and though you may not perhaps be able to specify the precise moment of your conversion, some traces must remain upon your memory of the circumstances connected with an event so replete with important consequences. In the course of our discussion on this subject we have observed, that the cure of sin must be preceded by a sense of the malady, by a humiliating conviction of defilement, urging us to cry with the leper, "Unclean, unclean." Did any ever witness in you this appearance of concern for sin, this apprehension of your misery as a guilty creature before God? Were you ever heard, we will not say to cry out in a public assembly, as did the three thousand that were converted by Peter, but in the most private intercourse with a Christian friend, and inquire what you must do to be saved? Are you conscious to yourselves of having ever felt serious and lasting solicitude on that head? Did it ever rest with a weight upon your mind at all proportioned to what you have felt on other occasions of distress? Was it ever allowed to put a check to your worldly amusements, to your gay diversions, or to the pursuit of any scheme whatever, from which you could promise yourselves profit or pleasure? We will take occasion, in treating on the subject before us, to observe, that the only method of deliverance from the malady of sin is a devout and humble application to the Lord Jesus; for he, and he only, "shall save his people from their sins ;"* and now, not less than in the days of his flesh, it is his prerogative to say, "I will, be thou clean."t Supposing you thus to have applied, and to have succeeded in your suit, you must have some remembrance of those solemn transactions between Christ and your soul. You can recall the season when you committed yourselves into the hands of the Redeemer; when, like the leper in the gospel, you fell at his feet, crying, "If thou wilt, thou canst make me clean." Your struggles after the Saviour, your attempts to believe, accompanied with prayer that he would help your unbelief, and the rest you have found in him after being tossed by the storm, cannot all have passed like the fleeting images of a dream, without leaving some traces in your mind not easily effaced. If you are conscious that nothing of this nature has taken place, if you recollect no such transactions, you may be assured they never took place. Waiving, however, these points of inquiry, and admitting it to be possible that all this may have disappeared from your mind, still, since sin is a universal malady from which none are naturally exempted, if you are now healed, you must be conscious of your being very different from what you formerly were. Admitting you can give no account of the circumstances or time of your cure, yet you can at least say with him in the gospel, "One thing I know, that whereas I was blind, now I see." Your taste, inclination, and pursuits must have undergone a great alteration; and whereas you were formerly alienated from God, and took no delight in him, he is now your avowed and deliberate end, your chosen portion. Whereas you were formerly utterly disinclined to prayer, it is now your constant practice, and considered as a VOL. III.-G • Matt. i. 21. † Matt. viii. 3. high privilege. "Led captive" formerly "by Satan at his will," borne away by the tide of sensual inclination or corrupt example, you now feel yourselves endowed with spiritual power, so as to overcome temptation; and having the seed of grace remaining, you keep yourselves that so "the wicked one toucheth you not." The Lord Jesus Christ, who appeared to you formerly "like a root out of a dry ground, without any beauty or comeliness in him for which you should desire him," is now in your eyes "the branch of the Lord, beautiful and glorious; the fruit of the earth, comely and pleasant." The knowledge of him, instead of being tasteless and insipid, you now find to be of so high and superlative excellence, that you account all things but loss in the comparison; nay, you esteem them "but dung, that you may win Christ." You feel, it may be, some remains of your ancient distemper; but you feel, at the same time, that its power is broken, that the prescriptions of your Physician have wrought kindly, and that you are not far off from a complete cure. But if you are conscious of being strangers to all this, you may rest assured your disorder remains in its full force. Nor let any flatter themselves that things are well with them because their external conduct is decent and regular, and they are exempt from the grosser acts of immorality, while they remain alienated from God, forgetful of his presence, unawed by his authority, insensible to his goodness, strangers to his converse. In this alienation lies the very core and essence of sin; this is the "evil heart of unbelief departing from the living God;" this is the radical distemper of which the diversified forms of iniquity in men's lives are but the symptoms and effects. This aversion to God, this inaptitude to be influenced by considerations and motives derived from