Christ out of heaven, and the epistles of St. Paul out of the Bible, we may dissent from Peter in the text, and instead of saying with him, "Lord, to whom shall we go? Thou hast the words of eternal life;" we may say with all Deists, "Lord, we need not go to thee, for we have the words of eternal life at our command; our endeavours, works, and righteousness will save us; the pope has shown us this door, and though thou tellest us thou art the door, yet we are determined to go in at our own door." This I do not speak, my brethren, to set you against good works, but to show you the need of coming to Christ first, that the tree may be made good before you can do works good in the sight of God. "Make the tree good," says our Lord, "and then the fruit shall be good;" till then, "bring forth fruits meet for repentance;" and when you stand in the Lord by faith, when you are grafted in Christ, when God has given you the victory through our Lord Jesus Christ, take St. Paul's advice, 1 Cor. xv, 58, "Be steadfast, unmovable, always abounding in the work of the Lord: forasmuch as you know that," though your labour would be in vain in yourselves, yet it " is not in vain in the Lord."

But I would hope that many of you, instead of finding these sayings false and hard, find them true and just; and that were our Lord to say unto you as he did to the twelve, "Will ye also go away ?" you would answer as well as Peter, "Lord, to whom should we go? God is a consuming fire out of thee; angels and saints, bishops and priests, books and ordinances, good works and endeavours cannot save, for thou alone, O Christ, hast the words of everlasting life." But can you say this from your heart as well as with your lips? Are you entirely reconciled? Are you really well pleased with God's way of saving sinners through faith alone in the blood and righteousness of Jesus Christ? Do you ronounce the devil and all his works; yea, and all dependence upon your own works? Can you, with St. Paul, desire to be found in Christ, not having your own righteousness, but that which is through faith in his blood? Are you determined to glory only in the Lord; to rejoice in nothing so much as in the cross of Jesus your Lord, which is to crucify the world unto you, and you unto the world? Though all men should go back to the world, and walk no more with Christ in the way of the regeneration, are you resolved (the Lord being your helper) to follow Christ and his word, and to stand to your Bible even unto death? If this is the case, rejoice, you dearly beloved of the Lord; the good work is begun in your souls; you are already called out of the world. "Marvel not, then," says St. John, "if the world hate you;" it hated, it forsook, it crucified your Lord and Master before you, and so it will do by the servant in a measure. O, bear your cross with patience; your Saviour who bore it first comes to meet you with a crown of righteousness, and a crown of glory. O faint not in the meantime; faint not in this day of reproach, scandal, temptation, and darkness. You see many who call themselves disciples, and Churchmen, exclaiming against the plain doctrine of Christ and of our Church, and refusing to walk with our reformers in the narrow path pointed out in the word of God, and in our articles and homilies. But O, follow not a multitude in the broad way; choose rather with Moses to endure affliction and reproach with the people of God, than to enjoy the pleasures and smiles of the world for a season. Take the good part of Mary, take the good part of Peter,

and though all the world should not only forsake Christ, but also rise up in arms against you for cleaving to his word, stand to the text. In you there is nothing but sin, death, and damnation, says our Church. "In me, that is, in my flesh, (says Paul himself,) dwelleth no good thing." Up then with the apostle; not only renounce with him all other saviours, but go, this moment go, to him whom God has exalted to be a Prince and a Saviour for you. Say not only, "To whom shall we go?" but go directly, with all your sins, with all your misery, to your dying Saviour. Tell him, "Lord, thou hast the words of everlasting life: speak them in my soul." Give him no rest till he say to you, as he did to David, “I am thy salvation;" till he give you the blessing which he gave to the thief upon the cross, to Zaccheus upon the tree, to Nathanael under the fig tree, to the harlot that wept behind him, to the woman who touched the hem of his garment, to the returning prodigal, to the penitent publican in the temple. Fear not; only believe; one grain of the faith of the centurion will remove all your sins upon Christ, who took them away upon the cross. Hear what David says: "As the heaven is high above the earth, so great is his mercy toward them that fear him; as far as the east is from the west, so far has he put our sins from us." Look up then, believe, and live. Does not the Lord even now speak the word that, going justified to your houses through the blood of the everlasting covenant, you may praise and serve him without fear all the days of your lives?

SERMON X.-On what terms Christ gives life.

"Ye will not come to me, that ye might have life," John v, 40.

