his power as a Creator; it claims our submission also on the ground of those transcendent perfections and excellences which belong essentially to the blessed God, and the exercise of which is inseparable from his administration. By virtue of these he is the sovereign good, the only good; for, strictly speaking, "there is none good but God;" the infinite, the absolute, the unchanging, the satisfying, the allcomprehending good; so that whatever appears beautiful or glorious among the creatures is but an efflux from his fulness, the faint reflection of his glory.

2. If we reflect on the powers with which we are endued, we cannot suppose that they are formed for no other end than the indulgence of carnal appetites, the amassing of riches, the enjoyment of sensual pleasures, or the procuring honours and distinctions from our fellowworms. We shall be at no loss to perceive a strange disproportion between such powers and such pursuits, and that they cannot be confined to them without descending unspeakably beneath our level, without a base forgetfulness of ourselves as well as God, and a voluntary dereliction of our rank. Jeremiah, when he witnessed the ruin and desolation of his country, beheld with astonishment those that were brought up in scarlet embrace dunghills; a deplorable, but an involuntary degradation. But this we are now speaking of is chosen and voluntary; these dunghills, for such are the highest forms of created good when compared with the blessed God, are embraced with appetite and desire.

3. If God were disposed to relinquish his claim, the usurpation of another master might be yielded to with the more plausible pretence: but this is not the case. If we believe his word, he never means to part with his right over his creatures. "If I am a father, where is my reverence? if I am a master, where is my fear?"* We cannot suppose, without the utmost absurdity, he will ever divest himself of his authority, which he could never do without impairing his dignity, and introducing confusion into his empire. He owes it to himself not to relinquish what we owe to him. The claims of the flesh then are founded on plain and direct usurpation.

II. Let us next examine the claims of the flesh by what we have already derived from it. Let us see whether it is such a master as deserves to be served any longer. Of the boasted pleasures it has afforded, say, Christians, what remains but a painful and humiliating remembrance? "What fruit had ye in those things of which ye are now ashamed?" Has any thing accrued to you from the service of sin which you would wish to renew? Though it might flatter your imagination with the appearance of good, did it not afterward "bite as a serpent and sting as an adder?" You remember the wormwood and the gall you were made to taste when you were first convinced of its evil, and you know what a bitter and evil thing it is to depart from the living God. It has already brought you to the brink of destruction; it has placed you in a situation in which nothing but the interposition of sovereign Mercy could have saved you. By estranging you from

* Mal. i. 6.

God, it shut up the path to real good. In your unconverted state it indisposed you to prayer, armed you with prejudice against the salutary truths of the gospel, darkened your understanding, and seared your conscience. Such was its deceitfulness, that you were led by it to put "evil for good, and good for evil; sweet for bitter, and bitter for sweet." Your ears were closed to the voice of the charmer, charmed he never so wisely. You were made to fancy that true religion was melancholy, that tenderness of conscience was needless scrupulosity, and that happiness was only to be found in the pleasures and pursuits of this world. It engaged you in the chase of innumerable vanities. You "followed after your lovers, but could not overtake them;" fled from one refuge to another, till, to speak in the language of the prophet, "You were wearied in the multitude of your way." In the mean time, to all pleasant and delightful intercourse with the Father of Spirits, to the soothing accents of peace and pardon issuing from Christ, and to all the consolations of piety, you were utter strangers. In your more serious and reflecting moments, your heart meditated terror; death, judgment, and eternity were awful sounds in your ears, and you only felt a delusive and sickly repose, while you forgot they had any existence. On a calm review of your conduct, you felt an uneasiness which you were conscious was so just and well founded that you seldom dared to reflect. Surely you will acknowledge that you at least are not debtors to the flesh. And what has the flesh to plead for its services which will bear for a moment to be weighed against these great evils? What has Satan to plead, who by means of it "rules in the children of disobedience?" Will he venture to mention a few vain and sinful amusements, a wanton arbitrary liberty, or a few transient guilty pleasures, which I trust you are so far from wishing to repeat, that you never think of them without blushing before God? How are you' more indebted to the flesh, since you had reason to hope you formed a saving acquaintance with God? The partial indulgence to its dictates has robbed you of your comfort, has retarded your progress to heaven, and made you pass many a day sad and disconsolate, when but for this the joy of the Lord would have been your strength.

