has graciously promised to regard the prayers of the destitute while therefore you acknowledge your unworthiness, and enumerate your own wants, remind him of his own promise; lest he should complain, and say, as he did of Israel of old; Thou hast not called upon me-thou hast been weary of me, and hast not honoured me with thy sacrifices.' No longer doubt the love of Christ revealed for encouragement to the distressed and the guilty: reject the thought as highly dishonourable to God: and if the risings of hope be depressed by the prevalence of unbelief, pray that you may be enabled to give implicit credit to the testimony of his own word; that you may be helped to say with grateful confidence, I know in whom I have believed, and am persuaded that he is able to keep that which I have committed unto him against that day.'

Your concluding, that there can be no mercy for such a detestable wretch as yourself, arises from ignorance, or inattention to the way in which the infinitely gracious God hath determined to save sinners. He is, remember, the 'God of salvation; and unto God the Lord belong the issues from death.' Instead, therefore, of ransacking the heart for pious dispositions, or of adverting to good works already performed, with a view to forgiveness; attend to the gracious and instructive language of him that saith, Thou hast destroyed thyself; but in me is thine help-I, even I, am the Lord; and beside me there is no Saviour.'

Unworthiness, arising from depravity and guilt, is, indeed, matter of deep humiliation; but a conviction of this unworthiness, however pungent, ought rather to excite gratitude than despondency; to rouse the torpor of dejectionto impel the soul to be urgent for mercy, and to

engender a hope that the kind hand which discovered the disease, will not withhold the remedy. The testimony of God speaks louder than the most clamorous conscience; and to this testimony, and this only, you must appeal in determining whether your fears be ill or well founded. If you search into the cause of your distress, it will perhaps be found to arise, not from a consideration of God's unwillingness to pardon-not from any want of efficacy in the blood of Christ to cleanse the foulest sinner; but from a sense of your having nothing to recommend you to his favour. It is a conviction of this fact that imperceptibly holds the soul in bondage-that renders your taking encouragement from God's word altogether impracticable. Should you say, No sins are like mine; let me add, There is no salvation like Christ's-his blood cleanseth from all sin.'

If, however, you will not believe 'while your sins are so great, and your heart so polluted; it is probable, were your heart less defiled, and your sins less in number, that you would not believe in Christ at all. You would be more likely to trust in your own heart, and to rely on your own righteousness, instead of believing and trusting in Christ. Great sins and a bad heart, felt and bewailed, should operate in this case like hunger, which becomes an incentive to seek food. If men had clean hearts, it is very likely they would dispose of them otherwise, and rather think that Christ should come to them, than they to him. Instead of a man's poverty making him less desirous of relief, it should make him more importunate. To say, I will not come to Christ because I have great sins, is as if one should say, I will have nothing to do with happiness, if offered, because I have great misery: I will not go

to a surgeon for healing, because my wounds are so great: I will eat no bread, because I am ready to starve with hunger. This surely is bad logic; and it is not better to argue, Because I am filthy, therefore I will not go to the fountain to be cleansed.

'But admitting that you are a great sinner, nay, one of the greatest; will your staying away from Christ make your sins less? Are you so rich as to pay the debt out of your own revenue? or have you any hopes of another surety? Can complaints of a great load, without endeavouring its removal, ease the shoulders that bear it? If your sins be so great, surely the Lord Jesus Christ, who is an Almighty Saviour, and who delighteth in mercy, will not lose an opportunity of evidencing both his power and his pity on such a miserable subject: for if there cannot be so great a sinner as you are, he cannot possibly have any other season in which to display them!'

Ever since the fall of our first parents, all men invariably manifest a strong propensity to cleave to their own righteousness: to something they have performed, or are to perform, in order to final happiness. When a man contemplates the turpitude of his nature, and the imperfection of his conduct, he must, as a moral agent, be conscious of numberless defects; of being extremely culpable and as he cannot but acknowledge, on reflection, that his pravity has been the result of his own choice, it is quite natural for him to look to future reformation for something that may counterbalance his guilt, and avert the punishment he has reason to expect. Without revelation, he has no other medium by which to obtain forgiveness: and if this be neglected or despised, he will not see the absurdity of his conduct; his deceptive hope will keep pace with his diligence;

and, if divine goodness do not interpose, never perceive his mistake till too late to prevent it. On this principle those Jews acted of whom it is said, They trusted in themselves that they were righteous, and despised others. They had a zeal for God, but not according to knowledge: for they being ignorant of God's righteousness, and going about to establish their own righteousness, have not submitted themselves unto the righteousness of God.' But before a man can cordially receive the salvation revealed in the gospel, every pretension to forgiveness on the ground of human worthiness must be entirely relinquished. To talk of pardoning one that is innocent, or of forgiving a debt that never was contracted, is absurd in the extreme;' it is therefore a part of the Holy Spirit's work to convince the sinner that in his flesh dwelleth no good thing; that his own righteousness is as filthy rags, and that, if he expect to be justified before God, all he has ever esteemed gain, in reference to this grand affair, must be esteemed loss for Christ.

'Heaven,' says the ingenious Spurstow, 'stands like a little mark in a wide field, where there are a thousand ways to err from it, and but one to hit it. Yea, though God hath said that there is but one sacrifice by which we can be perfected;\ but one blood by which we can be purified; but one name by which we can be saved; yet how hardly are the best drawn to trust perfectly to the grace revealed, and to look from themselves to Christ, as the author and finisher of their blessedness? Seeing therefore, Holy Father, that thou hast made the whole progress of salvation to be in Christ, and by Christ; election to be in him; adoption to be in him; justification to be in him; sanctification to be in him; glorification

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to be in him; grant that, whatever others do, I may never choose the light of reason, but the Sun of righteousness to guide my feet into the paths of life; and that, both in life and in death, 1 may say as that blessed martyr did, None but Christ, none but Christ.'

While the awakened sinner surveys himself, he can meet with nothing but discouragement. If he look within, he perceives that the heart in which he trusted, has turned him aside; that it is deceitful above all things, and desperately wicked, and the fruitful source of all the evils committed in his life. If he advert to actions in which there was apparently nothing to blame, but rather every thing to praise; he finds, on minute inspection, enough to convince him that he imperceptibly sought his own honour, and not the honour that cometh from God only. He feels that he is inwardly defiled, he is convinced that all his duties have been shamefully defective: he discovers nothing on which he can safely depend for pardon and acceptance. Like the unclean spirit, when dispossessed of his peaceful residence, he turns this way and that; seeking rest, but finding none: and the reason is obvious: he is looking for that in himself which is only to be found in Christ. Peace for a troubled conscience is not to be attained in this way; nor will the trembling sinner ever experience the inestimable blessing, till his attention be called from himself to the cross-till, as a perishing wretch, he look to him that said, when referring to his own death, 'If I be lifted up from the earth, I will draw all men unto me.'

The inquiry of a soul in this perplexed state is -How the Judge of the world can, consistently with the holiness of his nature, and the immutability of his truth in the threatenings, justify a sin