LAST Sunday I showed that Christ has an indubitable right to call us to receive spiritual and eternal life at his hands; because, having stood as our surety, he has fully satisfied Divine justice, and exactly answered the demands of the Divine law: so that now he is the author of eternal salvation to all those that seek it through his merits. I expostulated next with the convinced and awakened sinners; answering their most common objections for putting off their coming to Jesus Christ for life. But as time did not permit me to do such an important subject justice, I shall to-day, by the grace of God, show more particularly upon what terms Christ gives life to those that come unto him: describe four classes of sinners who will not come to Christ that they might have life: prove, by some unanswerable arguments, that unbelief (or not coming to Christ for life) is the most abominable and damning of all sins; and then I shall conclude by exhorting those who are guilty of it to arise, and go to their Saviour for pardon and life. And, in the meantime, may the power of Divine grace, and the virtue of Jesus' name, be so present to wound and to heal our souls, as to make us willing and able to come to him now, that henceforth we may live to the glory of him who died for us!

I. I am to show upon what terms Christ gives life unto those that come to him.

To come to Christ that we may have life is, in general, to believe in him only for salvation. It is to pass through faith, from a state of nature

unto a state of grace: from a state of guilt and sin, into a state of peace and holiness: it is to forsake the old Adam and his deeds, and to go unto Christ so as to dwell in him, and to have him dwelling in us. It is, in short, to make an exchange of what we are, for what Christ is or hath : giving all we are worth to buy this pearl, as the wise merchant in the Gospel.

This exchange, without which it is impossible to get life, implies four things chiefly.

1. The giving ourselves to him; head, heart, tongue, body, soul, because he bestows himself upon us freely. Then we are enabled to say with the believing soul, Cant. vi, 3, "I am my beloved's, and my beloved is mine." When we do this sincerely, we sit already in heavenly places with our blessed Saviour. His Father is our Father: his throne is our throne; and we reap the benefits of his triumphs over death, hell, and the devil.

2. Coming to Jesus Christ for life implies giving all our sins to Christ; confessing them, loathing them, leaving them, casting them upon that Lamb of God, so as to receive rest for our souls from the guilt and power of them. When we do this we are made the righteousness of God in him, who, though he knew no sin, yet was made a sin offering for us.

3. Believing in Jesus Christ, or coming to him for life, implies a giving up our name, pleasure, profit, life, for him and his Gospel; because he gives his crown and honour, his life and all unto us. Thus, when nothing seems to be delightful and glorious unto us but Christ, he takes us into a share of all his delights and glory.

4. Our blessed Lord expects, when we come unto him for life, that we forsake all dependence upon our own righteousness, and place our entire reliance upon his merits; and then we shall obtain absolution from guilt, and be fully and freely "accepted in the beloved." Now, glorious as these conditions are, it is remarkable that no one ever submitted to accept of them till he was driven to an extremity; no sinner ever coming to Jesus Christ for life till he sees that he is a dead man without him. We all shift for our ourselves, as long as we can, upon the stormy sea of the world, caring little whether Christ is far or near, whether he wakes or sleeps; but if, happily for us, a storm arise in our conscience, and we see ourselves just ready to sink into the gulf of God's judgment, then, and then only, are we made willing to come to Jesus Christ: then, and then only, we cry with the trembling disciples, "Lord, save us, we perish! Lord, quicken our souls by thy saving health, or we die the second death!"

And to convince you of the truth of this amazing assertion, I come, II. To describe four classes of sinners who make up almost the whole of Christ's visible Church in our day, and yet will not come to Christ for life.

1. The first class consists of those who have well nigh filled up the measure of their iniquities, and sinned away their day of grace. These, like Cain and Judas, seeing their sins very great, and feeling their hearts almost past relenting, scorn to sigh and mourn, and ask for mercy: and unable to bear the consideration of their dangerous, desperate state, like mad dogs they break the chains of restraining grace, and run to the

vomit of sin upon the dung hill of profaneness, till they leap into the lake that burneth with unquenchable fire. Of these (humbling and melancholy thought!) there are not a few among us. These you will find running into excesses and debauchery, as far as their shaken constitution and shallow purse will permit. These are noted for rambling from one house of public entertainment to another; for breaking the Sabbath, as far as the fear of the laws will allow them; despising all religious worship, and scoffing at all those that seem soberly and religiously inclined. These are the first born of Satan, and the boldest of his visible agents among men they worship openly their Father; and were their lip prayers (if they pray at all) to be weighed in a balance with their hearty curses and desperate wishes for damnation, you would find that the service they offer to God Almighty bears no proportion to that which they offer to the devil. These people are each of them a living hell; sunk into brutish lusts, and worse than brutish stupidity: swelled with diabolical passions, they have nothing human but the shape, and (blessed be God!) a capacity to come to Jesus Christ, that he may rescue them from the jaws of eternal death. But to these, among us, he says in vain, "Ye will not come unto me that ye might have life." Formerly, indeed, such publicans and sinners flocked to hear the word, and entered into life before the righteous Pharisees and learned scribes; but in our degenerate days both publicans and Pharisees seem to vie who shall slight the Gospel most.