The more we observe what passes around us with a serious mind, the more we shall be convinced how little men are indebted to the flesh. Look at that young man, the early victim of lewdness and intemperance, who, though in the bloom of life, has "his bones filled with the sins of his youth." Survey his emaciated cheek, his infirm and withered frame, and his eyes sunk and devoid of lustre; the picture of misery and dejection. Hear his complaint, how he mourns at the last, now his flesh and his body are consumed: "How have I hated instruction and my heart despised reproof, and have not obeyed the voice of my teachers, nor inclined my ear to them that instructed me! -I was almost in all evil in the midst of the congregation of the assembly." Is he a debtor to the flesh? Behold that votary of the world, successful as he has been in the pursuit of it, and stained by no flagrant crime. Yet he has lived "without God in the world;" and now his days are drawing to a close, he feels himself verging to

the grave, and no hope animates, no pleasing reflection cheers him. The only consolation he receives, or rather the only relief of his anguish, is in grasping the treasures he must shortly quit. Is he a debtor to the flesh?

III. We shall examine the claims of the flesh by the aspect they bear on our future interests. Before we engage in the service of a master, it is reasonable to inquire into the advantages he stipulates, and the prospects of futurity attendant upon his service. In the ordinary concerns of life, we should consider the neglect of such an inquiry chargeable with the highest imprudence. Dreadful is it, in this view, to reflect on the consequences inseparably annexed to the service of corruption. "If ye live after the flesh," says the apostle, "ye shall die." "The wages of sin is death." And to demonstrate the close and unavoidable connexion subsisting between them he adds, "If ye sow to the flesh, ye shall of the flesh reap corruption." It is not an incidental connexion, it is an indissoluble one, fixed in the constitution of things. "Lust, when it is conceived, bringeth forth sin, and sin, when it is finished, bringeth forth death." If we live in the indulgence of carnal appetites, if we comply habitually with the dictates of corrupt nature, the word of God has assured us of what will fol low: "The end of these things is death."|| "Let no man deceive you with vain words; for because of these things cometh the wrath of God on the children of disobedience." "Be not deceived, God is not mocked: whatsoever a man soweth, that also shall he reap.' For this reason we can never be debtors to the flesh, to live after the flesh; the very reason assigned in the clause immediately following the text. We can never be under obligations to obey such a master, who rewards his services with death,-death spiritual and eternal. The fruits of sin, when brought to maturity, are corruption: his most finished production is death,—and the materials on which he works the fabric of that manufacture, if we may be allowed so to speak, consist in the elements of damnation. To such a master we can owe nothing but a decided rejection of his offers, a perpetual abhorrence, and an awful fear of ever being deceived by his stratagems, or entangled in his snares.

X1.

ON THE CAUSE, AGENT, AND PURPOSE OF REGENERATION.

AMES i. 18. Of his own will begat he us with the word of truth, that we should be a kind of first-fruits of his creatures.

In this chapter the apostle endeavours to fortify the minds of the professors of Christianity, under the various trials and persecutions to which their religion exposed them, by assuring them of the happy fruits, in their spiritual improvement, they might expect to reap from them here, and the more abundant reward which awaited them hereafter. "My brethren, count it all joy when ye fall into divers temptations, knowing this, that the trying of your faith worketh patience.'

