dependent creature: and that law means death as well as lifelife and death being the only alternatives that are possible, when God, and man, and a moral law, are the elements from which a conclusion must flow. Under the law, we are already lost sinners. To alter, to abolish, to evade, or to keep the law—are all impossible. A Saviour is the sole remedy-the sole alternative against perdition. Therefore it is, that Faith, Repentance, New Obedience, Good Works, Spiritual Warfare-have such immense significance and the Infallible Rule of them all such boundless importance.

10. Such is the relation of the sacred Scriptures to the human race, and more especially to the Messianic Kingdom, from the point of view occupied in the present inquiry. The truth contained in them is the only truth whereby we can be made wise unto salvation-the duties revealed in them are the only duties which a soul thus made wise admits the Saviour who is their centre and sum is the only Mediator between God and man, the only Redeemer of God's Elect. They are, therefore, the revealed, the unalterable, and the universal Rule of Faith, and of Morality; and in them, being divinely taught what we ought to believe concerning God, and what duty God requires of us, we are plainly, powerfully, and completely guided by the Holy Ghost to the chief end of our existence, in glorifying God and enjoying him for ever.

WHAT may be called the purely individual and personal aspect of the Religion of God, in its influence upon the soul and life of each particular Christian, was concluded in the preceding Book. The fundamental conditions of what may be called the purely social and organic effects of that Religion, with regard to those whose separate experience has been traced to the end, are disclosed in this Fourth Book. Our relations are direct with the Lord Jesus, in our Union and Communion with him; they are also direct with all our brethren in Christ, in the sense that all of them have communion with each other, by reason of their mutual union with Christ. That union with Christ, is the immediate basis of grace and salvation, personally considered: communion with each other, the immediate basis of organized Christianity-the Church.-Christ is equally the head, supreme and exclusive, of every particular Christian having communion with him; and of every organic union of Christians, having communion with each other, in consequence of the previous union of all of them with him; and this is equally true, in every conceivable state of the developement of this Christian brotherhood. The extent to which these truths are used in producing an organism, is different under different dispensations. The Kingdom of God is exhibited to us in the Scriptures in such a manner as to involve perpetually a threefold aspect; namely, from its head Christ, it is exhibited as the Kingdom of Messiah-from its author the Holy Spirit, as the New Creation-and from its members the Children of God, as the Body, the Bride, the Fulness, the Church of Christ. It is this last aspect of the Kingdom of God, now militant in its gospel state, which is the direct effect of those dealings of God with men in the matter of salvation, which is now to be discussed, in tracing the Subjective Knowledge of God into, and afterwards through, that divine organism. In the Nineteenth Chapter, therefore, which is the First of this Fourth Book, it is shown that the fundamental conception of the Church of Christ, considered as the Kingdom of God, is that it is the body organized of those, whom the Mediator redeems as their Priest, teaches as their Prophet, and rules over as their King; and that the supreme and exclusive Headship of Christ, and the Communion of Saints, are the two elemental principles of the divine Organization thus conceived; this being a

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our imperfect obedience is acceptable to God; there only is a divine agent revealed to us, by whom a righteousness fitting us for the service and enjoyment of God is wrought in us, these very Scriptures being, as has been proved, the instrument of the sanctifying work of the Holy Ghost. If, therefore, any reliance is to be placed on the express declarations of these sacred writingsor on the knowledge they impart to us concerning God, and man, and the relations between them; then there is no room to doubt that the invariable judgment and experience of all souls truly enlightened in divine things are just, and that herein is delivered to us infallibly, the sum as well as the rule both of obedience and faith. It may be added with confidence, that the clear acceptation of the divine truths revealed to our faith, and the living. conformity to the duties divinely required of us, are the very measure of the power of the divine life within us.

6. I have spoken with particular reference to the moral law --and more generally of the whole will of God no matter how we may come to the knowledge of it-and very specially of the written revelation of the divine will, as containing all that God requires man to believe concerning him, and the whole duty that God requires of man. Those positive commands and ordinations of God which he has at any time made known to man, and those intimations of his will through his infinite providence, which continually attend the progress of our whole race and that of every individual of it, and that working of his divine Spirit in the souls of men, which is so specially the life of all God's children and so universally the scoff of every form of unbelief: all these will be found to have the most intimate relations with each other, and a perpetual relevancy to that unalterable faith and morality, the claims of which and the rule of which I have been urging. This renders it needless, at this time, to enter upon the discussion of topics so numerous and so great, whose special exposition belongs to the regular ministrations of the pulpit, and to treatises whose form and object are different from the present one. I have shown in a previous Treatise, that the institution of the Sabbath day was coeval with the creation of man; and that the consecration by God of man, to his special service and enjoyment, and the consecration of the seventh day with special reference thereto, were the primeval acts of God's sovereign goodness in the way of dominion over the exalted being he had just created in his own

