would be saved, is faith, or confidence, in the Redeemer. Thus Paul said to the trembling jailer at Philippi, “ Believe on the Lord Jesus Christ, and thou shalt be saved," Acts xvi. 31. So again in the Epistle to the Romans, "If thou shalt confess with thy mouth the Lord Jesus, and shalt believe in thine heart that God hath raised him from the dead, thou shalt be saved. For with the heart man believeth unto righteousness, and with the mouth confession is made unto salvation," Rom. x. 9, 10. Here, as everywhere in the New Testament, salvation is represented as easy. The terms are as simple as possible. There is no requisition of our attempting to obey the whole law of God as a condition of salvation; no demand on us to offer costly sacrifices, or to make pilgrimages to a distant shrine, or to practise penances and fastings, or to lacerate the body, or to attempt to work out a righteousness by conformity to external forms, or by union to a particular church. The simple, the single thing demanded is, faith on the Son of God. If man has this, he is safe. No matter what his past life has been; no matter what his complexion, rank, or apparel; no matter where he lives or dies; no matter whether he worships in a splendid temple or under the open vault of heaven; and no matter whether his body rests in consecrated ground or amid the corals of the ocean,—he is a child of God, and an heir of the kingdom. Whatever may be said of this plan of salvation, it cannot be said that it is not sufficiently simple, and that it does not breathe a spirit of benignity towards the lost and ruined children of men. The infidel cannot object that God has not adapted it to the condition of human nature as it is-made up, for the most part, of the ignorant, of the down-trodden, and of children; nor that it has required more of any man than the human powers can render. Yet,

(2.) While thus simple and easy, it is on the great principles which we see everywhere prevail. There is required in salvation that which keeps the social world together, and causes human things to move on in harmony-that without which all the interests of man would be a wreck. There is required that which would arrest all human ills, and make this still a happy world-confidence in our God. Man wants but this to make him a happy being here; he will want but this to make him happy for ever. As confidence is the great principle which cements society, so it was indispensable in religion that confidence in God should be restored. We cannot conceive that a human being could be saved without faith. Even if it had not been distinctly and formally required in the plan, it is impossible to conceive that there could have been salvation without it. The very process of returning to God from our

wanderings implies returning confidence-for how or why should sinners return to him if they have no confidence in him? And how could they be happy in heaven if they had no confidence in God? What would heaven be, if there were there the same distrust of the Deity, and the same rebellion against him, and the same alienation from him, and the same doubt of his being, his justice, and his goodness, which exist on earth? The plan of salvation by faith is laid in the deepest philosophy, and is based on the irreversible nature of things.

(3.) The subject suggests a remark on the nature and aims of infidelity. Men often think that unbelief is a harmless thing. They sometimes regard it as a special proof of meritorious independence to be an infidel. They pride themselves on their philosophy and their freedom from vulgar prejudices and priestcraft— perhaps on their freedom from the prejudices instilled by a pious parent, a pastor, or a Sunday-school teacher. They consider the denunciation of unbelief in the gospel as singularly harsh, and use no measured terms in expressing their abhorrence of a system which denounces the eternal pains of hell on a man because he will not believe. The want of faith, say they, is a harmless or a meritorious thing. But are you connected with a bank? Would you think that a harmless effort in a daily paper which should attempt to unsettle the confidence of the community in your institution?-Have you a character for virtue, which you have secured by years of toil and of upright deportment? Is that a harmless report in the community which tends to destroy all confidence in that character?—Are you a father? Is it a harmless effort of your neighbour when he attempts to unsettle the confidence of your own children in your virtue?—Are you a husband? Is he a harmless man who shall aim to unsettle your faith in the wife of your bosom, and produce between you and her an utter want of confidence?-And is there no evil in that state of mind where there is no confidence in God that rules on high; the God that made us, and that holds. our destiny in his hands? Is it nothing to unsettle the faith of men in God, and to introduce universal distrust in his government? Is it nothing to inculcate or cherish the thought that the Governor of the world is a dark, malignant, harsh, and severe Being, and to alienate the affections of creation from its Maker? Let the history of the earth answer. All our evils began in that unhappy moment when our first parents lost their confidence in their God. "Loss of Eden," toil, sweat. despair, perplexity, and death, tell what the evil was. Calamities have rolled along in black and angry surges, and the dark flood still swells and heaves upon the earth.

