cares for none other in time, and will care for none other through eternity. The man who slaves at the employment to escape the penalty or to secure the pay, is diametrically the reverse of that man who is still more intensely devoted to the employment than the other, but because he has devoted to it the taste and the affections of his renovated nature. There is a well of water struck out in his heart, which springeth up unto spiritual life here, and unto everlasting life hereafter. There is an angelic spirit which has descended upon him from above; and which likens him to those beings of celestial nature, who serve God, not from the authority of any law that is without, but from the impulse of a love that is within ; whose whole heart is in the work of obedience, and whose happiness is without alloy, just because their holiness is without a failing and without a flaw. The gospel does not expunge virtue; it only elevates its character, and raises the virtue of earth on the same platform with the virtue of heaven. It causes it to be its own reward; and prefers the disciples of Jesus Christ from the condition of hirelings who serve in the spirit of bondage to the condition of heirs who serve their reconciled Father in the spirit of adoption; who love what He loves, and with a spirit kindred to His own, breathe in the atmosphere which best suits them, when they breathe in the atmosphere of holiness.

Our second inference is, that while the life of a Christian is a life of progressive virtue, and of virtue, too, purified from the jealousies and the sor

didness of the legal spirit, still to be set on such a career, we see how indispensable it is that we enter by Christ, as by the alone gate of admission through which we can reach the way of such a sanctification. How else can we get rid of the oldness of the letter, we would ask? How be delivered from the fears and disquietudes of legality? How were it possible to regard God in any other light than one whose very sacredness made him the enemy of sinners, and so made him hateful to them?

We are

bound over to distrust, and alienation, and impracticable distance from God, till the tidings of the gospel set us free. There is a leaden and oppressive weight upon our spirits, under which there can be no play of free, or grateful, or generous emotion towards the Father of them, till we hear with effect of the peace-speaking blood, and of the charm and the power of the great propitiation. Faith in Christ is not merely the starting-post of our reconciliation with God; it is also the startingpost of that new obedience which, unchilled by jealousy, and untainted by dread or by selfishness, is the alone obedience that is at all acceptable. The heart cannot go freely out to God, while beset with terror, while combined with the thoughts of a yet unsettled controversy, while in full view of its own sinfulness, and still in the dark about the way in which a Being of unspotted purity and inflexible justice, can find out a right channel of conveyance for the dispensation of His mercy—how He can be just, while the Justifier of the ungodly. It is the cross of Christ that resolves all these painful ambiguities. It is this which dissipates all these appre

hensions. It is this which maintains, in sanctity unviolated, the whole aspect and character of the Godhead; while there beameth forth from it the kindest expression of welcome even on the chief of sinners. Let that expression be but seen and understood, and then will that be to us a matter of experience which we have tried, and tried so feebly, to set forth as a matter of demonstration. Our bonds will be loosed. A thing of hopeless drudgery, will be turned into a thing of heart-felt delight. The breath of a new spirit will animate our doings; and we will personally, and by actual feeling, ascertain the difference that there is between the service of a Lawgiver pursuing us with exactions that we cannot reach, and the service of a Friend, who has already charmed us both into confidence and gratitude, and is cheering us on, through the manifold infirmities of our nature, to the resemblance of himself in all that is kind, and upright, and heavenly, and holy. It is only, we repeat it, through the knowledge of Christ and of him crucified, that we can effect this transition from the one style of obedience to the other style of obedience. It is only thus that we become dead unto the law, and alive unto God. It is only thus that we can serve him with all the energies of an emancipated heart, now set at large from that despondency and deadness which formerly congealed it. "I will run the way of thy commandments," says the Psalmist, "when thou hast enlarged my heart." Make room in it for the doctrine of the cross, and this will enlarge it. And, therefore, to sinners do we declare, that

:

Christ is set forth as a propitiation, and all who believe in him shall have the benefit; and to believers do we declare, that God hath called them not to uncleanness, but to holiness; that, naming the name of Christ, their distinct business is to depart from all iniquity, and to do the commandments, not because they can purchase admission to heaven by the doing of them, but because heaven is purchased for them already and to be educated for heaven, they must learn to do what is right-not that they can earn a title upon God, but because God has been graciously pleased to confer this title upon them; and now it is their part to do what is "well-pleasing in his sight-walking worthy of the Lord unto all pleasing--being fruitful in every good work-and giving thanks unto the Father, who hath made them meet to be partakers of the inheritance of the saints in light."

INTRODUCTORY ESSAY

ΤΟ

TRACTS

BY THE REV. THOMAS SCOTT,

RECTOR OF ASTON SANDFORD.

THERE is no delusion more prevalent, or more difficult to dissipate from the minds of men, than the imagined power which this world possesses, to confer solid good or substantial enjoyment on its votaries. Their life is one unceasing struggle for some object which lies at a distance from them. Their path upon earth is an attempted progress towards some attainment, which they conceive to be placed at an onward point in the line of their futurity. They are fighting their way to an arduous eminence of wealth or of distinction, or running with eager desire after some station of fancied delight, or fancied repose, on this side of death. And it is the part of religious wisdom, to mark the contrast which obtains between the activity of the pursuit in the ways of human business or human ambition, and the utter vanity of the termination -to compute the many chances of disappointment -and, even when the success has been most triumphant, to compare the vehemence of the longing expectation with the heartlessness of the