his blessed nature and holy will, is the seminal principle of all wickedness; it is the [universal,] the pervading malady which attaches to apostate spirits, as well as to apostate men, and the only one of which disembodied spirits are capable; and which [leagues] the disobedient and rebellious in all parts of the universe in one grand confederacy against God and goodness. Till this is subdued, nothing is in reality done towards the recovery of lost souls. "Man looketh on the outward appearance, but God looketh on the heart;"* and in consequence of this that which is highly esteemed among men is, not unfrequently, an abomination in his sight. "There is," the Scriptures tell us, "a generation who are pure in their own eyes, but are not washed from their filthiness ;" and they who value themselves on the correct exterior of their conduct, while their heart is not turned to God, are precisely that generation. II. The second improvement to which the subject naturally leads is, a reflection on the misery of those who are yet under the power and defilement of sin. Happy should we esteem ourselves, could we impress upon the consciences of such an adequate idea of their misery. "Then said" the prophet "Haggai, If one that is unclean by a dead body touch any of these, shall it be unclean? And the priests answered and said, it shall be unclean. Then answered Haggai, and said, So is this people, and so is this nation before me, saith the Lord; and so is every work of their hands; and that which they offer there is unclean."* To be under the power and pollution of sin is to be odious in the sight of God; and what inexpressible degradation is comprehended in this idea! For the eye of God's holiness to be averted from us, to have no share in his complacency, to be in a situation in which his essential attributes are engaged for our destruction, is a conception which, if you come to realize it, is replete with horror. To have "the wrath of God abiding on you" is a calamity which, one would suppose, must drink up your spirit, and completely destroy whatever satisfaction you might naturally derive from other objects. Till this plague is removed, cheerfulness is folly, and laughter is madness. However prosperous your outward condition, however successful your worldly pursuits, however ample your fortune, or elevated your rank, they are no just occasion of joy to you, any more than the garland which decorates the victim prepared for slaughter. "Rejoice not, O Israel, for joy, as other people: for thou hast gone a whoring from thy God.”† There are many circumstances calculated to afford a degree of joy; the blessings so plenteously showered down on the path of life are adapted in themselves to exhilarate the heart, and to diffuse a ray of cheerfulness over the soul; but to him that is under the wrath of the Almighty, if they afford high gratification, it must be in consequence of his forgetfulness of his true situation. We should pity the insensibility of the man who could delight himself with the dainties of a feast, while a sword was suspended over his head by a single hair;‡ the danger of whose situation is, however, not to be compared with being every moment exposed to "the wrath of God." While you continue in your sins, you have not the shadow of security against overwhelming and hopeless destruction: at any moment, in the midst of your amusements, your business, your repose, whether at home or abroad, in company or in solitude, you are liable to the arrest of justice; to be cast out into that eternal prison from whence you can never escape "till you have paid the uttermost farthing." The Being that fills with his presence the immensity of space-the Being "in whom you live, and move, and have your being," who can crush you in a moment, and who has engaged to recompense his enemies, and "reward them that hate him," is incensed at you, and laughs at your insensibility, because he knows that your hour is coming. III. The subject before us suggests the strongest motives for an immediate application to the methods of cure. Were sin a tolerable distemper, it might be endured; were it entirely or in every sense incurable, it must be submitted to. But as things are actually situated, there is no necessity for you to pine away in your iniquities; for though you cannot recover yourselves by any native unaided power of Haggai ii. 13, 14. See Horace, lib. iii. carm. 1. ↑ Hos. ix. 1 "Districtus ensis cui super impia yours, though in this light your [hopelessness] be deep, and your wound incurable, yet there is a method of recovery revealed in the gospel, which millions have tried with success. "There is balm in Gilead, there is a Physician there."* By the discoveries it makes of the placability of the Divine Being, and the actual constitution of a Redeemer, the gospel is essentially a restorative dispensation. "It is the power of God unto salvation to every one that believeth."