him. If we had never offered to open our mouth to utter any scandalous, offensive, or hurtful word, the cry of our secret cogitations is heard in the ears of God. If we did not commit the sins which daily and hourly, either in deed, word, or thought, we do commit, yet in the good things which we do how many defects are there intermingled! God, in that which is done respecteth the mind and the intention of the doer. Cut off, then, all those things wherein we have regarded our own glory, those things which men do to please men, and satisfy our own liking, those things which we do for any by-respect, not sincerely and purely for the love of God, and a small score will serve for the number of our righteous deeds. Let the holiest and best things which we do be considered. We are never better affected unto God than when we pray; yet when we pray, how are our affections many times distracted! how little reverence do we show unto the grand majesty of God, unto whom we speak! how little remorse of our own miseries! how little taste of the sweet influence of his tender mercies do we feel! Are we not as unwilling many times to begin and as glad to make an end, as if, in saying, Call upon me, he had set us a very burdensome task. It may seem somewhat extreme which I will speak, therefore let every one judge of it, even as his own heart shall tell him and no otherwise. I will but only make a demand: If God should yield unto us, not as unto Abraham, if fifty, forty, thirty, twenty, yea, or if ten good persons could be found in a city, for

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their sakes the city should not be destroyedbut if he should make his offer thus large-Search all the generations of men sithence the fall of our father Adam, find one man that hath done one action which hath passed from him pure, without any stain or blemish at all, and for that one action neither man nor angel shall feel the torments which were prepared for both. Do you think that

this ransom to deliver men and angels could be

found to be among the sons of men?"

The same sense of utter deficiency, which is expressed in the above passage with such a compass of thought and language, is experienced by every one who examines his life by the law of God. Much he will see that he has never attempted, and in every thing that he has attempted, much that he has never performed; and in what he has performed, much that is sinful and blameworthy; and the more he is at pains to scan the mighty labour, the more will the mighty labour swell in his eye, and the more of it will he behold unperformed. In the progress even of his improvement, he rolls along with him an accumulating load of omissions and transgressions, which, had there been no provision made for it, would have overwhelmed his mind, and soon brought all obedience to a stand.

Had there been no provision for this dilemma, then all had been ruined. For no enthusiasm could have borne up against the hopelessness and terrors of such a law; no spirit could have brooked to be ground down with a task, which by its very

nature was interminable and thankless in every stage of its progress,-where diligence did not satisfy our task-master, and patient endurance of the unmeasured toil did but find for us threats in this life and scourgings in the life to come. And if we did persevere, it would have been to decry the injustice of proceeding against us. For our advancement in what was good would have begotten a sense of worth, a pride of improvement, and a satisfaction with ourselves, which would have made us recede from the indignity of being threatened with the visitation of divine wrath for that which neither we nor any man, by any means, could better perform. And this burst of feeling would avail us little-for cool reflection would bring up the remembrance of having often fallen asleep in the midst of duties, and allowed ourselves with our eyes open, to give way before the dalliance and enjoyment and vanities of the world; and present consciousness would accuse us of yielding in the face of our better resolutions, to the insurrection of nature within; or, if now reformed of having spent the long period of youth, and perhaps prime of manhood, in rushing at the command of natural instinct into forbidden wickedness. All which evils, past, present, and to come, Memory loaded with the unprofitable past, Hope having fearful anticipation of the coming future, the Present occupied with interminable duty, would, together, have combined a state of mind the most unfit for any useful employment of our faculties. Joy and happiness, which form the atmosphere of

alacrity and activity, would have been sealed up; and a drooping speechless drudgery, driven on by a kind of fear, by the desire that things might not grow worse, with no hope of ever retrieving them, would have been the only motive to carry us forward. Between attempting and failing, between reflections upon ourselves and reflections upon God, our life would have passed unprofitably,-if this law, so enlarged and pure, was to have a strict inquisition at a future judgment.

It remains, therefore, that we complete this exposition of the constitution under which God hath placed us, by entering into an explanation of the various provisions which are contained in it for meeting this dilemma, into which every man is brought, however sincere be his intention and however great his endeavours to keep the perfect law of God. But this is of so much importance, and so distinct, that we separate it along with the other provisions of the divine constitution for the next part of our argument.

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OF JUDGMENT TO COME.

PART III.

ACTS XVII. 30, 31. god comMANDETH ALL MEN EVERY WHERE TO REPENT: BECAUSE HË HATH APPOINTED A DAY, IN THE WHICH HE WILL JUDGE THE WORLD IN RIGHTEOUSNESS.

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THE SAME SUBJECT CONTINUED.

In order to meet that sense of delinquency with which every reflective mind is oppressed when it betakes itself to stand or fall by the law of God, many devices are imagined, whereof we shall examine the stability before unfolding that which the Lawgiver hath himself discovered. For there is a strange perverseness in mankind to do without this other part of the divine constitution, and by their own inventions to help themselves out of the dilemma into which they are brought by the purity of the law; on which account it becomes necessary to pause, and consider these suggestions of natural reason, before proceeding to develop that scheme which God himself hath revealed.

The most common refuge of the mind from its consciousness of guilt is in the mercy of God. His toleration of sin here, and his goodness to the sinner, insinuate into the mind the idea that he may be as forgiving and kind in the world to come. This hope, or rather hallucination, for it does