2. The second class of those who refuse to come to Jesus Christ for life, is that of careless, reputable sinners, who, trusting in themselves that they are righteous, (or at least that they are safe, because less unrighteous than others,) slight the invitations of Christ's messengers. Do they hear an offer of Christ? Instead of wondering at the love of the Lord, in making it to them, they regard it not. After the most searching sermon they go home as unaffected with grace and sin as if they had been hearing a ballad, or seeing a horse race. You may know them by such language as this, when the tedious discourse is over: "It is very fine weather to-day. Well, what do you say of the man? For my part I believe he means well; but do you not think he overdoes the matter? Did you see such a one at church? We had but a thin congregation to-day, the roads are so dirty." Thus he will speak of the weather, the congregation, the minister, the sermon, and what not? but if ever you hear him mention the love of God in Christ, or the sinfulness of his heart, and the danger of his unconverted state, represented in the sermon, you may wonder, for the leopard has changed one of his spots. These careless sinners, who are every where the most numerous tribe, are for the world, their farm, their merchandise, their wife; they have married or intend to marry, and the care of the perishing body engrosses almost all their thoughts. As the Gadarenes, disturbed about the loss of their herd of swine, came to Jesus, and besought him to depart out of their coasts or like the devils, who, when our Lord was going to cast them out of the man, cried, "What have we to do with thee? Art thou come to torment us before the time?" So these worldly, careless sinners, when we invite them to rend their hearts, and turn unto the Lord with weeping, fasting, and praying, account our ministry troublesome and dangerous. They wish we would depart out of their coasts, or complain that we

try to make them uneasy before the time. Scorning to yield to conviction, and stifling the checks of their own conscience, they soon grow so careless, or rather so hardened, that they make no more of the offer of Christ than of the offer of a straw. Were a good bargain put to them, they would forget all their business to accomplish it: but when it is only Jesus Christ and life that they are invited to, they suppose it time enough to think of that; they pray to be excused for the present; or madly suppose that they have already accepted him. I want words, brethren, to express the greatness of the danger of these Laodicean sinners, who say, "I am rich, and increased in goods, and have need of nothing." I shall only observe, that if the blood of Abel cried to heaven for vengeance against Cain, the blood of Christ will one day cry much louder against these unbelievers, who, by slighting it, spill it afresh every moment. To these, then, as well as against desperate unbelievers, the man of sorrows and Lord of glory says, with great reason, "Ye will not come unto me that ye might have life."

3. The third sort of sinners that reject this kind offer of our Lord, is that of presumptuous unbelievers; who, seeing what sins they have committed, and it may be, having now and then some touches of sorrow for them, catch notionally at Christ, and hope to be saved by him, before ever they come to feel sin as a heavy curse. These catching notionally at Christ, and hoping that they have him already, shut him out of the future, and so in fact reject him. This is the case of most of those who are only half awakened. The Prophet Micah describes them in these remarkable words: "The sin of Israel is great, and unrepented of, yet will they lean upon the Lord and say, Is not the Lord among us? None evil can come upon us," Mic. iii, 11. You will never hear people that are in this dangerous state complain of their utter want of faith, but only of the weakness of their faith; and they will not be beaten off from the notion, that they are true but weak believers. Let them hear never so much of their real misery, and see never so much of their desperate sinfulness, yet they will hold their imaginary trust in Christ: as if one could savingly trust in Christ, before he has truly experienced the bitterness of sin, and been clearly convinced of unbelief, John xvi, 9. Therefore, these also, (though they profess with their lips and conversation to come to Christ for life,) yet in fact keep at a distance from him with their heart, as well as desperate and careless unbelievers. This was the case of the foolish virgins. They made great profession of going to meet the bridegroom, as well as the wise ones, and really thought they had oil in their vessels, or faith in their hearts; but being mistaken, they justly perished for their wilful delusion.

4. The fourth, and last class of unbelievers, who make Christ complain, that they will not come unto him that they might have life, is that of those who are convinced they have not life,-they perceive in general that they are in a bad state,-they have some confused sight of their sins, and of their need of Jesus Christ,-but after all, they do not know whether they had best come to him or not. They see some good in a Saviour, for which they fain would have him; such as peace, grace, pardon, and heaven: but they see many things in his offer of life that overbalance those advantages. They must bid adieu to all their foolish pastimes, and vain diversions: the drunkard must renounce his cups,