image.' When, so many ages afterwards, God spoke and recorded with his own finger on tables of stone, the law which he had first written on man's heart; it is not strange that he placed in the midst thereof that law of a blessed Sabbath, which was from the beginning of time and of human existence, independently of which in some form man had never known any moral law, nor had any idea of his own consecration to his Creator. Nor is there the least cause of surprise, when we consider these things, that the Lord Jesus should have made his exercise of lordship over the Sabbath day, one of the crushing proofs of his own divine authority; and that he should have taught with so much emphasis that in its very nature and existence it had, like the law written on the heart, relation to the very being and blessedness of man." With that restoration of the moral law by God, moreover, commenced the written revelation of his willand every word he has caused to be revealed and written since, stands in indissoluble connection with it. It lay at the basis of the ceremonial, political, and Levitical, as well as religious system erected by Moses at the command of God: and the Gospel Church founded on the Apostles and Prophets, Jesus Christ himself being the chief corner stone, is so far from being independent of this unalterable rule of right, that every member of it is created in Christ Jesus unto Good Works, which God hath before ordained that we should walk in them. Nor is the New Birth itself more inscrutable to us, than is the power of God in creation by which the law written in man's heart should be reproduced in us through endless generations, just as it stood in the first fallen man; nay, reproduced with the record also of its primeval violation, in the same terror of God's presence in every child of Adam, which Adam himself felt as soon as he had fallen ;* a terror from which nothing can deliver us but faith on the Son of God. In every direction all these sublime truths illustrate and fortify each other: and each one of these great topics may be taken in succession, and made the centre from which all the rest may be displayed. In itself, not one is more distinct than this of God's unalterable moral law; and however the exact nature of particular duties may sometimes perplex us, nothing can be more certain than the nature of duty itself—nothing more assured 1 Gen., i. 28; ii. 3. 2 Matt., xii. 1-8; Mark, ii. 23-28. 4 Gen., iii. 10; 1 John, iii. 20, 21.

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Eph., ii. 10-22. 5 Rom., v. 1, 2.

than its infallible sum and rule. A law emanating from God himself-written on every human heart by nature-restored by the finger of God-incorporated with all revealed religion-illustrated throughout the whole sacred Scriptures-perfectly fulfilled and complete satisfaction made to it by the divine Redeemer in our room and stead: we are born again by his Word and Spirit into the lost image of God and a new conformity to his holy law-the love of that blessed law the very fruit of our new life as we increase in conformity to God, and in fitness for his service and enjoyment! Well may God's prophet declare, He hath showed thee O man what is good; and what doth the Lord require of thee, but to do justice, and to love mercy, and to walk humbly with thy God? Well may the inspired preacher proclaim the conclusion of the whole matter to be, that we should, Fear God and keep his commandments: for this is the whole duty of man.' It is Jesus who crowns all: I am the way, the truth, and the life: no man cometh unto the Father but by me: all that the Father giveth me shall come to me: and him that cometh to me I will in no wise cast out."

7. Thus connecting all duty with all faith-thus uniting all the good with all the true-thus laying in the very nature of man an original ability, and in his fallen state a susceptibility of restoration, to the service and enjoyment of God-thus founding in God himself, the author and first cause of all things, the root, and course, and end of all the mysteries of nature and of grace -thus accepting the Son of God as the Saviour of the world, in whom all these mysteries are solved, and all things are recapitulated and redressed: we turn to the written word of God, the repository of all these sublime truths, and confessing it to be the infallible source of knowledge, whereby we may be enabled to glorify God and enjoy him for ever, which is the chief end of our existence we seek in these Scriptures, in order to that end, specifically what we ought to believe concerning God, and what duty God requires of us. They give us, specifically, that knowledgeline upon line, precept upon precept: they give it with divine authority as to the matter, and with divine certainty as to the form through them, we receive, by the Spirit of God, a divine illumination wherein a true insight of them is attainable-a divine regeneration and sanctification wherein a continually in'Micali, vi. 8. Eccles., xii. 13. 3 John xiv. 6; vi. 37.