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Lest any might be induced to relax in their vigilance, under an idea that the circumstances of their trial were too arduous, and that if they shrunk in the combat they might excuse themselves from the consideration of its being disproportioned to their strength, and that they were therefore, in fact, tempted of God, he takes pains to repel this insinuation, and to show that the success of any temptation whatever is solely to be imputed to the unbridled corruption of the human heart. It is, he tells us, "when a man is drawn away by his own heart's lust, and enticed," that he is "tempted;"† this sinful corruption has its origin in his own heart only; nor is in the smallest degree to be imputed to God, as though he impelled to it by a direct agency, or so ordered things, in the course of his providence, as to render it unavoidable. The sum of his doctrine on this head appears to be this, that all evil is from ourselves, and from the disordered state of our hearts, on which temptation operates; while, on the contrary, all moral and spiritual good is from God, and “cometh down from the Father of lights, with whom there is no variableness, neither shadow of turning." The communications, of grace are emphatically denominated "good and perfect gifts," by way of asserting their immeasurable superiority to the blessings which relate to the present life; and of these gifts St. James affirms, that every one of them "is from above, and cometh down from the Father of lights." Their origin is truly celestial: they are not capable of being communicated, like the good things of this life, by one human being to another; they are, strictly speaking, divine donations, which can only proceed from above. As a further illustration of the proposition he had been laying down, he introduces the words of the text: "Of his own will begat he us with the word of truth, that we should be a kind of first-fruits of his creatures." These words instruct us in the cause, the instrument, and the end of the renovation of Christians. I. The cause is "the will" of God;-God operating by a free and spontaneous agency. His grace imparted in regeneration must be

* James i. 2, 3.

VOL. III.-E

↑ James i. 14.

James i. 17.

acknowledged to be grace the most free and unmixed, the fruit of his sovereign will, in opposition to any necessity of nature to which it may be ascribed: for though the nature of his agency cannot but be consonant to his character, though the fruit of his Spirit cannot but be most pure and holy, yet he was under no necessity to interpose at all. That the effect of his special operation on the hearts of the faithful should be sanctifying is unavoidable; but his operating at all by his Spirit in the restoration of a fallen creature is to be ascribed solely to "his own good pleasure.'

It is of his own will, as opposed, not only to a necessity of nature in him, but to any claim of merit in the subject of this his gracious agency. No previous worthiness of ours, no attractive excellence in us, engaged his attention, or induced him to exert his power in our renovation: for whence could this arise in a creature so fallen and corrupt as to need so thorough a renovation? Or how, since "every good and perfect gift cometh from above," can it be supposed to subsist previous to, or apart from, his donation? In the context the apostle has been strongly insisting on it, that the beginning of all moral evil is to be ascribed to man; the beginning of all good to the Supreme Being; and it is in supporting this assertion he introduces the words of the text, "Of his own will begat he us."

No signs of virtuous and laudable conduct had ensued to procure the communication of divine grace, agreeable to what another apostle observes in his epistle to Titus: "not by works of righteousness which we have done, but according to his mercy he saved us, by the washing of regeneration, and the renewing of the Holy Ghost."t

The production and maintenance of religion is styled, by the same writer, "the good pleasure of his will."

II. The instrument of this renovation is "the word of truth." In infusing the principle of divine life into the soul, God is wont to employ the gospel as the instrument, styled, with the utmost propriety, "the word of truth:" not only on account of the infallible truth and certainty of all its declarations, but on account of its high dignity and excellence, as a revelation from God, it is "the truth;" to which whatever is contrary is imposture, and whatever is compared to it insignificant.§

It falls not within the limits of this discourse to illustrate at large the manner in which the word of God produces a saving change: two circumstances may suffice to establish the fact. The first is, that where the light of the gospel is unknown no such beneficial alteration in the character is perceived, no features of a renewed and sanctified mind are to be traced. The second is, that among those who live under the light of the gospel, the reality of such a change is less or more to be perceived, in proportion to the degree in which the gospel is seriously attended to and cordially received. Every person who is deeply influenced by religious considerations, and enabled to live a holy and spiritual life, will acknowledge his deep obligations to the gospel; and that it is to its distinguishing discoveries he is, under God,

Phil. ii. 13.

↑ Titus iii. 5.

12 Thess. i. 11.

Gal. iii. 1.