a seriousness and diligence in some measure corresponding with their importance! We must confine our observations more immediately to that righteousness, the necessity of which is insisted on in the text. This is twofold-First, a righteousness ensuring our admission into the kingdom of heaven; and, Secondly, a righteousness at once evidencing the legitimacy of our claims, and at the same time constituting our meetness for that inheritance of the saints.

I. We may consider our Lord as speaking of a righteousness connected with our title to heaven. Where then may such a righteousness be found? Not amongst the Scribes and Pharisees of our Saviour's time. Righteous they were in their own esteem, and in the estimation, perhaps, of a misjudging world. They were strict observers of outward ceremonies, and scrupulously exact in their attendance on religious ordinances; they avoided gross immoralities, and maintained the appearance of decency and sanctity in their conduct; they made long prayers, and tithed their mint and anise

and cummin; and having thus far the form of godliness, they trusted in themselves that they were righteous :-but their profession was hypocrisy, their religion a delusion, and their refuge, at best, a mere refuge of lies. When, in the confidence of their self-righteous hopes, they ascended up as it were to the very gate of heaven, they found that gate closed against them, and themselves shut out into outward darkness; for they were "weighed in the balance and found wanting ;" and our Lord, in the words of the text, points at them as a beacon, to warn others of the rocks on which they made shipwreck of their eternal hopes. And is such an admonition needless at the present time? Are professors in the present day in no danger of imbibing the spirit, and treading in the footsteps of the Scribes and Pharisees? Is a spirit of legality and self-righteousness at length wholly banished from the Christian church? Is it entirely eradicated from every heart in the present assembly? Oh! that such a hope could be reasonably indulged. But for ministers to cherish such a hope.

concerning their people, without sufficient ground, would be to deceive themselves and endanger the souls of many. We must suppose the very reverse; and are compelled to fear that many of our hearers, were they frankly to confess their feelings. and sentiments, would utter (and utter it in the same spirit of self-dependance) the language of the young ruler: "What good thing shall I do, that I may have eternal life?" And to such we can only reply: "If thou wilt enter into life, keep the commandments ;" but, remember, your righteousness must exceed the righteousness of the Scribes and Pharisees. If they attended to the outward letter, you must keep these commandments in their most spiritual sense, and in their strictest application. If they regarded some of them, you must keep them all. If they observed a peculiar strictness at particular times, you must maintain an undeviating course, and continue faithful unto death. In a word, if you would entitle yourselves to heaven by your own doings, you must be enabled to say, even in a dying hour-taking your stand on

the margin of eternity, surveying your career from its first commencement, while each of the divine precepts passes one by one in review before you-you must, I say, be enabled to affirm: "All these have I kept from my youth." But suppose, in that momentous period your own. conscience should misgive you, and you should be found to lack one thing; even this would be sufficient to shake your confidence, to darken your brightest prospects, to render your salvation on the ground of your own righteousness impossible, and to seal your everlasting perdition. For what can be more decisive than the voice of Scripture upon the point? which declares, on the one hand,

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That he that doeth these things shall live by them :" and, on the other, That "he that keepeth the whole law, and yet offendeth in one point, is guilty of all;" for "cursed is every one that continueth not in all things that are written in the book of the law to do them."*

Once more we repeat the inquiryWhere is such a righteousness to be found;

* Rom. x. 5.

James ii. 10.

Gal. iii. 10.

a righteousness sufficiently meritorious to insure to us the divine favour, and to secure our entrance into the kingdom of heaven? Alas! our search must continue fruitless, so long as our eyes are directed to sinful man; for, survey at a glance the whole race of Adam, it must be confessed, that" there is none righteous, no not one." "Death has passed upon all men, for that all have sinned;"" therefore by the deeds of the law, shall no man living be justified." Nothing could possibly be more humiliating than the language of the prophet Isaiah: "We are all as an unclean thing, and all our righteousnesses are as filthy rags; and we all do fade as a leaf; and our iniquities, like the wind, have taken us away.' With which the testimony of our church, in the Homily on the Misery of Man, strictly accords. "We have heard," says the Homily, "how evil we be of ourselves: how of ourselves, and by ourselves, we have no goodness, help, nor salvation; but contrariwise, sin, damnation, and death everlasting which, if we deeply weigh and consider, we shall the better under