amid the sunbeams in which it floats. "Whoso keepeth his word, in him, verily, is the love of God perfected: hereby we know that we are in him." To keep God's word, is to make the revelation which he has made of his will the sole measure of our own; so that we can say in every thing, "Not my will, but thine be done." There is infinite sweetness in thus losing ourselves in God, in having our eye single to his glory in all things, so as to fill our whole being with the illuminations of heaven, and in being able to say, in the language of ancient piety, "I have set the Lord always before my face; he is on my right hand, that I shall not be moved." The manifestations of this exalted love must of course be different in us, from what they are in beings who have never sinned. Self-abasement, arising from a sense of having deviated from so good a law, is indispensable to our restoration to it as a rule of life, or to complete our idea of Christian morality. Does not our Saviour teach us, that the moral elevation, at which he aims, is to be attained by the humbling process of repentance, confession, and self-abhorrence? Are not those parts of the Bible, which contain the devotional language of holy men, crowded with expressions of self-condemnation? Do they not cry out, in view of the total wreck of their moral nature, "O wretched man that I am, who shall deliver me from the body of this death?" "Wo is me! for I am undone; because I am a man of unclean lips, and I dwell in the midst of a people of unclean lips; for mine eyes have seen the king, the Lord of hosts!" Are not sentiments like these involved in the repentance which John preached, with which Jesus began his ministry, and to which the apostles pressed the consciences of all men, from the opening of the Spirit's dispensation, till they sealed the doctrine with their martyred blood? Are they not, in the revival of a sinner from spiritual death, what the first convulsive movements of a drowned man are, in the process of his resuscitation; the first painful throes of returning life; the nucleus collecting to itself all the subsequent adornments of spiritual animation; the starting point of those excellences with which Christianity invests its subjects that they may be on earth living epistles of the moral purity and elevation of its divine Author; a colony on these barbarous shores to extend the manners and exalted civilization of highest heaven? Shall we not look in VOL. VII.-NO. XXVII. 42 vain for the morality of the gospel, therefore, where these sentiments of contrition and self-abhorrence have never been experienced? All this admitted, and we see not how any should fail to acknowledge the adjustment of Christian morality to the doctrine of total moral depravity, as parts of the same perfect whole. Could such a nucleus of reform spring from less sanguine views of human guilt? As soon as sinners indulge the opinion, that their guilt will admit of palliations, and that they are not totally vile and unclean, but have a spark of inherent goodness that entitles them to the gracious regards of their Maker, just so soon all their tendencies to the selfabasement, necessary to their return to the holy law as their rule of life, will vanish, and they will become mere formalists, or the avowed enemies of all religion. The entireness of our depravity consists not in the extinguishment of every thing in itself good from our characters, but in the principle at the basis of the whole. The principle of the divine law is perfect love, as consisting in the coincidence of our wills with the will of God in every thing; and the magnitude of our sin is to be measured by the extent of our deviation from this rule. What we call our virtue, so far as it springs not from this attitude of our wills, or so far as it is practised without reference to the glory of God as the supreme good, requires to be abhorred and repented of in dust and ashes. Did this truth come distinctly to our view, how should we be slain by it, as Paul says he was by the law! How should we come before our Maker, in the language of Job, "Behold, I am vile; what shall I answer thee? I will lay my hand upon my mouth." The gospel plan of urging upon us the contrast of what we are with what we ought to be, and to convict us of our guiltiness, in the manner of Peter, when he charged his Jerusalem auditors with crucifying the Lord of glory, has reason and philosophy in it. Nature itself teaches that the way to turn a child from a wrong into which he has fallen, is to urge upon his attention the enormity of it, the filial ingratitude which it involves, the pernicious consequences in which it must issue, and the reasonableness of the command of which it is a violation. Till you can make him sensible of the wrong, what hope is there of reclaiming him? In like manner, our restoration to the law as the standard of "absolute, pure morality," can only be effected by means of the doctrine of our total moral debasement, in having set up a standard in opposition to it, and in having placed our own personal gratification, instead of the divine glory, as the supreme end in all things. A reformation of life, that does not begin with an intelligent conviction of the truth of this doctrine, is a mere change in the symptoms of our moral disease, and not a breaking up of it from its foundations. It is a repentance that needeth to be repented of. We see not, also, how the character of Christ should wield such a magic power over those who are distinguished for the excellences of Christianity, if he were regarded any thing less than God manifest in the flesh. Did the world ever witness such instances of self-sacrifice for the good of others, as were evinced by the early propagators of the gospel? Though from the lower walks of life, and untrained to