† We have observed, in the course of our discussion of the subject, that the evils attached to sin are twofold: guilt, which is a legal obstruction to an approach to God, and renders the sinner liable to eternal death; and pollution, which disqualifies him for happiness. To the former the blood of the Redeemer, "sprinkled upon the conscience," is a sovereign antidote: "the blood of Christ cleanseth from all sin." The great design of his coming into this world was to render that reparation to divine justice for the injury it had sustained by the transgressions of men, which it had been otherwise impossible to make; and thus, in consistency with the divine law, to admit repenting sinners to mercy. Having boldness to enter into the holiest by the blood of Jesus, by a new and living way, which he hath consecrated for us, through the veil, that is to say, his flesh; and having an High-priest over the house of God; let us draw near." 66 With respect to the power and pollution of sin, its efficacy in retaining the soul in bondage; this also admits of relief in the gospel. There is a Spirit, we have often occasion to remind you, which can liberate the soul, and diffuse freedom, light, and purity through all its powers. "The Spirit of life in Christ Jesus hath made us free from the law of sin and death."|| "Where the Spirit of the Lord is, there is liberty." If you are willing to be made clean, if you sincerely implore the savour of Divine grace, it will not long be withheld from you. "He will give his Holy Spirit unto them that ask him.”* "If you will turn at his reproof, he will pour out his Spirit unto you, and make known his words unto you." "He is willing to heal your backslidings, to receive you graciously, and love you freely."‡‡ If you are so much in love with your distemper, indeed, as to determine, at all events, not to part with it, your case is hopeless; and nothing remains but for you to die in your sins, under the additional guilt you incur by refusing the remedy which Infinite Wisdom has prepared. At present, God is expostulating with you, in the language of an ancient prophet, "O Jerusalem, wash thine heart from wickedness, that thou mayst be saved. How long shall thy vain thoughts lodge within thee?" "Wo unto thee, O Jerusalem! wilt thou not be made clean? when shall it once be?"|||| You have met with many occurrences calculated to bring your sin to your remembrance; in various respects God has walked contrary to you, and has probably often visited you with severe chastisements. Your bodies have been reduced by sickness, your families visited with death; and under some of these strokes you were for a while stunned, and formed some feeble resolution of forsaking your sins, and devoting yourselves to a religious life. But what are the fruits? No sooner was the first smart of your affliction [abated,] than you returned to your course, and became as inattentive to the concerns of your soul as ever. God only knows whether he will grant you any more warnings; whether he will wait upon you any longer; whether he will ever again visit you in mercy; or whether he will pronounce on you that awful sentence recorded in Ezekiel,-" Because I have purged thee, and thou wast not purged, thou shalt not be purged from thy filthiness any more, till I have caused my fury to rest upon thee. I the Lord have spoken it; it shall come to pass, and I will do it; I will not go back, neither will I spare, neither will I repent: according to thy ways and according to thy doings shall they judge thee, saith the Lord God." XIX. ON COUNTING THE COST. LUKE xiv. 28.-For which of you, intending to build a tower, sitteth not down first, and counteth the cost, whether he have sufficient to finish it? AMONG the many excellences which distinguish the character of our Lord, as the author and founder of a new religion, we perceive, throughout the whole of his conduct, a most transparent simplicity and candour. He disdained, on any occasion, to take advantage of the ignorance or inexperience of the persons with whom he conversed; never stooping to the low arts of popularity, nor attempting to swell the number of his followers by a concealment of the truth. He availed himself of no sudden surprise, no momentary enthusiasm arising from the miracles which he wrought, or the benefits which he conferred. The attachment which he sought, and which he valued, was the result of mature conviction, founded on the evidence of his claims, and combined with a distinct foresight of the consequences, near and remote, which would follow from becoming his disciples. Conscious of the solidity of the foundation on which his title to universal and devoted obedience rested, he challenged the strictest scrutiny. Knowing that his promises would more than compensate all the sacrifices he might require, and all the sufferings to which his disciples might be exposed, he was not solicitous to throw a veil over either; but rather chose to set them in the strongest light, that none might be induced to enlist under his banners but such as were "called, and chosen, and faithful." He felt no desire to be surrounded by a crowd of ignorant and superficial admirers, Ezek. xxiv. 13, 14. |