pointments when you were laboring to enter into God's rest. If these are your thoughts, you have very different thoughts of God's gracious covenant from those of David. "He hath made with me an everlasting covenant, ordered in all things, and sure; for this is all my salvation, and all my desire." The covenant of grace could not be a surer covenant than the covenant of works, if our strength were in ourselves. Adam had power to keep the covenant of life if he had pleased. But his will was changeable, and he fell. Let us rejoice that God is become our strength and salvation.

If you forget that it is not by your own strength, but by the strength of God, that you must be enabled to believe on Christ, one of these great evils will be the consequence: Either you will think that you have done the work of God when it is not done, and thus your self-confidence will be encouraged and increased; or by frequent disappointments of your endeavors, you will be reduced to despondency, and say, There is no hope. But when you remember that the work of faith must be wrought in you by God, you will be guarded against both these extremes. You will be under less temptation, at least, to think that the mere exertions of your natural powers have accomplished the desired change in your condition; and when you find that you cannot

do what you once thought was not very difficult, you will learn to distrust yourselves, and to set an high value upon those promises of grace that are every where found in the Bible.

"This is the covenant," says God, "that I will make with the house of Israel after those days I will put my law in their hearts, and write it in their inward parts." By the law, we are to understand the whole doctrine of God, including the gospel. Sensible that we are undone by the breach of the covenant of works, the covenant of grace must be all our desire; and, according to this covenant, it is God that gives us faith, and disposes us to that obedience which is the fruit of it. He writes his law in our hearts, when he effectually determines us to believe on Christ, and to take his easy yoke upon us. Those, therefore, who take hold of God's covenant, will trust in his arm. They will not merely look for help from him as if they could do something of themselves, but sensible that they are not sufficient to think any thing of themselves, it will be their desire and hope that he may work in them all the good pleasure of his goodness, and the work of faith with power.

3. Beware of deferring the duty of believ ing on Christ till you feel the power of the Spirit working in your souls.

It is one of the great principles of our re

ligion, that the only rule of our faith and practice is the word of God. There are some enemies of the truth who would have reason to be the rule of our faith; and others who substitute a light within from the Spirit, for the infallible directory of religion. Such principles we renounce in our profession.God grant that our religious exercise may not be tinctured by them. "Happy is the man that condemneth not himself in that which he approveth."

We follow reason, and not Scripture, as the rule of our faith when our practice is regulated by deductions which our own minds make from the truths of Scripture, instead of those conclusions which the Scripture itself draws. When we will not believe on Christ; because the Scripture says, that without Christ we can do nothing, we may act rationally in our own apprehensions, for it is very natural to think that it would be vain for a man who has no strength at all to attempt to put himself in motion. Thus the man with the withered arm, whom our Lord commanded to stretch it out, if he had acted upon the principles of corrupt reason rather than faith, might have said to Jesus, "If thou dost not heal me, do not insult me. Thou knowest that a withered hand cannot be stretched out by the man himself. Stretch it out for me,

or let me feel life and power returning to it, and then I will stretch it out.' The poor man

neither thought nor acted in this manner. It was Jesus who spoke, and Jesus was to be believed and obeyed in hope against hope.

But we make the light of the Spirit within us the rule of our faith, when we refuse to do what God requires, till we find power sensibly communicated to ourselves. Will a minister preach to any good purpose, without the aid of the divine Spirit? and yet what would you think of a minister who should refuse to mount the pulpit till he felt the Spirit working powerfully in him? Would you not think that he was fit only to be a speaker in a meeting of Quakers? And why should you require more sensible communications of the Spirit in believing than ministers in preaching? It has not seldom been found, that ministers have been eminently assisted by God to declare his truths to men, when they went forth to their work under dismal apprehensions, that they would be left to expose themselves by their own weakness. And many, under a persuasion that it was their duty to believe, though sensible of utter inability, have been enabled truly to commit their souls unto Christ, while they could not distinguish the work of the Spirit from the workings of their own minds. It was the Spirit of God that impressed upon their minds a sense of their obligations to believe. It was the Spirit that disposed them to comply with the command of God, and to silence a thousand ob

jections started by an evil heart of unbelief. It was the Spirit that secretly communicated strength to their souls, and enabled them to trust in the word of grace. His influence

was efficacious, and overcame every obstrucstruction to the good work, although they could not satisfy their own minds, and far less assure others that they were partakers of such distinguished mercy.

"Blessed art thou, Simon Barjona, for flesh and blood hath not revealed this unto thee, but my Father who is in heaven." In these words our Lord told Peter what, if he knew before, he probably did not know so distinctly and with such certainty, as after our Lord gave this testimony of the divine original of his faith. Peter first met our Lord in Judea, near. the Jordan, and saw plainly that he was the Christ the Son of the living God. He met with him afterwards at the sea of Tiberias, where he saw such a proof of his divine glory in the draught of fishes, that he could not, without shutting his eyes, doubt whether Jesus was the Christ, the Son of God. The evidence appeared so bright to him, that he wondered every man did not see it. yet Peter would have been as blind as other men, if the Spirit of God had not opened his understanding to the evidence of the truth. The disciples did not know all that the Lord had been pleased to do within their own hearts. When Jesus said to them, "Whither I gǝ,

And