are adopted into the family of God, and being brethren of Christ become sons of God and joint-heirs with Christ to a glorious inheritance. Without the spirit of adoption it is impossible to serve God acceptably; without it every effort made by the awakened sinner or the self-sustaining is prompted by a fear of wrath, and springs from a servile dread of God as the final judge. It is only when we cry Abba, Father, only when we approach Him as reconciled through the blood of His Son, that we are enabled to bring forth the peaceable fruits of righteousness. The twinges of conscience, the stings of remorse and the alarming dread of Hell can never be the motives of a truly sober, righteous, and godly life. The spirit by which we become followers of God as dear children, coupled with a sense of pardon and reconciliation with Him through the blood of Jesus Christ, are absolutely necessary to holiness in life and peace in death. And that man is to be pitied whom the spirit of bondage and the fear of a coming wrath goad on to a forced conformity to the externals of religion, to a life relieved by no earthly enjoyment, and sweetened by no joys of pardon, and to a dying bed racked with awful uncertainty with reference to the tremendous issues of eternity. A constant reliance upon the blood of Christ which justifieth is the only thing that robs life of its gloom and death of its sting. But there is still another consideration which evinces the harmony between justification by free grace and santification of life. The obedience of Christ unto death as it has produced remission of guilt and a title to life, has also purchased for the believer the santifying influences of the Holy Spirit. It is the meritorious cause of our santification.

It is only by virtue of Jesus' sufferings and death that we obtain the grace of the Spirit. His great atoning sacrifice was the reason of the impartation of the Spirit as the immediate agent in the production of holiness. Aside from Christ's obedience and perfect righteousness, God is a consuming fire, nor would the Spirit, while the sinner lives under the curse of the law, impart his graces in his heart. To him who has died with Christ to the guilt of sin, the Spirit is imparted to enable him to die to its power. There is thus a beautiful consistency in the whole scheme of redemption. As God has determined to save the sinner, and that can only be done through the righteousness of a substitute, it is necessary that the sinner should be invested with that righteousness; but as this avails only the justification of his person in law, it is equally necessary that his heart should be sanctified and prepared for the eternal presence of God. This is accomplished by the Holy Spirit in the application of those blessings which Christ has purchased with His blood. Thus, my brethren, does Christ become to us our whole salvation; our wisdom to instruct us, and righteousness to justify us, and santification to make us meet for the inheritance of the saints in light.

III. But as it has with strange inconsistency been urged by those who object to justification upon a scheme of free grace that Christ by His sufferings and death has introduced a new law of grace and procured for us easier conditions of salvation, we would remark in the next place, that the scheme of justification by free grace, against which the objection is advanced, establishes the moral law in its integrity as a rule of life and duty to believers. The opponents of this system of grace show their leaning to works by this theory,

and as if convinced both from the teaching of Sacred Scriptures and their own experience, that it is impossible to furnish an obedience which will abide the rigid demands of God's law, adopt a view of the law itself which relaxes the bonds of moral obligation. It being necessary to obey the law in order to salvation, and experience convinces that it cannot be obeyed in its original state, they are forced to regard the death of Christ as slacking off its unbending claims and accommodating it to the weakness and imperfection of their moral strength, and as only partial conformity can be expected to its requisitions even in this lowered state, what is wanting will be made up by the merits of Christ. In short, God will accept a sincere instead of a perfect obedience. But the view of justification given by the apostle, so far from inducing a conviction that the claims of the law are thus compromised, establishes those claims in all their force. For, in order that the sinner should escape the penalty of the law, it was necessary that a righteousness without a flaw should be provided. And the obedience of Christ, being infinite in value, was alone sufficient to meet the exigency. That obedience could have been no less than perfect, as the person who rendered it was incapable of failure. or imperfection. An infinitely perfect obedience was absolutely demanded by the righteous law of God. Nothing short of this could have been satisfactory. The law is but an exact external representation of the nature and perfections of the Almighty, and it is scarcely less than impiety to assert that its original rectitude could be so far compromised as to admit a partial obedience. There is undoubtedly a sense obvious to every reader of Sacred Scriptures in which the law is nullified. But that sense presupposes a

certain necessary condition to have been performed. It is true that, in consequence of the obedience and death of the Son of God, as the surety of the elect, the condemning sentence of the law is forever removed from them. As He has incurred their debt and paid it, justice is satisfied; nor would it demand of the believer the fulfilment of a claim which Christ has discharged in his place. There is now no condemnation to them who are in Christ Jesus. The law as it is administered under the form of a covenant of works actually exists no longer to the believer in Christ. The law which still exercises its, sway over his life is administered by Christ as mediator, and hence the believer is said to be "under the law to Christ." As the sinner owed obedience to the law as a covenant of works, and as Christ assumed his obligations and rendered a perfect obedience to it under that form of administration, it is clear that the believer is freed from its claims, and hence the apostle, under the figure of the marriage relation, represents the death of the law, as a covenant of works, by the death of the first husband, and the marriage of the believer to Christ as by the marriage of the wife to a second husband. As Luther observes, "The law is bound, dead, and crucified in me; it is not overcome, condemned and slain unto Christ; but unto me believing in Him, unto whom He hath freely given the victory." The fact is, that Christ having voluntarily subjected himself to the law, as a covenant of works, and having perfectly obeyed it, was justified on the ground of that obedience. And as the guilt of sin had been imputed to Him He was justified from that guilt, or "dead to sin," and it is in this sense that the apostle says we are "dead to sin," for being in Christ we were justified with Him from its

guilt. While, however, he thus unequivocally asserts the nullification of the law in this point of view, he is careful to determine its continued existence as a rule of life in the hands of Christ. "Do we then make void the law through faith? God forbid-yea, we establish the law." The law derives its immutable character from the immutability of that nature which is the only ultimate ground of moral distinctions. Its complexion is reflected from the radiant perfections of the Almighty. And as it is a specific rule to the creature, embodying the distinctions of right and wrong which exist necessarily in God's nature, it can never be relaxed until that nature itself has ceased to be unchangeable. In the cross of Christ we behold the strongest proof of the unyielding nature of the law. It being determined to save sinners, nothing could obviate the difficulty but the death of God's eternal Son. And as long as that accursed tree shall stand the only refuge of the guilt-burdened sinner, as long as that bleeding victim to justice shall be lifted up that all men may come unto Him, so long will there be the most striking monument that omnipotence itself could raise to the eternal sanctions of His law. That crown of thorns, that bloody robe, that pierced side, that agonizing cry, that awful head which bowed in death, shall conspire forever to "magnify the law and to make it honorable" in the sight of God's moral universe.

The words of our Savior himself are: "I am not come to destroy, but to fulfil." No, my brethren, these heavens which stretch above us shall pass away, those "everlasting lamps" shall each go out in the blackness of darkness; yea, the firm pillars of this earth shall totter and crumble and fall, but not one jot or one