his feelings, or habits of conversation-he may cherish the thought of them as a man cherishes a matter of vivid consciousness or delightful experience, and in this way he may practise upon himself a very artful and a very fatal delusion. It is fearful to think of the ease and efficiency with which a man can blind himself in this way, adhering tenaciously to his own device, and resisting every call to review his procedure, although it may be said of him, with no less truth than of the worshipper of idols, “He feedeth upon ashes; a deceived heart hath turned him aside that he cannot deliver his soul, nor say, is there not a lie in my right hand?"

It has been

The most alarming evil connected with this delusion is, that it leads the mind by slow degrees, and insensibility it may be, to fortify itself in a position which renders its salvation every thing but impossible. The man is really reformed, though he is not renewed in the spirit of his mind. His reformation is a visible thing, written out on the exterior of his character, known and read of all men. effected withal, under the influence of Christianity, and by the power of Christian truth. On these very grounds it is strongly assimilated to that reformation which is thorough and saving; but in proportion as it is so, the difficulty of detecting its fallacy is mightily increased. The man is so like a Christian that you cannot convince him he is any thing else. The attempt to bring him into doubt about the matter, is defeated by the appearance which it has, or which he can easily give to it, of impertinent or censorious intermeddling. He has not the life of god

liness though he wears its form; and just because he wants it, he is like every other dead man, a stranger to the stirring solicitudes and salutary fears which indicate and stimulate the operation of life. Thus it is that his situation is peculiarly forbidding, and inaccessible to the means of relief, rendering the prospect of his rescue increasingly distant, the longer he continues to hold by it.

When he begins to move in this dry and devious path, and while the fears which induced him to enter on it are still fresh in his recollection, you may see him anxious and hesitating, willing to listen to counsel, like one who is "not far from the kingdom of heaven;" but as he gets along, his anxiety subsides and his confidence increases, till ultimately he becomes proud and opinionative, sure that he is right, and contemptuous of every one who insinuates the contrary. The darkness thickens as he descends into it, till at length it has acquired consistency enough to close the eye of his understanding, and divert him with images of ultimate safety, till the crisis arrive at which "his iniquity is found to be hateful." It is melancholy to observe the flippancy with which truth and error are jumbled together in the speculations of such persons. They will tell us, with all the ease and confidence imaginable, that Jesus Christ is the Saviour of sinners-that he came into the world to set us an example of suffering and patience, that we should follow his steps-that he died also to teach us the art of trusting in God, even in the greatest extremity; and that, as there is in our nature an unhappy tendency to go wrong, all

this was necessary, that by having so bright a pattern delineated before us, its beauty and attraction might win us back into the paths of virtue.

But to talk of the death of Christ as an atonement for sin, or of the rigours of a law which could require such a sacrifice for any little delinquencies of ours, is, in their estimation, to libel the Deity, and to hold him up to the creatures he has made in a light which is altogether unamiable. While, at the same time, to speak of the universal depravity of man, or of his utter inability to perform an action which accords with the spirit of his Creator's law, is to calumniate the species, and to deprive us at once of every honourable spur to moral activity. For their part, they are quite sure that they love the paths of virtue, and are able to walk in them with but a little assistance, and now that they have the career of the Saviour before their eyes, they see the way to the celestial region quite patent, and make no doubt of arriving there in due time by walking in their own strength, as he also walked. How artful is man in conceal

ing from himself the extent of his own deformity, and by consequence, the peculiar glories of that remedy which God has provided for his disease!

There is a third class of Christian professors, who have posted themselves on an extreme directly opposed to that which has just been adverted to, whose speculations seem much more evangelical in their complexion, but who, in point of fact, are equally remote from that "repentance which needeth not to be repented of." They not only acquiesce in every thing which the former class deny about the atone

ment of Jesus Christ, and the moral inability of man, but strenuously plead for it as indisputable truth, and on it, as a basis, they found the perverse conclusion, that they can do, and are required to do absolutely nothing at all. Their language is, We are "dead in trespasses and sins," and "Christ is the end of the law, for righteousness to every one that believeth;" therefore, if we believe in Christ, we have nothing to do with the law in any form, and it has just as little to do with us. We have no righteousness of our own to present to it, and we require none, for in the very act of believing, the righteousness of our substitute is imputed to us. Instead then of troubling ourselves, as many do, with loud lamentations over what is called remaining corruption, or the sins of the heart and the life, let us abound in joy, for our hope is built upon the very words of inspiration, and we cannot but be safe in the end. How jealous can these persons show themselves for the honour of the Saviour, and the purity of evangelical truth. How mortally do they hate what they call legal preaching, and with what virulence of spirit will they fulminate their condemnation of the characters already described.

It would be well for them to remember, that Christianity, as laid down in the Bible, is more than a mere remission of punishment, and must be more, to be worthy of Him from whom it has come. So far from freeing man from his obligation to obey, it positively enforces that obligation, and strengthens it by new motives. If theirs be not a faith then, which "worketh by love, and purifies the heart,”

it is no faith; and if they do not feel sin, which dwelleth in them, to be a heavy burden, they are no Christians. The theory of their creed may be a skeleton of orthodoxy, so far as it extends; but it is a naked skeleton, and withal it wants the vital parts: the Spirit of life, from the Lord, has not been breathed into it, and therefore it is dead, being alone. Nay, if their religion were genuine, the apostle of the Gentiles would be found in error; for they are actually making void the law through faith, and converting the grace of God into an instrument of licentiousness. Thus it is, that each of these contrasted parties is deviating from the path which leadeth unto life. The works of the first are dead, because they are isolated from faith; and the faith of the second is dead, because it is isolated from works. The first impeaches the wisdom of God, by supposing that the stupendous economy of redemption, with all its wonders and mysteries, was devised and executed for no higher purpose, than to give forth a glowing picture of piety to man; and the second impeaches his moral attributes, by conceiving him capable of dispensing pardon, without securing purity of heart. The one ensures the ruin of the sinner, by assigning him a task which he can never perform; and the other involves him in the same disaster, by teaching him to neglect what no other can do for him. In short, the victim of the one delusion is proud enough to account himself both the cause and the instrument of his own salvation, while the victim of the other is blind enough to imagine that he is neither the one nor the other.