form of a rapture or an ecstacy, and calculated to convince none but the individual by whom it is felt. The question is, whether a man who has no external and visible proof to which he can appeal, may justly shield himself beneath our text, as proving that the necessary testimony may be all given within; and whether, on the other hand, a man, whose life is a witness to his piety, must suppose himself void of the Spirit's attestation, if he be not favoured with a spiritual and animating sense of forgiveness.

reasons.

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It is manifestly of the greatest importance, that we find the right answer to these questions. We doubt whether, in the whole range of theological inquiry, there be a point on which a sound decision is more necessary, and perhaps more difficult, than this of the witness to a man's spirit of his being God's child. We speak of the difficulty, as well as the necessity; for you must have gathered from our foregoing remarks, that there are two opposite dangers in handling this topic; the one of encouraging sentiments which may often spring from enthusiasm; the other of limiting the operations of the Holy Ghost, and making the believer suspicious of his choicest enjoyments. We shall endeavour to make our way between these opposite difficulties; though we frankly own that of the two we should be less careful to avoid the latter than the former. It were far safer for men to be kept in doubt and anxiety when there is full ground for comfort, than to be confident on insufficient We would far rather for all of you that would fail to hear the testimony of the Spirit when actually given, than imagine it when it did not exist: you might indeed have more comfort, but evidently you would have much less security, on the second supposition than the first. And therefore, however anxious we are that you have all those comforts which spring from a well-grounded foundation, we are even yet more anxious, that none of you should deceive yourselves, speaking peace to the soul when there is no peace. We wish that those within whose breasts the Spirit is witnessing that witness of which St. Paul speaks, may be led to the full assurance of salvation; but we wish with greater intenseness, that those who may be resolving the Spirit's testimony into something secret, and mystical, and indefinite-an impulse, a whisper, a communication, of which they can give no account, and furnish no evidence; we wish that these may be taught to put away the wild and unwarranted opinion, and to feel that, with regard to the witness of the Holy Ghost, as the very ground-work of assurance, they should be ready, according to St. Peter's admonition, "to

give to every man that asketh them, a reason of the hope that is in them."

You will understand, from these remarks, that we consider, and wish to prove, the witness of the Spirit, which is spoken of in our text, an intelligible, manifest, determinable thing, far removed from what is mysterious, or strange, or unaccountable. You will perceive, that, in place of regarding the witness as that of which the very party to whom it is directed can furnish no account, and of which he can assert that he feels it and cherishes it in the solitudes of his heart, we consider it as capable of being manifested to others, and established upon principles which all around must admit. Of course, we do not pretend to have yet advanced any thing which makes good this opinion; we simply state that this is the opinion which we wish to uphold, because we reckon, that any other gives encouragement to views which are practically pernicious. We must hence examine the text with accurate attention, and thus endeavour to elicit its real import.

It seems to us, that St. Paul distinctly asserts that the witness of the Spirit is no secret or inexplicable thing, and then leaves us to infer from such assertion its true nature and character. These, at least the assertion and the inference, we design to bring successively to your notice; and you will judge in the sequel, whether the passage has been fairly handled and examined.

In the first place, then, we are to show you an assertion in our text, as to what the witness of the Spirit is not; we are, in the second place, to draw from this an inference as to what this witness of the Spirit is.

Now we speak of the text, as containing AN ASSERTION AS TO WHAT THE WITNESS OF THE SPIRIT IS NOT, because it is of a joint testimony, and not of a solitary, that the Apostle makes mention: "The Spirit itself beareth witness with our spirit." The Spirit testifying is a fellow-witness with our spirit: such is the import of the expression. So that the testimony is that of two witnesses combining together to give evidence, and not that of a single party furnishing a single affirmation. Had St. Paul said, "The Spirit itself beareth witness to our spirit," the passage would have assumed a widely different character; there would have been but a single witness, namely, the divine Spirit; and the human would have been only the recipient of the testimony. And had this been the statement, we could scarcely have rescued the text from the grasp of the enthusiast. He might have told us that the Apostle spoke of a

witness given by the Spirit of God to the spirit of man—a witness, therefore, which, by its very nature, must be secret and inexplicable; and he might then have gone on to reason upon special manifestations and secret intimations, and have rested all his hope for immortality on evidence which sprang only from a fervid imagination. But we cannot allow that the text, in its present form, may be brought to support such opinions. We contend, that, by speaking of the concurrent testimony of two witnesses—and those two the divine Spirit and our own—St. Paul removes the testimony itself from all that enthusiasm can dictate, and brings it under the jurisdiction of sound reason and sober inquiry.

