sal adoration and praise, now hangs a suffering victim upon the cross, bearing submissively the punishment due to our sins in his own body on the tree; for it pleased the Father, in redeeming the world, to lay upon his well-beloved Son the iniquities of us all. Whether we contemplate the dignity and exaltation of the being who was crucified, the variety and degree of his sufferings, or the character and condition of those for whom he died, the subject is certainly one of the most intense and absorbing interest. Sinners should, in the present life, take a deliberate and serious view of Jesus, as he appeared in the garden, at the bar of Pilate, and on the cross, wounded for their transgressions, and bruised for their iniquities. I speak now of obligation; for we are bound to do that which will result in our highest good. Sinners must discover and feel their sins, before they will abhor and forsake them; and where can they get such an affecting view of their nature and tendency, as when they look at them through

the atoning sufferings of Jesus? In the blackness of that cloud, which hung over the cross; in the darkness of that night, which covered the land at noonday; in the fury of that storm, which beat with such violence upon the defenceless head of the Son of God; in the inflexibility of that justice, which turned not away its sword from the heart of him who was the brightness of the Father's glory, and the express image of his person; in the accumulated woes which fell like thunder-claps upon the innocent Lamb of God, as the tokens of his displeasure against sin; and, finally, in that memorable cry of Jesus, "My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me," we see what sin is, what it has done, and will do, unless, in the exercise of deep repentance, it is washed away by the blood of atonement. If such keen mental anguish, such horror, such agony and death, were combined in the scene on Calvary, when the innocent suffered for the guilty, what will be experienced in the world of despair, where the

guilty shall bear his iniquities, and feel the endless pressure of that amazing weight of wrath, which the Son of God himself could not sustain ? If these things were done in the green tree, what will be done in the dry? And when you reflect also that, had you been the only sinner to be redeemed, and had you been guilty of only one act of disobedience, Christ must have undergone all that he did to procure your pardon, you have presented to your mind, in a most impressive light, the enormity of transgression. "The wages of sin is death.” "Cursed is every one that continueth not in all things written in the book of the law, to do them." "Christ hath redeemed us from the curse of the law, being made a curse for us." Christ crucified, when contemplated by the sinner, has also a melting and subduing influence. Is your heart hard? A view of the atoning sufferings of the Lamb of God will soften it. Are you asleep in stupidity? The dying cry of Jesus will break this guilty slumber. Are you skeptical? Gaze upon

the scene of Calvary, and you will be constrained to exclaim with the Centurion,

Truly this was the Son of God." When the sinner, enlightened by the Holy Spirit, gets a view of his sins as exhibited in the atoning sufferings of Jesus, he will cry out, in the bitterness of his soul, "The arrows of the Almighty are within me, the poison whereof drinketh up my spirits." "Oh! wretched man that I am; who shall deliver me from the body of this death?"

what must I do to be saved?"

"Sirs,

CHAPTER III.

GODLY SORROW THE RESULT OF A VIEW OF CHRIST CRUCIFIED.

"They shall look upon me whom they have pierced, and they shall mourn for him, as one mourneth for his only son, and shall be in bitterness for him, as one that is in bitterness for his first-born."- Zech. 12: 10.

GODLY Sorrow is brokenness of heart in view of sin committed against God, and discovered to the sinner by the operations of the Holy Spirit. A truly convicted sinner is distressed, and his distress will be in proportion to the clearness of his discovery of the purity and extent of the divine law. A view of his ingratitude, unbelief, pride, hardness of heart, forgetfulness of God, want of love to him, contempt of his au