found in what has been now given; with much of divinest truth there is clearly something missed or perverted, which causes us in both of the views given above to lose the perfect Gospel of God. If we must look to our holiness of life for assurance, is not that to build again upon the quicksand? Is not that to look to ourselves for salvation, and not to Christ, and to look where we must look in vain? Or if without looking to ourselves we look only to Christ, and hope and believe whilst we are full of sin, and look to be redeemed from death, because Christ has died, although we have never risen with Him again to a new life of holiness; is not this to make Christ the minister of sin, and to hope where God says that there is no hope? We must see, therefore, how it may be possible to seize the truth of each of these views, and yet escape their error; and after having shown the difficulties of the question on the right and left, to see how far, with God's blessing, it may be possible to avoid them. And this, if God permits, shall be the subject of one more concluding sermon.

February 27, 1842.

SERMON XXVI.

THE MEANING OF JUSTIFICATION BY FAITH.

ST. JOHN, vi. 57.

As the living Father hath sent me, and I live by the Father: so he that eateth me, even he shall live by me.

GALATIANS, ii. 20.

I am crucified with Christ: nevertheless I live; yet not I, but Christ liveth in me: and the life which I now live in the flesh, I live by the faith of the Son of God, who loved me, and gave himself for me.

THESE two passages, as it seems to me, speak the same language, and it is by following up the clue which they offer to us that we may arrive, I think, at the full scriptural truth concerning justification, which we now are seeking for. We may arrive at it, and yet we cannot. We may in one sense, for it is there to be seen; so far, at least, as that we may recognise any thing else but it, to be not altogether the true doctrine. Some jarring note there will be which our ears may have listened enough to the

true heavenly music to perceive at once to be out of harmony. But yet, when we try to state our impression of the truth in our own words, it is like the copy of a master-work of painting, we see ourselves its inferiority, we see that it is not that very perfect thing which we so admired: it has lost something, we know not what or how, but it is no longer the very same. We must feel and acknowledge this defect in our own representations of Scripture truth we ought to make allowance for it no less when we find it in the representations of others.

Let us consider once again what we found to be the difficulties of this question of justification. Were they not, on the one hand, that if we laid the whole stress on our being forgiven and justified by Christ already, carelessness and great ungodliness were apt to steal upon us; Christ has done all for us, it were wronging Him to interfere with His work; His grace is glorified in our sinfulness. And on the other hand, if after the one justification once obtained by faith, all else is to be a matter of our own works to preserve or to recover our state of justification, is it not in the end placing the real justification in our works, and have we not, on the one hand, the notion of merit coming in as if we were saving and justifying ourselves, or else do we not take away the comfort of the Gospel promises, and leave ourselves in the fearing and ever restless state of those whose con

sciences were taxed by the law which they knew they ought to fulfil but did not? In a word, the Scripture justification can neither be a minister unto sin, nor to pride, nor yet can it destroy itself and leave no man justified at all.

Now looking steadily at the two passages of Scripture which I have chosen for my text, we shall, as I said, gain the clue to the full scriptural truth. First of all St. Paul, speaking of himself many years after his conversion, declares that he lives by faith in the Son of God, who loved him and gave Himself for him. It is manifest then that the principle of a Christian life, after the knowledge of Christ had been received, was still to be, "Faith in the Son of God, who loved us, and gave Himself for us." The same faith which brought us to Christ is to keep us in our life afterwards in Christ, and it is, "Faith in the Son of God, who loved us, and gave Himself for us." That is, I suppose, faith in Him as our Redeemer, that He has done for us by virtue of His death what we could neither have done, nor do for ourselves, namely, made us at peace with God, placed us in the condition of God's children whom He has forgiven, and whom He loves. This faith entertained not once only, but always, ascribes clearly the whole merit of our justification to Christ; that for His sake God looks upon us, not as enemies but as children, not as condemned but as forgiven. And farther, the Scrip

ture supposes, that whenever, and so far as we realize to our minds the fact that God has forgiven us, we are also drawn to love Him as His children; nay, that the two feelings are in fact inseparable; that faith in Christ's atonement places us necessarily in the state of loving children to God; that if we do not love Him, such want of love is clearly one way or another a want of faith in Christ; either that we do not believe that we needed the atonement, and therefore so far deny its reality, or do not believe that God has fully forgiven us, and so far deny its efficacy. But believing that we were without Christ dead, and that through Him we are alive and forgiven, that belief places us in the state of children towards God, with open and thankful hearts, loving Him because He first loved us. And if we sin and lose this feeling, for with every sin the cloud surely rises over our hearts, and the feeling of the slave succeeds to the feeling of the child, is not the repentance which we need exactly a restoration of our faith, as St. John says, any man sin, we have an advocate with the Father, Jesus Christ the righteous, and He is the propitiation for our sins?" It is not, "If any man have sinned before he became a Christian," but if any man sin now; if he sin, the remedy is still faith, even as the cause of the sin was want of faith. "Christ is the propitiation for our sins." Again must we realize to ourselves the truth of what He

BB