us to abandon the way of faith, should lead us to the exercise of a more hearty and unreserved confidence in Christ. As we become more fully acquainted with the plague of our own hearts, filling us with horror and shame, we must go directly to the Saviour, and by a new discovery of his grace, a new application of his atoning blood, and the excitement of a new and joyful hope in God's mercy, bring ourselves under the influence of motives, the natural, spontaneous results of which shall be the sanctification of our natures, and a meetness to be partakers of the inheritance of the saints in light. "HE THAT HATH

THIS HOPE IN HIM, PURIFIETH HIMSELF, EVEN AS HE IS

CHAPTER XVI.

Assurance and Sanctification.

SURELY, no one who understands the Gospel of the grace of God, can have any fears that the preaching of a free forgiveness through the sufferings of Christ, will have the least tendency to obscure the doctrine of holiness; or can even doubt that its effect will be most decidedly the reverse. Nowhere does the holiness of the Divine nature seem more awful, and the holiness of the creature more indispensable, than in the Cross of our Lord Jesus Christ. Never did the eternal Father so manifest his uncompromising abhorrence of all sin-not when an ungodly world perished in the waters of the flood-not when fires from heaven consumed the cities of the plain-nor will he so manifest it in the destruction of the earth, nor in the final punishment of the wicked-as when his righteous sentence against sin was executed upon

the person of his dear Son. No man can imagine that the sufferings of our Saviour, however complete for his entire justification, have in any degree released him from his obligation to keep the whole law of God; or, that sin, in any of us, seems less detestable in the sight of God, or of the ministering spirits that are about us, or that it should be less detestable in our sight, than before the Son of God felt the agony of its punishment in the garden and on the Cross. Lives there a man with so stupid mind and brutal heart, that he can come from the olives of Gethsemane and the painful steep of Calvary, with the impression that liberty to sin is now the law of the creature, or, still less, that it is the law of the house of God! Was there any thing in the sacrifice of Christ that at all weakened those relations that, from the beginning, bound man to love God with all his heart, and soul, and mind, and strength-that did not rather confirm and proclaim before heaven and earth their eternal force?

Neither have we the least fear that any personal assurance of the grace of God in Christ, however clear, and lively, and comforting, or even transporting such assurance may be, will ever tend to weaken our sense of obligation, as if we might now sin with impunity, nor to diminish our conviction that perseverance in faith, and prayer, and watchfulness, is indispensable to our salvation. The more thoroughly

we can strengthen our hearts in the conviction that the grace of God is our sufficient dependence— that we may and shall so persevere, the less liable will we be to yield in the hour of trial. We may, indeed, as our hearts embrace the free promises of God's grace with satisfaction and comfort, do even more than this, not only with safety, but with positive advantage. We may strengthen ourselves the more, in view of the sovereign mercy of God, and of the eternal covenant between the Father and the Son. That which perhaps was once a stumbling block, against which your proud and impenitent heart rebelled, not willing that God should have mercy on whom he would have mercy, or was trying to wrest to its own destruction-that which afterward you could hardly bear to think of, fearing that there might be in it the defeat of your rising hopes and desires, that in the sovereign mercy of God there might be no gracious designs toward you-now, as the act of faith becomes complete and you see in the Cross of Christ a free gift of forgiveness and eternal life to your perishing soul, begins to be looked upon with complacency and satisfaction. So far as we can exercise a childlike faith in God, looking up to him as our reconciled Father in Christ, the thought of his sovereign, everlasting love will be a source of unspeakable comfort and stability in hope. The idea that the love which now fills my soul with such