Imágenes de páginas
PDF
EPUB

demands or threatenings, when it had Christ for its servant; it is the greatest absurdity, as well as the most dangerous folly, to presume that it will accept a composition at the hands of sinful creatures. The righteousness of Christ is not only profitable to slay our legal hopes, by setting before us the righteousness we must perform, if we would enter into life by keeping the commandments; but his righteousness is presented in the gospel to us as sinners, that we may therein receive Christ himself as the Lord our righteousness; He having fulfilled all righteousness in our stead, that the righteousness of the law may be fulfilled in us.'

It appears past contradiction, says Mr. Riccaltoun, That the Redeemer put himself in the very place where the redeemed stood, and took upon him that very curse which they were bound under.'

The learned Mr. Norton of Boston in New England, successor to the famous Mr. John Cotton, observes, when writing against Pinchin the Socinian, Either Christ suffered the wrath

[ocr errors]

of God, i. e. the punishment due to the sins of the elect, or else God is untrue in that Commination, He that sins shall die; because the elect themselves do not suffer it. But God is true: the Strength of Israel will not lie, 1 Sam. xv. 29. God cannot lie, Titus i. 1. Either Christ suffered the penal death of the curse due to the elect for sin, or the elect suffer it themselves, or the curse is not executed; but the elect suffer it not themselves, neither is the curse not executed; for then the truth of the commination and divine justice fail: therefore Christ suffered the penal death of the curse due to the elect for sin. As the eternal virtue of Christ's sufferings redeemed us from the eternity of suffering formally, so Christ in suffering the wrath of God formally, suffered virtually whatsoever was due to the elect for their sin, and so by suffering redeemed us from all the properly penal curses of the law whatsoever.'

It should ever be remembered that precepts of a merely positive nature are repealable at the will of the Institutor, but with moral precepts it is otherwise. They have their foundation in

N

that relation which subsists between the creature and the Creator, and can therefore neither be annulled nor relaxed. To suppose that the righteous Governor of the world should annul or relax a law which indispensably requires us to love him with all our hearts, and our neighbour as ourselves (which will be as much a duty in heaven as it is now upon earth,) would not be for God to judge the sinner, as Mr. Howe remarks, 'but to judge, or criminate, himself for the enactment of a penalty which circumstances in the creature afterwards compelled him to repeal.' Had there been no plan in the divine councils and administration by which the penalty of the law might be consistently endured on the behalf of man, he must for ever have remained in the state of those apostate spirits for whom there is no redemption.

'The disobedience of our first parents was nothing less, says Bishop Horsley, than a confederacy with the apostate spirit against the sovereign authority of God: and if such offenders are spared by such a sovereign, it must be in a way which shall unite the perfection of mercy

with the perfection of justice; for in God mercy and justice must equally be perfect.'

To these excellent remarks suffer me to add the observations of an elegant writer on the same subject. It argues the grossest absurdity, and the highest presumption, to suppose that human guilt can be pardoned without an adequate reparation for the injury done to the law, or a proportionate satisfaction rendered to the justice of the divine Lawgiver. The supposition reflects the highest dishonour on the moral government of Deity, and represents the law of Heaven as more flexible in its penal sanctions, and more relaxed in its requisitions of obedience, than the laws of men; while the great Legislator himself must, in consequence, be less studious to preserve inviolate the precepts of his law, and to inflict the merited penalty incurred by a breach of it, than earthly judges are, whose sentence against the guilty is always guided by an inflexible adherence to the dictates of justice, and by an undeviating conformity to the demands of the civil law. To elude the force of this reasoning, the very persons whom the law of

God convicts of sin, and whom the gospel addresses as criminals, entertain the precarious and dishonourable hope, that sorrow for sin is sufficient to the pardon of it, and future amendment an adequate recompense for past disobedience. But sin is a debt: and whoever heard that a creditor would admit sorrow for having contracted a debt, as positive payment of it? or what law would release a criminal from the hands of justice, because the dread of death extorts confession, and prompts penitence, or because he promises obedience to those laws which he is convicted of having broken? A criminal in the hands of the executioner might as soon expect a reversal of the sentence of the law for his sorrows and his promises, as a transgressor hope for pardon at the hands of the Judge of heaven and earth for that which neither satisfies his justice nor compensates for the violation of the law. If the hope of the one would be justly reprobated as ill-founded and presumptuous, the expectations of the other rise in presumption and in guilt, as they lead the bold transgressor to believe that God will clear the guilty, though he

[ocr errors]

has expressly declared he will in no-wise do so;

« AnteriorContinuar »