ther way: Yes, you have loathed God, except as

a name.

And then, Think how long this has been. These offers were not made to you yesterday. You were baptized to Christ, in infancy. You have been brought up in the knowledge of Christ. Any day, for twenty, thirty, forty years, or more, these blessings were to be had, for asking them; as thousands have found, by blessed experience, who have gone for them to God. They have but waited your acceptance. Every Sabbath has God been soliciting, Be thou reconciled. thou happy. But, no. Your heart has been averse from God. You have had no wish to come into near converse with him; and so you still are what, and where you were; far off from God the real reason being, as I say, that you like to be so, while God has been proposing peace.

Be

My brethren, this one admitted fact, that you are thus leaving your spiritual state, all uncertainty, to say the least, when God, in his word, has been pressing his grace upon you, all your life, marks, as with a sunbeam, the dreadful alienation of your heart from God. May God's Spirit fix deep, in you, this arrow of conviction, unto timely repentance, and salvation !

I say then, in the first place, respecting this matter of reconciliation to God,-The necessity

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SERMON XI.

FREEDOM FROM SIN,

BY FREEDOM FROM THE LAW.

ROMANS vi. 14.

For sin shall not have dominion over you, for ye are not under the law, but under grace.

NOTHING is more essential to the peace of an enlightened conscience, and the vigour of divine life, in any soul, than a clear understanding of the essential opposition, between the method proposed by the law, and that made known by the gospel, for obtaining eternal life. To blend the two, for its attainment, is impossible: and, yet, no attempt is more common; not only, among unawakened men, who lower God's law, to their own supposed power of fulfilment, and take Christ to complete their deficiencies, but, alas! even with many who are truly quickened of God's Spirit, in whose minds there frequently remains, for a time, grievous confusion, on this vital point. They know, that, till a man come

were, you might be happy, as the brute creation are around you, in health, and food, and bodily enjoyments. Further, you are not a mere rational creature, with powers of mind just adapted to your present state of being, and nothing more. If it were so, you might content yourself in worldly speculation, and worldly science. But you are a being of another world; a creature of immortality: and this world is but as a brief platform, from which you step into real being, in eternity. You are formed for God. O noble birthright of man! to find his delights in those things, wherein God himself has his delights! to have Deity for his portion! Jehovah's self, for his inheritance!

Now, when God removes the enmity, when a sinner is reconciled to him, by the sweet influences of his grace, making the appeal in my text effectual, then he is introduced into this blessedness he has the beginnings of it, in his experience. God and he are friends. And this is not mere notion; but God acts towards him, treats him, as a friend. He comes, and converses with him not visibly, as with Abraham; but, really, according to his own spiritual nature: so that prayer, praise, the written word, the preached word, the supper of the Lord, O these are, often, marrow and fatness, life and peace, heaven anticipated, to the believing soul. Why?

God is with him, in them; as he has said, of his people, "I will dwell in them, and walk in them; and I will be their God, and they shall be my people." (2 Cor. vi. 16.) As Christ has said, (John xiv. 23,) "My Father will love him, and we will come unto him, and make our abode with him." The soul is no more afraid of God, with that slavish fear which once it had as you read of Adam, instantly that he felt himself a sinner, he hid himself from the presence of the Lord God, among the trees of the garden. No; the man is, now, reconciled to God. Why should he have any dread of him? He may look up to the heaven above him, and feel that his Father, his friend, is there. He can look on the world around him. Earth, air, and seas, with all their inhabitants, belong to his God and Saviour. Not a sparrow falleth to the ground, without his Father. He can look forward to all the uncertainties of time, and know that all things are working together, for his good:--to death and judgment, and they have no terrors for him. He is reconciled to God. And the eternity beyond admits him into the fulness of this blessedness, and stamps it with perpetuity.

Ask the saints of God, and, with all their cause for present humiliation, all their manifold temptations and conflicts, they will tell you, We know something of this experience. Now, will money

days, and make but feeble opposition to the sin that dwelleth in them. May the Lord, the Spirit, open to us the important truths, that are contained in this portion of his word, while we consider,

I. The state into which the believer is brought in Christ.

II. A glorious consequence of it, here set forth.

I. The state into which the believer is brought in Christ. He is 66 'not under the law, but

under grace."

1. He is "not under the law." The law of God is, like himself, "holy, and just, and good :" a perfect transcript of the divine character. In the principle of it,-perfect, absorbing love of God, and love of man,-it was written on man's heart, when he came out of the hands of his Maker, and was pronounced "very good.” The details of this law, as given in ten commandments, at Mount Sinai, are the application of its principle to the circumstances of man, as a fallen creature. They are, for the most part, prohibitory: marking out the several paths in which men are in danger of wandering from God, by the broad outlines, and strongest features, of each : not, as if the commandment were fulfilled by the