men suppose they must wait for some miraculous agency, and that without it, this whole matter is placed entirely beyond their reach. They must wait for, rather than seek the Spirit. The obvious ef fect of such a notion is, to render men easy in a state of impenitence a state of mind at entire variance from the whole teaching of the word of God, which is enough to prove the entire fallacy of such an opinion.

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Yet I remark in the second place, to obviate a contrary error, that what we have to do is something very different from what multitudes are doing, who hope by their deserts to obtain salvation. It is totally different from clothing ourselves in the garments of self-righteousness, or trusting to an amiable disposition, a moral life, or any degree of outward religious observances. man may be exact in all these, even to a degree of self-mortification, and yet publicans and harlots may enter the kingdom of heaven before him. These very things may be perverted to such an use as to become the great difficulties in the way of his repentance and faith. What you have to do, is without delay, without excuse, without pleading any difficulties you may imagine to lie in your way to the performance of the duty God enjoins, without attempting to compromise with conscience or with God, to repent and believe in the Lord Jesus Christ. Do you reply you cannot? but God commands it. Do you say there are difficulties in your way; you cannot yourself repent; you cannot convert your own heart? And do you ask how you are to proceed in order to remove these impediments? I answer, by repenting and believing the Gospel. God, who imposes this command, knows just where the difficulty lies; he knows the whole case; and, in the view of it all, he has shut you up to this single and immediate act; has authoritatively commanded you to repent and believe. He enjoins it with awful solemnity; suspends upon it your eternal hope, and requires it at once. Oh! do not begin to question his right, to invent apologies, to excuse your sin. "Bow, and make submission to your Judge." "Believe in the Lord Jesus Christ, and thou shalt be saved."

"With thee will I establish my covenant; and thou shalt come into the ark; thou, and thy sons, and thy wife, and thy sons' wives with thee." Genesis 6: 17.

We have here an example by which God teaches one of the principles of his administration of grace. In the prominent dispensations of temporal good and evil towards the earlier generations of mankind, he revealed the more important principles on which his spiritual dispensations should, both then and now, proceed; and perhaps, did we read the Old Testament more for that end, we should find it a crowded record of examples, set forth in the old dispensation to be followed in the new.

The principle presented in the text is the family covenant. I propose to meet the covenant in the case of Noah's salvation from the flood as an illustration of God's covenant of grace in its relation to families, and to explain and recommend the privileges and the duties which that covenant involves.

"With thee will I establish my covenant, and thou shalt come into the ark; thou, and thy sons, and thy wife, and thy sons' wives with thee." God thus gave Noah a solemn and specific pledge of salvation from the flood; and this pledge embraced his family with himself. To place in fair light the

kind and the amount of instruction conveyed to us by this covenant, these four things require notice :-the ritual relations of this covenant; the matters it contemplated; the principle on which it proceeded, and the persons it embraced.

As to the ritual relations of this covenant with Noah. We have no knowledge of any dispensation of rites and ceremonies peculiar to that age of the world, and determining the form or the spirit of the covenant, or even the terms of its description. It was not a covenant of rites and ceremonies pertaining to a temporary system. In both the spirit and the form, it appertained to no changeable or occasional law; but was conducted by the permanent laws of the kingdom of grace. Like the covenant with Abraham, it was made before all ceremonial laws, and did not depend on them for its existence, its meaning, or its effects; a conspicuous and independent example of God's way of showing favour to his friends, and an example which we are taught to expect he will follow, at least as his general rule.

As to the matters which this covenant contemplated:-The favour promised to Noah and his family was a great distinction, and proper to the system of grace. This covenant was not indeed what we commonly call the covenant of grace, the covenant which makes eternal life sure to God's elect through the atonement of Christ; yet it was a covenant of grace, although it related to a temporal good. It was not as if God had said to Noah, With thee will I establish my covenant, and thou shalt come into heaven; thou, and thy sons, and thy wife, and thy sons' wives with thee. Yet the favour which that covenant promised was as really grace, as that which promises heaven to the believer in Christ. The spirit of the promise was the same. For, so far as the flood was sent to punish sin, did not the grace of that covenant promise Noah and his family salvation from a part of the punishment of sin? And it was properly deliverance, or salvation. It was not mere forbearance of God had been granted to all the generations of the human family who then had lived. Thousands of the most ungodly had been permitted to live the whole of the long term of life at that time allotted to man; and was this favour to Noah nothing but such forbearance as this?