generous sentiments or magnanimous deeds, they rose to a sublimity of courage and intrepidity, above all heroic greatness, above all valorous achievements. The feeblest of them, though of the softer sex, in whom timidity, from being an instinct, has come to be regarded as an ornament, could boldly meet death in a den of vipers, on the arena of the amphitheatre in a contest with wild beasts, amid the barbarous clappings of exulting thousands, and in the worst form that infernal ingenuity could invent; all, not like other heroes, to encircle their names with a halo of glory, but in furtherance of the great designs of love to man, and that, by all means, they might save some. Painting, poetry and imagination are too feeble in their promptings to reach the reality of sober history on a theme like this. The benevolence, the forbearance, the zeal, the immortal hope, and the various graces which enter into the morality of those who caught their inspiration from the Lord Jesus, convert cowardice into courage, weakness into strength, apathy into ardor, holy and unquenchable, hatred into love, parsimony into charity, and thus transport the nature of man above and beyond itself. "The love of Christ constraineth us; because we thus judge, that if one died for all, then were all dead: and that he died for all, that they which live, should not henceforth live unto themselves, but unto him who died for them and rose again." Are such features of Christian morality as these, therefore, adjusted to any other view of Christ, than as God manifest in the flesh, or as the true God and eternal life? What, but a feeling of contact with the divinity, could originate such forms of virtue? Christ to the apostles was the broad sun, covering the whole hemisphere of thought and emotion. All this and more also, was he to Luther, and Knox, and Whitefield, and Howard, and Brainard, and Martyn, and to the whole phalanx of those who shine in the constellation of worthies, whether ancient or modern. The sentiment which burned in them towards the Son of God, is expressed in no exaggerated terms by the poet, when he sung: "Thou, my all! My theme! my inspiration! and my crown! My sacrifice! my God! what things are these?" What, therefore, must be the effect of losing sight of the proper deity of our Lord Jesus Christ? Would not the strong influence under which these distinguished excellences spring up, cease, as soon as the convert began to esteem him less than God, and to offer him measured praises ? Could less potent beams produce virtues of this luxuriant growth? Did admiration of any other name ever effect upon character the same brilliant results? Did it ever transform the besotted pagan into a prodigy of excellence? Did it ever inspire young and old, male and female, the ignorant and the learned, with an ardor of love to mankind, that shrinks not from the immolation of property, reputation and life, upon the altar of the world's happiness? Yea, could we hope for future generations of Pauls, of Luthers, of Whitefields, and of Howards, if the divinity of Christ were blotted from the faith of the church? The great principle on which God acts, in bringing men to his law as their standard of character, is that of developing in their minds the true idea of his own being and attributes. Himself, the sole fountain and source of goodness to a vast universe, where could motives of such force be found to overcome that selfishness which is the essence of our sin, as in his own munificent example? What could be more efficient in impelling us to live for the supreme good, than witnessing the bliss that ensues to God and holy beings from their devotion to it? What more likely to impress us with the odiousness of sin, than to see God's abhorrence of it? It is an object, therefore, which God keeps undeviatingly in view, throughout the pages of his word, to put us in possession of the true idea of his character and government. He begins with holding himself up to us as the Creator of all things and the possessor of heaven and earth, in opposition to the local divinities, which have been the objects of worship with the most of mankind. His indignation against sin he evinces by the circumstantial record of the first transgression, and the consequent woes in which it involved the whole race of man for time and eternity. He revealed himself as the living God, in contrariety to the dead gods of the nations; and as the I AM THAT I AM, or the self-existent, thus appearing to Moses, through whom he established a form of government to be administered over a particular nation, to whom he addressed his legislative decrees according to a fixed arrangement for communicating his will. And that article of the theocracy, by which it was made a treasonable crime, to be punished with death, for that people to worship, or even make mention of, another god, together with its repeated violations, their punishment, the denunciations of prophets against them as a stiff-necked and rebellious nation; and, indeed, their whole history as contained in the Old Testament, all tended to the great end of developing in the mind of man the true idea of God. But the work was not complete, till the Son, as the brightness of the Father's glory and express image of his person, appeared and unfolded God to our view in his character of infinite love. "No man hath seen God at any time; the only begotten Son, who is in the bosom of the Father, he hath declared him." How, therefore, can false views of the doctrines, involved by the divine being and attributes, fail of impairing the integrity of Christian morals? This is manifestly impossible, even according to Mr. Parker's own definition of them, as consisting in supreme love to God. Supreme love to what God? To a god of our own imagination?-or to the living |