forgetting by what means their election was to be rendered sure. He is terrible, lastly, to those who have leaned on the broken reed of human merit, or repentance; who, with the brightness of the Sun of Righteousness before them, have turned back to the twilight of natural religion; who, professing to look forward to a future life without end, have acquiesced in grounds of hope, than which the Jew possessed far better, and by which the heathen, in his grossest ignorance, was still too wise to be comforted! But to the sincere and humble believer in the atonement made by Christ, to him whose faith has worked by love, and who has earnestly panted after holiness; who has sought for grace in the ordinances of the Most High, and shown forth the grace received by a progressive though imperfect amendment, to him death is not terrible; he rests on a protection which no created thing can render vain, and the garment, which is his passport to the marriage banquet of the Son, is itself a pledge of that Son's free grace and favour.

Of the many direct, and the still more numerous implied assertions of Christ's atonement, which are contained in Scripture, the time forbids me to take notice. It is enough for my present purpose to have shown that this doctrine is not only consistent with, but absolutely necessary to, the fears and feelings of our nature, and that, consequently, those sects by whom it is explained away into I know not what apparatus of allegory and mysticism, are but

little entitled to the name which they assume of rational and philosophical Christians.

I cannot, however, dismiss my audience without entreating them to recollect that this illustrious display of God's mercy in the humiliation and sacrifice of His Son; these glorious promises which He has made, and this earnest of future blessedness and perfection which He has afforded us in the gift of His Holy Spirit, are not merely a splendid pageant in which we are not personally and individually concerned: nor are they to act in our favour like a charm, without our own application of them to ourselves, and our earnest and consistent use of the means of safety which they offer.

"To die is gain;" but it is gain to them only to whom it has been "Christ to live;" and by how much the greater salvation has been tendered, and by how much the easier the terms have been on which it was tendered, so much the blacker confusion must our faces one day gather, if our obstinacy in sin has abused the long-suffering of the Lord, and we have presumed on the merits of His blood to disgrace the name of His religion! Those are ill taught in the language of Scripture who suppose that salvation is not offered to us, but forced on us; who forget that they are the children of God who only are heirs with Christ of a happy immortality; and that the promise is not that we shall be made the sons of God, but that "power shall be given us" to become so 1.

1 St. John i. 12.

Let then the promises of the Most High produce in our minds the effect for which they were intended; the effect of encouraging and exciting us to a holy energy in His cause, and to a soldierly perseverance in our spiritual warfare. But let us recollect, in this our struggle, that the arms with which we fight are not our own; that our most acceptable services are clogged with sin, and our firmest allegiance tainted with defection; and that in our seeming strength, as well as in our greatest weakness, our reliance can there only be grounded whither the natural fears and gracious aspirations of the heart alike mount up for refuge, the cross of that victorious Saviour who hath tamed the strength of sin, and made the gate of death the entrance to immortality!

SERMON XVIII.

THE ATONEMENT.

[Preached before the University of Oxford, 1818, and at
Cuddalore, 1826.]

ROMANS Vi. 3, 4.

Know ye not that so many of us as were baptized into Jesus Christ, were baptized into His death? Therefore we are buried with Him by baptism into death, that, like as Christ was raised up from the dead by the glory of the Father, even so we also should walk in newness of life.

ST. PAUL in these words, and in the chapter from which they are taken, is providing against an abuse which (even in the earliest and golden age of Christianity) some mistaken Christians had begun to engraft on its doctrines, and which had been urged, with some show of plausibility, as an objection to those doctrines, by the enemies of the new religion. He had in the preceding chapter explained, in a clear and striking manner, the general fact on which are grounded the most important peculiarities of our creed; that our justification is not purchased by any virtues or merits of our own, but that it is the free gift of the Most High, through Jesus Christ His Son. And he had illustrated the greatness of

us.

the mercy which God, for His Son's sake, had shown to the world, by comparing it with the degree of severity which, for Adam's sake, the same God had formerly thought fit to exercise towards "The sentence," St. Paul had argued, "which, in the case of Adam, was passed for one man's sin on the race of mankind in general, was no more, after all, than (even if such a sentence had not been passed in the first instance) the subsequent crimes of each of Adam's descendants might in his own person have justly called for. But, in the case of Christ, a benefit was conferred on the whole race of mankind for the sake of one Man's obedience, to which the whole race of mankind were so far from having any meritorious claim, that all men and every man had been committing actions which merited the direct contrary. So that though death, in point of fact, reigned over the world in consequence of Adam's sin, not in consequence of your sin or of mine, yet were the sins of each of us and of each of Adam's descendants so great as to have called down such a sentence on our heads, if that sentence had not been previously passed on us; while, on the other hand, the gift of eternal life, which is offered to us all in consequence of Christ's merits, is offered, not merely without regard to the deserts of each particular man, but absolutely in spite of them. "Where sin" then " abounded, grace did much more abound." The mercy of God was more powerful to save us from death than our offences were to seal and confirm the doom of death VOL. I.

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