Billeder på siden
PDF
ePub

foolishness to the congregation, and condemn both yourself and your folly, all the while you was holding me in the pillory; for you add:

'I tell you, if you are angry with your brother, 'if you ruin his reputation, you are guilty of a 'breach of the law of God as much as if you had ' taken away his life.'

[ocr errors]

Here my accuser has arraigned himself; proved himself a murderer; and owns that he has taken away my life. God grant that innocent blood be not laid to his charge. However, my enemy seems to have no conscience of this, for when Miss M. asked him, how he could abuse, in the public pulpit, those whose ministry God owned and blessed, and if he did not expect to be dealt with as he had dealt with others? He answered, To be sure;' and seemed as much pleased with his performance as Cain was when he went from the presence of God to build the city of Enoch. And how an evangelical association can sit under such slander as this; give their approbation by countenancing of it; thank God for it; and crave his blessing upon it, when God himself, according to my antagonist, calls it murder; is a mystery to me, and must rest with them. But we go on again.

When Christ says that heaven and earth shall pass away before one jot or tittle of his word shall fail, keep it in your idea that the word includes the law and we ought not to separate the law ' of God from the gospel, in as much as the law

' of God runs through the whole, and is blended 'with every part of the New Testament.'

If heaven and earth are both to pass away before one jot or tittle of the law can fail, which I really believe, then the law cannot be altered, or admit of that alteration, when it goes into heaven with you, as you formerly asserted. Your former established alteration is now overthrown, and I defy you ever to establish it on one gospel basis, if you preach for seven years. This is wild divinity, and worse affinity; a strange conjunction, where there is no connexion.

I always thought that the gospel the Saviour preached to the poor was opening the prison doors to those that were bound by the law; that his giving spiritual sight to the blind consisted in removing the vail that remained in reading the Old Tes tament; that in taking Christ's yoke upon us we got rid of that which neither we nor our fathers were able to bear.

We are not to separate the law from the gospel, say you. There is no need; God has done that ready to our hands. He has ordered the curse of the law to be pronounced on Mount Ebal, which Paul makes to be Mount Sinai, and in the figure Hagar, which includes all that are of the works of the law, for they are under the curse. And upon Mount Gerizim God orders the blessing; which, David says, is Mount Zion; "For there the Lord commanded the blessing, even life for evermore."

The sword of the Lord comes down on Idumea, the people of his curse, to judgment; while those that be of faith are blessed with faithful Abraham. The law is the ministration of death. The gospel brings life and immortality to light. The wages of sin is death to the legalist; the gift of God is eternal life to the believer. One covenant requires doing, the other receiving. One says, "Do, and live;" and the other says, "I will put my spirit upon them, and they shall live." One is called works, the other grace. If salvation be of works, it is no more of grace; if it be of grace, it is no more of works. Grace must withdraw and be no more grace, or works must withdraw and be no more works, Rom. xi. 6.

[ocr errors]

To be short, sir, if life be the gift of God to his adopted children, it cannot be called the wages of bond servants; and, if life be the wages that God as a master pays to his bond servants for their work, then it cannot be called the gift of God to his children. "To him that worketh [for life,] the reward is reckoned of debt;" he must keep the whole law or be damned; " but to him that worketh not [for life,] but believeth on him that justifieth the ungodly, his faith is counted for righte ousness." He is a son of God by faith, and the son abides in the house or family of God for ever; but the servant, though he steal into it, as you have done, abideth not ever, John viii. 35; but is cast out, as the bondwoman and her son was,

while the free woman and the heir of promise live, continue, and inherit all, Gal. iv. 30, 31.

This blending of yours, sir, breeds confusion, not harmony; it is not rightly dividing the word of truth. This is not the doctrine that was communicated under the influence of cloven tongues. This is not separating the vile from the precious. This is not explaining the two covenants; but is confusion—a jumbling of wrath and love, curses and blessings, death and life, servants and sons, commands and promises, wives and whores, bastards and heirs, the vail of ignorance and the light of knowledge, enmity and friendship, rebels and loyalists, servants of Mammon and servants of God, light and darkness, glory and damnation, all together. Sir, the word of God bears me out, chapter and verse, in all that I have said. I have not deviated either from the letter or the sense of scripture.

This blending of yours is what God calls untempered mortar; for you do not temper the mercy of God in harmony with justice, as it is held forth in his promise to the broken hearts of his children, in the law-obeying and justice-satisfying Saviour. Nor do you hold forth your knowledge of the terrors of God in his law, to persuade the bond children of the legal covenant to escape the curse of it. But you go on again to exalt yourself; and I after, to abase you.

[ocr errors][merged small]
[ocr errors]

6

[ocr errors]

he might suffer in our stead? It was all done to 'magnify the law of God; it was done to fix it upon an immutable footing, and to render it eternally venerable, both in the sight of men and

angels; and therefore we cannot have too high a respect to the law of God; for all the perfections ' of God shine forth here. It is a transcript of his • mind and will. Here does his holiness appear; here does his truth appear; here does his justice here does his eternity appear. appear;

[ocr errors]

Some

'will tell us it is done to introduce a better law; that they term a remedial law. A remedial law is to reduce the law to a covenant of works, and bring it down to terms, which they call faith and repentance, &c. which terms, as they tell us, God 'fixed. Salvation, in a remedial law, is that which • fills the mind full of pride, and puffs it up against 'the law of God.'

[ocr errors]

Here we are told that the sufferings of the Saviour were all done to magnify the law; but we are not told how; in laying himself down;' but not a word about his obedient life; to fix it upon

[ocr errors]

an immutable footing, and to render it eternally ' venerable in the sight of men and angels.' By the Saviour's obedient life the law was magnified and made honourable. By the Saviour's death God appeared just to his threatening, as well as the justifier of him that believeth in Jesus. By the Saviour's death justice was satisfied, judgment executed, God appeased, and sinners ransomed. Justice being satisfied, and judgment executed, a throne

« ForrigeFortsæt »