who will. On this, the alone warrant of faith, he invites all to enter into peace and reconciliation with God, and by judging Him faithful who hath promised, to enjoy the blessedness of the man whose sins are covered, and to whom the Lord does not impute transgression. But, while faith in the free grace and offered pardon of the Gospel puts peace and joy into the heart of the believer, it is no less fitted to produce purity and holiness. This, indeed, is the tendency, as well as the main and ultimate design of the Gospel, and it is on this account that we estimate so highly the Treatise we are now recommending, that it so nobly vindicates the doctrines of grace as doctrines according to godliness. And if there is any portion of this work to which, more than another, we would particularly direct the attention of our readers, it is to those chapters" On Grace as it reigns in our sanctification," and "On the necessity of holiness and good works." There is, in the minds of many, a fancied alliance between free grace and an immunity to sin; that, since pardon is the free gift of God, through the blood of the atonement, there is no restraint laid on men's inclinations to sin-that since we are justified wholly by the righteousness of another, the necessity of personal righteousness is as wholly superseded—and that since we cannot earn heaven by our own obedience, all the motives and securities for obedience are removed. We have not room to attempt an exposure of this oft-repeated, but unfounded, assertion-an assertion, to which the clearest averments of Scripture, and the experience of every true believer, give the most triumphant re futation. And we count it unnecessary to enter into any defence of the doctrines of grace from the charge of licentiousness, after the able and unanswerable vindication which the present Volume furnishes. We do not indeed deny, that many professors of the gospel give some colour for such an impeachment, by profaning that holy name by which they are called, and by failing to adorn the doctrines of grace by lives and conversations becoming the gospel; but such men have never felt the reign of grace in their hearts, otherwise it would not have failed to teach them "to deny ungodliness and worldly lusts, and to live soberly, righteously, and godly in the world ;" and, while such men repose a fancied confidence in the death of Christ, as their deliverance from condemnation and as their passport to heaven, they have utterly mistaken one of the main designs of Christ's death, which was, "to deliver us from all iniquity, and to purify us unto himself a peculiar people, zealous of good works." If heaven consists in God's manifesting the spiritual glories of his holy and perfect character, then must our spirit and character be kindred to his own, before we can delight in the love and contemplation of such glory. To love and enjoy God, we must be like God. And they utterly mistake the design of the gospel, who conceive of it as a mere act of indemnity; and the gospel has not been believed by them at all, if it has not come to them in the power and beneficence of holiness and grace, to change their hearts and affections into the love of what is holy and righteous and excellent; nor can they entertain any well-founded hopes of heaven hereafter, in whom there is no process of re storation going on at present to the lost image of the Godhead, and in whose hearts grace is not exerting its reigning power, to assimilate them to the spirit and character of God. Whatever there may be now, in the days of Paul, at least, there were men who turned the grace of God into licentiousness, and who ranked among the privileges of the gospel an immunity for sin. And it is striking to observe the effect of this corruption on the mind of the Apostle;-that he who braved all the terrors of persecuting violence, that he who stood undismayed before kings and governors, and could lift his intrepid testimony in the hearing of an enraged multitude-that he who, when bound by a chain between two soldiers, still sustained an invincible constancy of spirit, and could live in fearlessness, and triumph, with the dark imagery of an approaching execution in his eye-that he who counted not his life dear unto him, and whose manly breast bore him up amidst all the threats of human tyranny, and the grim apparatus of martyrdom-that this man so firm and so undaunted, wept like a child when he heard of those disciples that turned the pardon of the cross into an encouragement for doing evil. The fiercest hostilities of the gospel's open enemies he could brave, but when he heard of the foul dishonour done to the name of his Master, by the moral worthlessness of those who were the gospel's professing friends, this he could not bear-all that firmness, which so upheld him unfaltering and unappalled in the battles of the faith, forsook him then; and this noblest of champions on the field of conflict and of controversy, when he heard of the profligacy of his own converts, was fairly overcome by the tidings, and gave way to all the softness of womanhood. When every other argument fails, for keeping us on the path of integrity and holiness, we should think of the argument of Paul in tears. It may be truly termed a picturesque argument, nor are we aware of a more impressive testimony in the whole compass of Scripture, to the indispensable need of virtue and moral goodness in a believer, than is to be found in that passage where Paul says of these unworthy professors of the faith, "For many walk, of whom I have told you often, and now tell you even weeping, that they are the enemies of the eross of Christ: whose end is destruction, whose god is their belly, and whose glory is in their shame, who mind earthly things." ST. ANDREWs, June, 1828. T. C. १ |