wise to sustain. If not wise to execute it, in the last extremity, upon the offender himself, than assuredly, not merely unwise, but monstrous, to punish the substitute. There should have been proclaimed immediately a free and full pardon. There was the greatest possible cruelty, in the transactions of the cross, but on the supposition that the law is too good to be set aside, even if the population of a world must perish to do it honour.

5. A gospel that shall set aside the law will defeat its own design. Tell the sinner, in the same message in which you offer him a Saviour, that the law he has broken, is repealed; or has come into disrepute, and its curse less to be feared than formerly, and he will answer, Then I have no need of a Saviour. If my Sovereign is convinced, as I long have been, that the law is too rigid, he will not punish its violations; if its penalties are unjust, he will not execute them. I reject your offered Redeemer, and approach boldly to the throne, to demand my acquital. It is mocking me, to talk of an atonement, while I have done only right, in opposing a cruel and oppressive legislation.

Thus the advocates of a gospel, built on the ruins of the law, soon as they make the secret known, that the law has perished, furnish the sinner a motive for rejecting the gospel they offer. Thus they labour in vain and spend their strength for naught. They may urge the overtures of their gospel, till

they have become grey in the service, and their hearers will remain unchanged and unreformed. The only consistent course is, to justify wholly the law, or offer no Redeemer. We must make man the diseased, and suffering, and dying creature, that the book of God describes him to be, or we need offer him no physician; must make him blind, or offer him no eye-salve; make him guilty and condemned, or offer him no pardon; make him polluted, or offer him no cleansing; make him an exile, a captive, and a slave, or offer him no redemption. The estimation in which we hold the law, will decide, whether we shall have any success in offering sinners the gospel.

6. The gospel is most glorious when the law is fully sustained. The glory and the grace of the gospel, must, in the very nature of the case, be exactly commensurate, to the claims and the curses of the law. The one must contain a woe as broad, as the blessedness implied in the other; must present a ruin as wide and desperate, as the cure presented in the other; must frown as implacably, as the other smiles complacently. When we can thus honour the law, and justify the Law-giver, and defend, without misgiving, the most punctilious execution of every threatening that has issued from the lips of the Eternal; then it is that we can equally elevate the glorious gospel of the blessed God: which else becomes as worthless as the Shaster or the Koran.

The deeper and the darker the pit into which I had sunk, the mightier that arm that could lift me out. The full glories of Calvary, have never been seen, but by the same eye, that has descried ineffable, beauty in the divine legislation, The gospel will be shorn of its last beam, when it shall be made to eclipse the splendour of the law. It is only the dead in sin that need the offer of life, the condemned that need a pardon. Christ is the Repairer of the breach; make the breach wide, and you make the Repairer illustrious. Carry not the fertilizing influence of the gospel, but into the very territory, where the curse of a good law violated, has spread a boundless desolation. There its healing waters will be welcome, an Edon will blossom under your feet, and the harvests of many years, repay your toil, and make glad your heart. May the blessed God put honour upon his own institutions.

In bringing my remarks to a close, let me say; that the law cannot go into disuse. It expresses exactly the mind of God, and must be the rule of duty to his obedient subjects forever. And when broken, as it has been in this unhappy world, its curse must fall, and remain upon the head of the transgressor, till he flies for refuge to lay hold on the hope set before him in the gospel. Till then he lies condemned, just as if a Saviour had not died; with this difference, that his condemnation, if he perish will be aggravated by his having been offered redemption. He might have had life but would not,

unless on such condition, that his transgressions might be justified. I close with

REMARKS.

1. How tremendous the ruin of sinners, who after all this, shall fall under the condemning sentence of the divine law. God we see will not set his law aside. He would give his own well beloved Son, to expire on the ragged nails, to save those who had broken the law, and incurred its penalty, rather than give his foes occasion to say, that he had repealed it. "If these things were done in the green tree, what shall be done in the dry?" If God appeared so inflexibly holy, on Calvary, where he drew his sword upon the sinner's substitute, how terrible the indignation that he will display in hell. O, is there a man, so hardened and so daring, that he would venture to pass through life, and go on to the judgment, with the curse of the violated law resting on him! When he shall see that Redeemer, who saved others, but in whose blood he would not take sanctuary, coming in the clouds of heaven, with power and great glory, will he not regret, that he had not been interested in his atonement? And when his destiny shall issue from that Saviour's lips, and he goes to make his bed in hell, will he not learn, what now he is so unwilling to know, that "The law is holy, and the commandment holy, and just, and good?"

The torments of the lost, will be an abiding tes

timony of God's regard to his law. And those who shall have escaped to heaven, when they shall " look upon the carcases of the men that have transgressed," will be feeling more and more strongly forever, how great are their obligations to the Saviour, for redeeming them from the curse of a law, so fearfully holy. And who, that places any value upon his soul, and believes that God will thus jealously guard the honour of his law, and has not already made him incorrigibly angry, will delay an hour, in securing an interest in that Saviour, who bore the curse for us. O, my friend, haste your escape, as you' would at midnight from your burning house, as you would from the jaws of a ravening lion, as you would from the terrors of a volcanic eruption, as you would from the fire that can never be quenched, and the worm that shall not die.

2. The subject will I hope prepare us to contemplate with horror, the condition of those congregations, who have selected for themselves a ministry, that builds its instructions on the ruins of the divine law. Would to God that I were mistaken, in supposing such a case to exist. But when I hear, from lips that profess to have been touched with a coal from off the altar, that man is quite an upright being, has committed a few errors only, and these all venial, not sufficient to condemn him; that he needs no atonement, nor Saviour but to teach him, and be his pattern, and this Saviour not divine ;-When I hear