is no other given under heaven. In short, it is in all their writings, like the sun in the firmament of heaven, and how men can miss finding it, or not rejoice over it when it is found, is a miracle of blindness and want of feeling, to be accounted for only by their being shut up in some of those mistakes and prejudices about the nature of law, and its powers of yielding, which we have exposed above.

İt doth appear therefore, that we were not wrong in our argumentation, and that mankind are to a man brought, by the nature of God's government, into that dilemma of sinful

ness and wrath to come, out of which we found ourselves unable to discover a release; that Christ hath brought the redemption we stood in need of; that God hath set him forth to be a propitiation for sins that are past, and that he can now be just and the justifier of him that believeth in Jesus. This is a fact of revelation not less certain than the fact of the law given from the mount, or the fact of judgment to come, concerning which we argue.

By many, and indeed by the greater number, this liberty of forgiveness through Christ is thought to strike a blow at the whole system of law delineated above, and altogether to evacuate the use of it; and it must be allowed that there are passages in Paul's writings, which being taken singly, and apart from the context, might be forced to this construction. But when he expressly argues out the questions, 'is the law against the promises of God?' shall we sin because grace hath abounded?' without having any thing else in his eye, he comes to the conclusion, that if righteousness could have come by the law, Christ would not have died. But that which puts the question to rest is, that Christ declares of himself that he came not to abrogate the law, but to fulfil it and make it honourable, and above all, that the Christian books wherein the dogtrine of forgiveness through Christ is taught, contain throughout in every page a moral law, the same in substance with that delivered from the mount, but ramified and applied to every individual feeling and action which can occur. There is no intention, therefore, that the one should undermine or annihilate the other, but that both go to compose the constitution under which we live. What remains, therefore, is, that we engross this new idea of forgiveness through Christ into our argument, and see how it affects the result.

If there had been any condition attached to this boon of forgiveness, we should have been in no better case than before. If it had been required that, anterior to any hope of pardon for past offences, we should be so far advanced in obedience as to be of a reputable character for honesty or charity, or truth, or to be doing our best to attain it: then, verily, things would have been marred at the very commencement. For it would have been left to self to determine the measure of attainment upon which we could found a claim to the benefit, and the question would have been perplexed anew with that uncertain element of self-adjudication which we have already shown is enough to shake the stability of any system. Besides, from the nature of man, which always

founds a claim of right when a condition is present, it would have soon lost the character of a boon, and failed to make the impression of a free unmerited gift. But above all, it would have opened the door to self-esteem and partiality, and every kind of palliation, to juggle us into the conceit of having reached the mark at which all was safe. And being persuaded that we were there arrived, all inducement to further efforts would have been taken away when there was no further advantage to be gained.

Fortunately, however, there is no such condition attached. Every one, however enormous his sins, is invited without money and without price, to enter under this constitution of which the very title is redemption or salvation. Any man who has come to think upon his transgressions, and found no method of escaping from the threatenings of the divine law, hath here a city of refuge to flee to. Memory is not hindered from mourning over the past, but hope is hindered from ever despairing of the future. The time which might have been consumed in repining over the past not to be reclaimed, the load of unatoned guilt, the fearful looking for of judgment and fiery indignation, the strength of body and of mind which might have been exhausted in useless penance, are all annihilated at once by the revelation of forgiveness through Jesus Christ: and we are left free to follow the new course under the full force of the new motives which may be impressed on us, being delivered not only from the impediments arising out of our own heavy conscience, but also from the discouragements which that timorous conscience conjures up in the nature of God. While yet we fear him, and see no common ground on which our sinfulness may meet with his purity and be at peace, there can be no heart in us to draw near. Nature shrinks and shudders at his inspection, while she sees no fair way to his favour. Even before a fellow-mortal of great attainments, of severe justice, and of nice power to sift and scrutinize the heart, we shrink back abashed if we are conscious of crime, and fear to stand the penetration of his eye. What conscious criminal ever sought the judgment seat, or thought of the inflexible judge but with a shudder that they were to meet so soon? Did it ever happen that a man drowned in debt, could be but bowed down before the creditor to whom he owed it all? Nay, truly, the consciousness of obligation undischarged, of duty unperformed, of offences done against any one, is like a case of cold steel around the heart, which will neither allow it to glow nor to expand. But if the unsatisfied, injured party