We are not yet endeavouring to show what this testimony is; we are only examining, on the Apostle's authority, what it is not, that we may confute error, before we set ourselves to the establishing truth. And we say, that if our own spirit is a fellow-witness with God's Spirit to our having received the adoption of sons, then the testimony itself must be a testimony on which we can sit in judgment, and of which we can give account: not a supernatural voice, for our spirit could have nothing to do with such a voice; not a mysterious impression produced we know not how, for our spirit could have no part in working such impression. It may be (and this we wish well observed) that there will be much in the testimony, as proceeding from God's Spirit, which is not to be explained and not comprehended; but if it proceed at the same time from our own spirit, there must also be much which we may demonstrate and vindicate. There cannot be joint witnesses, there cannot be concurrent testimony, unless each witness be able to explain his own part of the testimony, however unable he may be to explain that of the other. The evidence may be a mystery to the one witness, so far as it is furnished by his fellowwitness, but it must be quite clear and intelligible, so far as it is furnished by himself. For example: I might receive a strong impression through a dream; a supernatural communication might seem made to me in a vision of the night; and I might awake with a deep and comforting persuasion that God had pardoned all my sins, and would admit me at death into the light of his presence. We are far enough from saying, that the impression thus derived from a dream must be necessarily deceitful, and that God would never take such a mode of ministering to a man's spiritual comfort. But could the testimony thus afforded me-allowing it to be all that it seems to be--could it be regarded as that of which St. Paul speaks in our text? If I have been staggered by the text because I could

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not find a similar witness to my adoption, should I be warranted in thinking that the wanting evidence was supplied by the vision, and that I might now therefore be satisfied that I was indeed a child of God? We cannot admit this. The vision might be the witness of God's Spirit to my spirit; it certainly could not be the witness of God's Spirit with my spirit." Undoubtedly my spirit bears no witness in this matter; it yields no witness, however much it may receive. If the testimony lie in the dream, it is manifest that my spirit is, in one sense, the author of the dream, and therefore in no sense the author of the testimony. So that, whatever the vividness of my waking feelings, and however permanent my impression of the adoption, I should have no right to refer to what had passed, as proving, in my own case, the truth that, "the Spirit itself beareth witness with our spirit, that we are the children of God.”

And, of course, what we thus affirm, in regard to a dream, may be affirmed equally in regard to any of those secret suggestions, those sudden emotions, those inspired feelings, with which many would identify the testimony of the Spirit. We ask an individual, on what he bases his assurance that he shall enter heaven when he dies. He tells us of a sweet sense which he enjoys of pardon and favour; he tells of the privileges of the elect-that they cannot perish, neither fail of happiness at last; he tells of foretastes vouchsafed to him of future blessedness, and of pledges of immortality. And he may speak quite truly; he may have a sweet sense of pardon, and a thorough belief in the doctrine of election, and anticipate the good in store for the faithful: we neither deny nor depreciate the tokens of adoption, which he thus reckons up. But he has brought forward nothing, which we can receive as the witness of the text: he has brought forward nothing of which we can show that his own spirit and God's Spirit conspire to its production. Th persuasion that he is one of the elect—however commonly appealed to when we challenge a man as to his ground of assurance-is a persuasion, which, if it stand by itself, is far enough from answering to the description of the testimony of the text. That persuasion may have been wrought into the human spirit by the power of the divine; but certainly it is no proof which the divine Spirit and the human concur in presenting. So that, without charging with deceitfulness other kinds of evidence, and without resolving into enthusiasm the sensations and persuasions from which the man may derive much of his comfort, we have a right to ask from every one who thinks himself God's child, some witness which may be subjected to

a rigid examination. We say, some witness which may be subjected to a rigid examination; for any which eludes the grasp of inquiry, which is too delicate to be handled, too ethereal to be reasoned upon, too private to be exposed to the observation of others, cannot be the joint witnessing of God's Spirit and man's. Man's part in such witness-whatever may be said of God's-must, as we before explained, be capable of being manifested, and brought within rules applied ordinarily to testimony. And unless, therefore, an individual can give us a rational account of the grounds of his assurance -an account, that is, which may be submitted to reason, and vindicated by reason, O he may dwell with much apparent delight, on his inward sense of acceptance, on his conviction that he is predestined to life, and on the rapturous feelings which he often enjoys, but we are bound to tell him that he has not yet furnished the scriptural evidence of adoption, for he has not made good his right to class himself with those who are privileged to say, "The Spirit itself beareth witness with our spirit, that we are the children of God."

Now we have thus shown, that the witness noticed in our text, forasmuch as it results from our own spirit as well as the divine, cannot be of that kind which Scripture asserts to be'genuine, and may be imagined by the enthusiast, or counterfeited by the hypocrite. We have found an assertion in our text, as to what the witness is not; we are now to draw AN INFERENCE, AS TO WHAT THE WITNESS IS. And this is comparatively easy; for, having excluded all testimony in which the human spirit does not concur with the divine, we are to confine ourselves to one kind of evidence by which this testimony can be confirmed and made manifest. The question is simply, in what way the Spirit can bear witness with our spirit, that we have entered into the family of heaven; what testimony there can be of adoption, in producing which the divine Spirit and the human can be proved to co-operate. We have no hesitation as to the answer to be given to this question. We believe our text to be in exact harmony with those many passages of Scripture, which represent holiness as the alone proof of justification. You cannot require us to refer to well-known passages of the Bible which insist on the fruitlessness of the faith that does not influence the life, and which forbid a man to suppose himself safe for eternity except on strict evidence of his being a new creature. There is no truth more prominently set forth by the inspired writers, none which is more woven into the very heart of the Christian system, than that there must be renewal of nature, a thorough moral change, in every one who gains entrance