him. So teaches the Saviour: "If any man come to me, and hate not his father, and mother, and wife, and children, and brethren, and sisters, yea, and his own life also, he cannot be my disciple." Luke xiv. 26. Of course the hatred here is comparative and not positive. We are to love all things less than God.

X. "The commands of the first table are not to be kept for the sake of the second; but the commands of the second are to be kept for the sake of the first. The worship and service of God are not to be performed out of respect to men; but our duty towards men is to be observed out of respect to God. For he that worships God that he might thereby recommend himself to men, is but a hypocrite and formalist; and he that performs his duty towards men without respecting God in it is but a mere civil moralist." Willard: "God and our neighbour do not stand upon even ground, so as that these must divide our love and obedience between them; but though it may seem to be a paradox, yet it is a great truth, that God must have all our love, and yet our neighbour must have some of it too. God must have our whole heart and soul, and yet our neighbour must have our hearty and 'undissembled love."

CHAPTER VII.

THE USES OF THE LAW.

IE moral law does not bear the same relation to

THE

men which it sustains to angels, and which it did sustain to man before his fall. Eternal life is no longer by our obedience to its precepts. To believers it is no more a covenant of works. By it, in the sight of God, shall no flesh be justified. Ps. cxliii. 2; Rom. iii. 20; Gal. ii. 16. To expect justification by our own works would be to supersede and render of none effect the work of our Saviour. We are not under the law but under grace. To oppose this grave fundamental heresy of salvation by works is one of the chief objects of Paul in some of his epistles, and particularly in that to the Galatians.

Seeing then that the law is not to be put in the room and stead of our Saviour, what is its use? or as Paul expresses it, "Wherefore then serveth the law?" Gal. iii. 19. The answer is,

I. The moral law is of excellent use as a rule of life. Its value in this respect is great. Its precepts are comprehensive, definite and easily understood. They cover all possible cases. They inform us with the utmost exactness what is right and wrong in action and in word. They go further. They trace

sin up to its original fountain in the soul. They pronounce envy and hatred to be murder, covetousness to be theft, and forgetfulness of God to be atheism. This law is universal in its prescriptions. In all things it is holy, wise, and benevolent. None can be truly pious without consenting that it is good. Whosoever esteems any of its precepts grievous shows that his heart is still unregenerated. All pious men do sincerely and habitually desire to be conformed to this blessed code. Often and earnestly do they cry, "Oh that my ways were directed to keep thy statutes. Ps. cxix. 5, 10. "Teach me thy statutes." "Open thou mine eyes that I may behold wondrous things out of thy law." Ps. cxix. 12, 18. He who in the spirit of humility, carefulness and teachableness thus cries. for divine guidance shall grow wiser than his enemies, shall have more understanding than all his teachers, and shall understand more than the ancients. Ps. cxix. 98, 99, 100; See also Micah vi. 8. The greatest grief of pious souls is not for poverty, or sickness, or slander; but because they either positively transgress or come short of keeping the holy commandments. Such is their desire to be as pure as the law requires, that there is nothing which makes them so willing to leave the body and exchange worlds as the hope that in a future state, they will be wholly conformed to its righteous demands. The superiority of this law as a rule of life is exceedingly manifest in the particulars already named as well as in others. It comes to the conscience with a sovereign authority. The heart of man when not utterly insensate recognizes God's voice in all its precepts.

Calvin: "The faithful find the law an excellent

instrument to give them from day to day a better and more certain understanding and to confirm them in the knowledge of it.'

II. The moral law is of excellent use in producing conviction of sin, and thus making men sensible of their need of a Saviour. "The law entered that the offence might abound," Rom. v. 20; that is, that it might be seen by us all how many and ill-deserving our sins were. Conviction of sin is not confined to unregenerate men, nor to sinners in the earlier stages of religious impression when a law-work is wrought on the heart. Important as this is, the law is not then laid aside as a means of conviction. To the close of life it continues to be of use to this end. It teaches us that we are not worthy to be called God's servants; it shows that our strength to do that which is right is nothing. Colquhoun: "The children of fallen Adam are so bent upon working for life, that they will on no account cease from it till the Holy Spirit so convince them of their sin and misery, as to show them that Mount Sinai is wholly on fire around them, and that they cannot with safety remain a moment longer within the limits of it." "What things soever the law saith, it saith to them who are under the law: that every mouth may be stopped, and all the world may become guilty before God." Rom. iii. 19. By our early conviction of sin, we obtain some faint impression of the necessity of salvation by grace. By our subsequent convictions, we are led more and more to renounce all confidence in ourselves for righteousness; and to see more and more our need of the perfect righteousness of the Lord Jesus Christ. There is no greater mistake respecting experimental religion

than that which regards the work of conviction entirely done when conversion takes place. It is true that sometimes there are certain horrors of conscience, certain pangs of remorse, certain guilty fears and awful apprehensions of the wrath to come, which in an equal degree do but seldom afflict the soul after conversion. But these horrors and fears are no necessary elements of conviction. He is truly convicted, who has a due sense that he is a sinner against a just and holy God; and that he deserves ill and only ill at the hands of the Judge of all. He may not expect to be punished. David was an experienced child of God, when he said of the commandments, "By them is thy servant warned;" and "Who can understand his errors? clease thou me from secret faults." Ps. xix. 11, 12. One may have set his hope in God through Jesus Christ; indeed, the more effectually he has despaired of helping himself, and the more completely he has cast himself on God in humble hope, the more proper and deep are his convictions. This use of the law is much insisted on in Scripture. Paul says, "By the law is the knowledge of sin." Rom. iii. 20. And when in the same epistle, he had proven the utter impossibility of salvation by the deeds of the law, he adds, "What shall we say then? Is the law sin? God forbid." Rom. vii. 7. He then goes on to say how useful it had been to him. The spirit of his declaration is, that he never would have known what a poor, lost, undone, helpless creature he was, and that he never would have felt his need of a Saviour, and never would have fled to him for refuge but for the law. His words are, “I had not known sin but by the law; for I had not