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Peace will be restored, and Paradise regained, only when man is restored to confidence in his God; and this is the grand and glorious work of the gospel. This done in any heart, and its peace becomes as a river, and its righteousness as the waves of the sea." This done all over the earth, and millennial joy I will visit the nations. This done, as successive individuals or generations leave the world, and death is disarmed of his sting, for the departing soul leans with full assurance of faith on the Saviour.

SERMON XXXVI.

THE BEARING AND IMPORTANCE OF THE DOCTRINE OF JUSTIFICATION BY FAITH.

ROM. i. 17.-" The just shall live by faith."

FROM these words I desire to illustrate the bearing and the importance of the doctrine of justification by faith. The points which have been illustrated in the previous discourses are the following:-The importance of the inquiry, How man can be justified with God; the fact that man cannot justify or vindicate himself by denying the truth of the charges against him; the fact that he cannot do it by showing that he had a right to do as he has done; the fact that he cannot merit salvation; the consideration of what is to be understood by the merits of Christ ; the sense in which we are justified by the merits of Christ; and the agency of faith in our justification. It is proposed now, in the conclusion of the subject, to refer to some historical illustrations of the value and influence of the doctrine of justification by faith, and to show why it has the place which history has assigned it.

I. In illustrating the value and influence of the doctrine as shown by history, three periods of the world may be briefly referred to.

(1.) The first is, the age of the apostles-when, perhaps, the effect of the doctrine of justification by faith was more vividly seen than it has ever been since. That this was the doctrine which Paul preached, which he made prominent in his writings, and which he everywhere defended, no one acquainted with his history can for a moment doubt. It would be needless here to transcribe the passages of his writings which declare his views on this point, or which show how earnestly he expressed his conviction of its truth and importance. Everywhere he maintained that a man is not justified by the deeds of the law, but by the righteousness of faith; that we are saved, not by works of righteousness which we have done; that they that are under the law, are under the curse; and that they who are justified by faith, have peace with God through the Lord Jesus Christ. In the most earnest and emphatic manner he abjured all dependence on his own merits for salvation; disclaimed all reliance on the

extraordinary zeal for religion which he had manifested in early life, and on his own blameless outward deportment; and declared it now to be the grand purpose of his soul to "know Christ, and to be found in him, not having his own righteousness, which was of the law, but the righteousness which is of God by faith," Phil. iii. 9. In this, he coincided with all the other apostles, who taught as he did, that no reliance is to be placed on outward forms of religion, on good works, on an amiable character, or on alms, as the ground of salvation. It was then that the doctrine of simple dependence on Christ for salvation went forth with freshness and with power. It was unencumbered by any attending doctrine of a different character to fetter its movements, or to hinder its progress through the world. There was no necessity proclaimed of depending on rites or forms of religion; no reverence for sacred places was inculcated as necessary to salvation; no connexion with a particular church, organized under a peculiar ministry, was declared to be essential; no saving efficacy was attributed to sacraments and to alms; no merits of the holy men of other ages could be looked to, to make up the deficiency of those who sought to be saved; no promise was held out that the dead might be saved through the extraordinary sacrifices and benevolence of the living. The naked doctrine of justification by faith in Christ stood out before the world, fresh in its youthful vigour, with no trappings or ornaments to hide and obscure it; a simple, solemn, sublime truth, that all might appreciate, and that might be available to all. This was then the sword of the Spirit, slaying human pride; cutting down the self-righteousness of men; prostrating the great and the mean, the learned and the unlearned, the patrician and the plebeian, the master and the slave, the man in purple and the man in rags, alike—a sword, whose keenness was not rendered useless then by being hid in a gorgeous scabbard.

The doctrine thus promulgated by the apostles stood opposed to the prevailing views of all the world. It was opposed to all the aims of the Pharisees-the essential tenet of whose religion was expressed graphically and honestly by one of their own number" God, I thank thee that I am not as other men are." It stood opposed to all the views of the Sadducees, who held to the necessity of no kind of religion, denying the whole doctrine of the future state. It stood opposed to the Essenes. the remaining Jewish sect, who sought to work out their salvation by extraordinary fastings and privations, and by exclusion from contact with the world. It stood opposed to the whole system of sacrifices among the heathen, who sought to propitiate the gods,