We have at least execution of it has

- this we have all come short of. incurred the sentence; and if the not yet been fully inflicted, it is at least in sure reserve for those on whom it is to fall. They are like malefactors in custody. Their doom is awaiting them. They are not yet dead in reality, but they are dead in law. They have the dread prospect of the reality before them; and, if they have nought but the law to deal with, they may well tremble or be in despair, as the prisoners of a hopeless condemnation.

The greater part of men are at ease, even amid the urgencies of a state so alarming. That they have broken the law of God gives them no concern; and their life passes as carelessly along, as if the future reckoning, and future vengeance, were all a fable. So cheap do they hold the high jurisprudence of Heaven, that they are scarcely conscious of having offended against it; or if ever visited with the suspicion that their obedience is not up to the lofty standard of God's commandments, they compound the matter in another way, and bring down the commandments of God to the lowly standard of their ́own obedience. God hath revealed himself to the world, under the impressive character of a God who is not to be mocked yet would they inflict upon him most degrading mockery, by robbing every proclamation of his against the transgressors of the law of all effect and all significancy. If there be any dignity in Heaven's throne, or any truth, and power, and force of character in him who sitteth thereon, his ordinations must stand fast, and his penalties, by which their authority is guarded, must

have fulfilment. The government of the Supreme would be despoiled of all its majesty, if mercy were ever at hand to obliterate the guilt of our rebellion against it. The carnal heart of man may be proof against these demonstrations of guilt and of danger; yet, notwithstanding, it is true that we have incurred the debt, and come under the denunciations of a law, whereof it has been said, that heaven and earth must pass away ere one jot or one tittle of it shall fail.

This is the appalling condition of humanity, however seldom it may be adverted to, and however slightly it may be felt, in the listlessness of nature. To the great majority of men, all secure and unconscious as they are, it gives no disturbance. They are so much hurried with the manifold relations in which they stand to the things and the interests that are around them, that they overlook their great relation to God the lawgiver, and to that law, all whose mandates have a force and a sanction that cannot be recalled. They are asleep to the awful realities of their state. They have trampled upon an authority which must be vindicated. They have incurred a threatening which must be discharged. They have insulted a throne whose dignity must be asserted-and cast contempt a government, which shall rise in its might and its majesty from the degradation which they have tried to inflict upon it. The high attributes of the Divinity are against them. His Justice demands a satisfaction. His Holiness cannot but manifest the force of its recoil from moral evil. His word stands committed to the death and the destruction of sinners-and a

nature so immutable as his, never can recede from those great principles which mark the character of his administration. The greater part of men escape from all this terror, while they live in mere insensibility; and some there are, who, because less enormous transgressors than their fellows, can lull their every apprehension, and be at ease. But the law It will treat with no degree or modification of evil. They have broken some of the things contained in the book of God's law, and by the law they are dead.

will admit of no compromise.

The most exempt, perhaps, from all disquietude on the score of that death to which the law has condemned them, are they who, decorous in all the proprieties, and honourable in all the equities, and alive, by the tenderness of a softened, sympathetic nature, to all the kindnesses of life, stand the freest from all those visible delinquencies by which the law is most notoriously and most disgracefully violated. They lie not-they steal not-they defraud not. They are ever prompt in humanity, and most punctual in justice. They acquit themselves of every relative duty to the satisfaction of those who are the objects of it; and exemplary in all the moralities of our social state, they sustain upon earth a high and honourable reputation. Nevertheless it is possible, nay it is frequent, that a man may be signalized by all these graces of character, and yet be devoid of godliness. The first and greatest commandment, which is the love of God, may be the object, not of his occasional, but of his constant and habitual disobedience. In reference to this part of the law, he may have not merely fallen into many

sinful acts, but more desperate still, he may be in a continual state of sinfulness. Instead of offending God at some times by the deeds of his hand, he may be offending him at all times, by that settled and invariable bent which there is in the desires of his heart. That bent may be wholly towards the world, and wholly away from him who made the world. He may have a thousand constitutional virtues: to use a familiar expression, he may have many good points or properties of character, and yet God not be in all his thoughts. His Father in heaven may have as little reason to be pleased with him, as an earthly father with that child, in whose history there may be a number of conformities with his own will, but in whose heart there is an obvious sullenness, or, at least, an utter disregard and indifference towards him. "Give me thy heart," says God, and love him with all thy heart," says the law of God. It is by viewing the law, in all its height, that we are made to feel how deep the condemnation is into which the law has placed us. Our actions may look fair in the eye of society, while it is manifest, to the eye of our own conscience, that our affections are altogether set on time, and on the creature, and altogether turned from the Creator. Those virtues, which give us a flourishing name upon earth, are not enough to transplant us into heaven. The law which said, "Do these things and live," finds its very first doing, or demand, unsatisfied, and bars our entrance into heaven. convicts us, not perhaps of many specific sins; but, most awfully decisive of our fortune through eternity, it convicts us of an unremitting course or

It

current of sinfulness; and so, dead by the law, the gate of life is shut against us.

The counter-part to this awful truth, that by the law the sinner is dead, is, that by Christ the believer is made alive. We may understand, in word and in letter, how this can be, even though we ourselves have had no part in the process. We may have the knowledge, though perhaps not the faith in it; and just as a spectator might look intelligently to a process in which he does not personally share, so might we have the literal apprehension of that way by which the sinner, who by the law is judicially dead, might by Christ become judicially alive. But aware of it though we be, it cannot be too often reiterated; and may the Spirit give a power and a demonstration to this important truth, when we say again how it is that the transgressor is made free. The sentence then is not annulled, it is only transferred. It is lifted up from his head, because laid on the head of another, who, rather than that man should die, did himself bear the burden of it. For this purpose Idid he bow himself down unto the sacrifice, and submitted to that deep, that mysterious endurance, under which he had to sustain the weight of a world's atonement. The vials of the Lawgiver's wrath were exhausted upon him. The law was magnified and made honourable in him. In him the work of vengeance was completed, and every attribute of the Godhead that man had insulted by his disobedience, did, on the cross of Christ, obtain its ample reparation. There, and under a weight of suffering which nought but the strength of the Divinity could uphold, the sacredness of the Divinity