God?" is a greater question than that. For whatever thoughts, knowledge, or notions, men may get in their heads respectiug the only true God, and Jesus Christ whom he hath sent, daily experience shews that such knowledge is no defence against sin, nor helmet against errors; it is nothing but a broken cistern. While the strong man armed keeps possession of the palace, he cares not for head notions, however pure; for, as soon as he can push such a sinner into an open profession, and into a pulpit, and establish him in the esteem of simple souls, and in the hearts of hypocrites, he will be sure to drive him to make shipwreck of all his sentiments, or teach him to improve them to the advancement of his own infernal interest. I suppose we have not a reviser nor propagator of heresy, nor one preacher of lies, in the whole nation, but who first began his profession and ministry with such a dry, empty stock of speculative knowledge as this book contains.

Was every unregenerate person in the nation to read this pamphlet till he acquired all the knowledge that it treats of, he would still be without God, and have no hope in the world. An experimental, spiritual, and heart-felt knowledge of the Lord Jesus Christ, must be had before eternal life can be known, felt, or enjoyed. Head knowledge is attended with pride, and exposes a man to the condemnation of the devil; while heart-felt knowledge is attended with life eternal. You begin your treatise of knowledge at the

wrong end. The sinner does not learn his first lesson of religion in the gospel, but in the law. He does not begin with Jesus Christ, but with the Father: "Every one that hath heard, and hath learned of the Father, cometh unto me." The sinner will never hunger nor thirst after righteousness till the sentence of death gives him an appetite.

God, who is a consuming fire, comes near to the elect sinner to judgment, and appears in his fiery law. Then he calls upon God in trouble, and is delivered; but he is sure to get his first answer in the secret place of thunder, Psal. lxxxi. 7. Here the poor sinner gets his first impressions of the tremendous attributes of God, which sink too deep for time or eternity ever to efface. In the glass of the law the holiness of God appears; and in this astonishing vision the dreadful leprosy is discovered from head to foot, both within and without. This view stirs up his guilt and filth from the bottom of the heart, while the raging infection appears a loathsome disease. All external varnish, dead works, dry formality, good name, false confidences, lying refuges, and legal hopes, find their funeral together, or fly away like chaff from the threshing-floor, or as smoke out of the chimney so that no place is found for them. It was this view, and the seraphic cry of of 'Holy! made the prophet Isaiah cover Unclean! unlean!'

holy! holy!' that

his lips, and cry,

At the sight of divine holiness in the law sin

revives, and justice applies the sentence. Nor has the sinner one plea to urge why it should not be speedily executed: his mouth is stopped, and he is become guilty before God. Such a sinner sees and feels that God is strictly just. Here all his former notions of a God all mercy forsake him and flee.

The truth of God is no less terrible to the sinner than his justice. He sees that God has spoken and revealed his wrath against sin, and pronounced his curse upon every transgressor; and has declared that he will not clear the guilty. And true to his own honour, and to the word that is gone out of his lips, he must be. Hence the poor sinner sees no way of escape: he makes confession; he cries for mercy; he makes use of every argument he is master of; he turns his feet to the testimony, and makes haste, and delays not, to keep the commandment; he makes the law his only rule of life, walk, and conduct; and, in good earnest, sets about the performance of every duty that appears right to him, in hopes of inclining his Maker to be propitious. But here the immutability of God appears: he finds that God is of one mind, and none can turn him; and what his soul desireth that he doth. This destroys his former notion of God's being mutable, and altogether such an one as himself. He is obliged to acknowledge that with God is terrible majesty ; and, as touching the Almighty and his ways, he cannot find him out.

A sinner thus arraigned, and impressed with

the holiness, justice, truth, and immutability of God, is at his wit's end. He is like a wild bull in a net, full of the fury and the rebukes of his Maker. Every wound slightly healed is laid open; every avenue, or false retreat, cut off; righteousness and holiness, by the law, are altogether despaired of; and the way to heaven by works, whether in whole or in part, for ever closed.

Thus far the sinner learns, in the law, to know the only true God; and this lesson prepares him for the new, living, and consecrated, way through the vail. And thus to use the law is using it lawfully; for it is not made for a righteous man, but for the lawless and disobedient, for the ungodly and for sinners: "Now we know," says Paul, "that whatsoever the law saith it saith to them who are under the law, that every mouth may be stopped, and all the world may be guilty before God." Pointing sinners to a physician, who never felt their sickness, and espousing them to Christ before their first husband be dead, is leading them into adultery. A sinner who thus learns of the Father cometh unto Christ, to whom none can come except the Father draw them.

The sinner's face is no sooner turned Zionward than the storm appears at his back; which is sweetly abated by a still voice behind him, intimating that he is now in the way. Dying love, by the Spirit, echoes from the cross to his conscience; which is answered again by the voice of faith; but so unintelligibly, that the sinner can

hardly understand it, though the soul feels the effects of it. At this the heart begins to lose its native hardness, and gradually opens and enlarges ; while every faculty of the soul is upon the watch, and every thought of the heart intent upon the strange emotion; until the blessed Spirit of God conveys a divine unction to the understanding, and proposes a crucified Saviour to the sinner, as the only object of hope, and testifies of him as such. With a longing eye the poor sinner looks, and with a trembling heart, and a wavering faith, longs, and begs of God to bring him near, and reveal his Christ in him. As the eye of a man upon the hand of his master, and as the eye of a maid on the hand of her mistress, so the sinner's eye waits upon God until he hath mercy upon him,

Psal. cxxiii. 2.

His face being Zion-ward, Zion-ward he looks; for out of Zion, the perfection of beauty, God shines: and into the sinner's heart he shines, to give him the light of the knowledge of the glory of God in the face of Jesus Christ. And in this glorious ray the Saviour descends to the sinner's soul, and God reveals his Son in him. When the voice of atoning blood at once drowns all the thundering sentences of Sinai, and silences every accusation in that tremendous court of judgment, the sinner feels himself with God at the mercy-seat, where the righteous in Christ may dispute with him, and so be delivered for ever from their Judge, Job xxiii. 6, 7; unless he permits the bond