The principle on which this covenant proceeded was the

identical principle of the Christian dispensation, although less fully developed than in after days. Though Christ was not yet slain in fact, he was in theory; and the administration of grace was conducted from the first on the principles of His atonement and mediation. Abraham saw not only Christ's day as a prophet, but also the benefits of Christ's salvation as a saint. It is only through Christ that favour has been ever shown to sinners; and the salvation of Noah from the flood was as properly a benefit of Christ's death, as was the spiritual salvation of Noah in heaven.

And the salvation was by faith. It was said of Enoch that he walked with God, and was not, for God took him. Noah, after his manner, walked with God, and he, for his testimony, was saved from the flood. And the righteousness of both of these men is pronounced by Paul, the Apostle, to be the righteousness of faith. The faith of Noah, like the faith of Abraham, was reckoned unto him for righteousness; and that alone it was that constituted him righteous before God. The covenant with Noah proceeded, therefore, on Gospel principles; bestowing a favor on Noah as a man of faith, and through the merits of that Redeemer by whom all the righteous have salvation.

As to the persons whom this covenant respected:-The form of speech in which the covenant is announced is peculiar: "With thee will I establish my covenant, and thou shalt come into the ark; thou, and thy sons, and thy wife, and thy sons' wives with thee." The covenant was with Noah in his single name, "With thee;" not, "with thee and thy children." Noah was the only person to whom the language was addressed; and his family are taken with him, as though they were a part of himself; and by the terms of the covenant we are led to the unavoidable belief that had the father of those children been an ungodly man, they would in their existing character have enjoyed the benefit of no covenant. This is the feature of the covenant with Noah, to which attention is here especially requested. It was a covenant with Noah alone; but its provisions extended to others besides himself; and the principle on which others enjoyed its benefits, was that of sovereign and condescending favour towards the righteous man with whom the covenant was made. No one can read this language with

out receiving the impression that this extension of the covenant was intended as a kindness to Noah himself, by which the blessing of his own salvation might be increased by the salvation of others who were dear to him, and whose welfare could be reckoned as a reward of his own righteousness.

The benefits of this covenant reached the family of Noah through their particular relation to him. That relation was, in the first place, the relation of near kindred. The persons were his sons, his wife, and his sons' wives; the kindred of nearest degrees. Remoter relatives were not embraced. And, in the second place, they fell within that line of relationship of which Noah himself was the beginning. They composed a family of which he was the head. His brothers and sisters were not included. His father, indeed, at the coming of the flood, was dead; having been taken, only five years before, from evil to come. But he was alive, and at the head of his patriarchate, when God made the covenant with Noah, and during one hundred and fifteen years after the ark is supposed to have been begun; yet no place was provided for him in the covenant or in the ark. The only persons embraced in those gracious provisions, were persons who constituted what could properly be called his family. By the patriarchal arrangement, the branches of the family remained on the paternal estate until the death of the patriarch. To him, during his life, the general control of the household was yielded; and he, as father and head, was responsible for the proper management of its affairs. Each son had his personal rights; and exercised his subordinate prerogative in the immediate control of his own wife and children, but all the branches, with their particular and more limited authorities, in some respects like states confederate, were under the general authority of the common patriarch. Thus Noah, while his father lived, was so far considered the head of his own branch, as to admit a particular dispensation towards him and his own children; and after his father's death, still remained the head and natural representative of the household, consisting of all his sons and their families.

One circumstance of Noah's family connections ought not to escape our notice. We will not presumptuously pry into the reasons of the divine counsels in this case; yet the fact to which I now refer is fraught with instruction. The genera