inner man in the living character of a friend, and admits us into the number of his children, through the faith that is in Christ Jesus, and pours the spirit of adoption upon us. So that, unburdened of guilt and of suspicion, we may come unto God with full assurance of heart, as we would do to a reconciled father. When such terms as these, from being felt as sounds of mystery, come to be embodied in actual fulfilment, and to be invested with the meaning of felt and present realities; then does the inquirer find within himself, that to become a partaker of the faith of the New Testament, is indeed to pass out of darkness into a light that is marvellous. The one and simple circumstance of being now able to go out and in with confidence unto God, opens the door of his prison-house, and sets him at liberty. And let us not wonder, that, with the new hope which is thus made to dawn upon his heart, a new feeling enters along with it, and a new affection now comes to inspire it. Who can say, in short, that the entrance of the faith of the gospel is not the turning point of a new character, that that is not the moment of all old things being done away, from which the man began to breathe in another moral atmosphere, and to conceive purposes, and to adopt practices, suited to another field of contemplation now placed before him. thus, by the single act of believing-by giving credit to the word of God's testimony, when he holds himself forth to us as God in Christ, reconciling the world unto himself, and not imputing unto them their trespasses,-by conceiving of Christ, that he gives an honest account of the errand on

And

which he came, when he says, that he " came not to condemn the world, but to save it,"-by conceding the honour of truth to him who is the Author of the Bible, and so believing just as it is there spoken,

-a course is set into operation, competent to the effect of an entire revolution, both in the prospect and in the moral state of him who is influenced by it,-translating him from a state of darkness, or a state of dismay, to peace, and joy, and spiritual life, -impressing a new character upon his heart, and turning into a new course of joy the whole of his habits and of his history.

Now, it is in the prosecution of this course-a course not of legal, but of evangelical obediencea course in which, instead of winning the favour of God as the result of it, we are upheld by the favour of God freely conferred upon us in Christ Jesus, from the commencement and through the whole process of it, a course in which, from its very outset, we draw help and strength from the sanctuary, and look unto him who dwelleth there, more in the light of a friend cheering us along the path of uprightness, than of a lawgiver goading us forward by the threats and the terrors of authority,

-a course, in which we walk with God as two walk together who are agreed, instead of walking with him as if dragged reluctantly along by a force which it were even death to bring down in wrath and in hostility against us, a course which we prosecute with the will, now gained over by gratitude, and touched by the love of moral and spiritual excellence, and enlightened in the great and final object of salvation, which is to prepare us for the

kingdom of God in heaven, by setting up the kingdom of God in our hearts, even righteousness, and peace, and joy in the Holy Ghost,-a course, the distinct object of which is to transform the character of man from its selfishness and its ungodliness, and not so much to surround him with celestial glories, as to give to him the worth, and the feelings, and the principles of a celestial mind.

Now, it often happens, that long after a formal admission has been given to the doctrines of the gospel, the mind may practically be far from being in a state of adjustment with a course of obedience, prosecuted in such a spirit, and with such an object as we have now been describing. There may be a course of very strenuous performance; but the old legal spirit may be yet unquelled, and the mind of the inquirer be still weighed down under a sense of hopeless and inextricable bondage. There may, at the same time, be a speculative conviction of the vanity of good works; and many a weary attempt be made to raise up faith with a set of qualifications, which are destitute in themselves of all power and of all sufficiency to propitiate the favour of God. It, however, cannot be disguised, that works, in some shape or other, are as strenuously called for under the latter, as under the former dispensation ; and we speak of an actual state of ambiguity on this subject, in which many have been involved, and where many have lingered for years in great helplessness and distress, when we say, that, unable to attain a clear and satisfactory perception of the way in which faith and works stand related to salvation, they have toiled without an object, and laboured to

get onwards without coming sensibly nearer to any landing-place. There is a want of drift in their manifold doings. They are at one time fearful of being in the wrong, when they attempt to multiply their conformities to the divine law; learning so much from one class of theologians of the vanity of works, and the danger of self-righteousness. They are, at another time, impelled to action by a vague and general sense of the importance of works; learning from the Bible, and even from these very theologians, that works, brought down to utter insignificance at one part of the doctrinal argument, reappear at a future part of it, vested with a real importance in the matter of salvation. And thus do they vacillate in darkness, between a kind of general urgency to do upon the one hand; and, on the other, a kind of indistinct impression that, as a Christian, his business is not to do, but to believe. And so there is either a halting of the mind, or an unceasing vibration of the mind, between two opinions; neither of which, at the same time, is very distinctly apprehended. The Christian who is steadfast and immoveable, and always abounding in the work of the Lord, knows that his labour in the Lord is not in vain. Now he does not know this. He has been schooled, by an ill-conceived orthodoxy, into a suspicion of the worth and efficacy of all labour, and so is haunted and harassed by the imagination, that all his labour is in vain. The perplexity thickens around him, among the uncertain sounds of a trumpet coming to his ear, with what to him are dark and contradictory intimations; and we are not drawing a fanciful representation, but

offering a faithful copy of what is often realized in human experience, when we say, that there are many inquirers, who, thus lost and bewildered in the midst of difficulties, embark in a race that is at once fatiguing and fruitless, and engage in a painful service, which they afterwards experience to be utterly unproductive.

The life and experience of the REV. THOMAS SCOTT, the Author of the excellent Tracts which compose the present Volume, afford a striking exemplification of the different states of activity in the prosecution of a religious life, which we have endeavoured to illustrate. He was long perplexed and bewildered amidst the errors which we have been exposing, and made many vain and fruitless attempts to attain to peace, by endeavouring to establish a righteousness of his own, and it was not till humbled under a sense of the vanity and fruitlessness of all such attempts, that he took refuge in the all-sufficient righteousness of Christ, and found that peace he was so earnestly in quest of. In his "Force of Truth," he gives an honest and faithful delineation of the severe and protracted conflict he sustained, ere he found himself established on the sure foundation of the righteousness which is by faith. He experimentally found, that such an obedience as man can render, must be an obedience without hope, and without affection, and without one element which can liken it to the obedience of heaven-that the mere animal drudgery, to which a man feels himself impelled, by the impulse of force, or of fear, upon his corporeal powers, bears not only a different, but an essentially opposite, character, to that of an accepta