natural affection to wile away the time, and make the soul forget its misery: no infidelity for the soul to take shelter behind in callous scorn: no false views of God's sovereignty or man's fall, to screen the soul from blame: no gleam of hope breaking through the darkness to cheer the soul with even a distant anticipation of release but constant lively consciousness of guilt, constant agonising endurance of punishment, pang after pang, rolling like the billows of the great deep upon the shore, raging, and lashing the wretched soul with relentless fury. Do you believe this? Do you really believe that you deserve hell fire? that instead of sitting in ease and comfort in those pews, and having your houses to return to in the afternoon, you deserve this morning to be in torments with the devil and his angels? that everlasting punishment, though it sounds dreadful in your ears, though the thought of it, when you can for a moment think seriously, makes your flesh as it were to creep and tremble upon your bones, is yet that very punishment which may in perfect justice be inflicted upon you by Almighty God? You cannot see how it is to be denied, yet you are unwilling to believe it; this pressure of the subject is irksome to you: you would excuse yourselves by calling it unscriptural extravagance: you would turn a deaf ear to the entreaties of the friend

who reiterates the painful but salutary warning you would wrap yourselves up in a sort of desperate heedlessness, and fall asleep upon the brink of destruction. But it is my duty to sound among you the trumpet of God's just threatenings, "to cry aloud, and spare not ;" "whether you will hear, or whether you will forbear;" to rouse you from the fatal security into which the devil has lulled you by the opiate drugs of the world and the flesh, to follow you along the broad road which leadeth unto death eternal, and even at the last stage of that fearful journey, when the gates of hell are already open, and the flames flash forth to seize upon their prey, then, even then, to cry to you, there still is hope! our just God is a Saviour also; to beseech you by his unbounded mercies to repent, and believe the glad tidings; to assure you on his own authority, that he is able to save to the uttermost, and will in no wise cast out any that come to him.

"Look unto me," he says, "and be ye saved, all the ends of the earth." "I have found a ransom; I have laid help on one that is mighty; I am just, and the justifier of the ungodly." In me, 66 mercy and truth are met together, righteousness and peace have kissed each. other." Well did the Prophet sing, in the anticipation of the promised redemption; and well may we adopt the triumphant strain

of the prophet, "Sing, O ye heavens, for the Lord hath done it: shout, ye lower parts of the earth; break forth into singing ye mountains, O forest, and every tree therein, for the Lord hath redeemed Jacob, and glorified himself in Israel." Look up my fellow sinner in hope, yea, in joy. Behold! here the dayspring from on high greets our delighted vision; here the sun of righteousness shines forth in all his native splendour, and the glory of a saving God is revealed in the face of Jesus Christ.

II. God in Christ is a just God, and a Saviour. Jesus Christ is an adequate substitute for the sinner: a substitute able to endure all the punishment which the sinner deserved to endure, to die the death, soul and body, which the sinner deserved to die, to challenge almighty, everlasting, inexorable justice, to say, what wouldest thou? and when justice says, I would the death, soul and body, of those guilty rebels, to answer, if death be your just demand, here am I, take me, on me execute all the righteous sentence, put me to death soul and body, instead of these guilty rebels, and proclaim to them pardon and peace, not an extorted pardon, not a reluctant grudging forgiveness; but a gracious, complete, eternal pardon, a free, and, to them, unconditional

forgiveness. Assuring them that as in time past, thy unchanging faithfulness was pledged to condemn them, now that I am condemned in their stead, the same unchanging faithfulness is as infallibly pledged to forgive them. Thou hast prepared me a body. In the volume of thy book it is written of me, I come to do thy will, yea, thy law is within my heart. I have finished the work that thou gavest me to do, and now I will that those whom thou hast given me for the travail of my soul be with me where I am, that they may behold my glory which thou hast given me, for thou lovedst me before the foundation of the world." Such is the language, and such the work of our Immanuel the shepherd of Israel, the man who is Jehovah's fellow, and against whom the sword of Jehovah's wrath was awaked, Jesus Christ of Nazareth of Galilee. This is he who while he upholds with one hand the unsullied splendour of the throne of justice, opens wide with the other the gates of the temple of mercy; who while he perpetuates the heavenly song of holy, holy, holy, Lord God of Hosts, causes at the same time the voices of ransomed sinners to shout the praises of him whose "" mercy endureth for ever."

The nature of the relation in which Jesus stood to the Father from eternity, the meaning of the expression, Son, when applied to him,

antecedent to his incarnation, and in what sense his sufferings made satisfaction to the divine justice, are among the dark things of God. But this we know clearly, that he who in the beginning was with God, and was God, he who made all things, and without whom was not any thing made that was made, he who was the brightness of the Father's glory, and the express image of his person, he who saith of himself" I and my Father are one," and of whom St. Paul saith that "he thought it not robbery to be equal with God;" he was manifest in the flesh made of a woman, made under the law, that he might redeem them that were under the law.

"It is a faithful saying, and worthy of all acceptation, that Christ Jesus came into the world to save sinners. It pleased the Father to bruise him, to put him to shame, to make his soul an offering for sin. He bore our sins in his own body upon the tree, the just one suffering for the unjust, and by one offering of himself once offered, he put away sin blotting out iniquities as a cloud, laying hold upon the hand writing of ordinances which was against us, which was contrary to us, and taking it out of the way, nailing it to his cross." He died body and soul. From the hand of man his body endured the punishment due to a malefactor: he was buffeted, mocked, reviled,