to produce pure and virtuous sentiments in the heart. He has done all that could be done for the salvation of the soul, without altering the nature of the soul He has spoken most impressively to every principle of our nature and infused into it new energy. He has addressed our understandings by his lucid and beautiful doctrine, our strong disposition to imitation by his example, and our gratitude and love-all our best affections by the most touching interest in our moral salvation, which he displayed, and which no accumulation of suffering could extinguish. His death, as it was by far the strongest proof of his love, possesses the greatest moral effect.

I hope I have made it plain, how it is that the death of our Saviour was necessary. It was not necessary to influence God, to appease the Divine Wrath, to satisfy the Divine Justice. The scriptures, as has often been observed, never say that Christ came to reconcile God to men. On the contrary their language always is, that he came te reconcile men to God; not to change the Deity-no frown has ever darkened the features of eternal Love-but to produce a change in man. I have heard language of this sort used in prayer, Lord, lift thou up the sight of thy reconciled countenance.' It is unscriptural. It was man, I repeat, who was to be reconciled--delivered from sin and brought to goodness, which is union with God. A great moral power, perfectly fitted to the nature and the laws of the human mind, was to be exerted and brought to bear upon man. That power has been introduced into the world in the Gospel. The death of Jesus Christ is full of it.

There are five different ways in which our Saviour,

by dying as he did, exerted a great moral influence, a power destructive of sin, which could not have been exerted under any other conditions.

1. The death of Jesus destroys the power of sin by furnishing a new and wonderful expression of the benevolence of God. A firm faith in the divine existence and goverment is universally acknowledged to be at the foundation of all religion in the soul of man. Numerous and beautiful as are the evidences of the Divine Presence and perfections, the simple fact of the death of Jesus Christ, when considered under all its circumstances, is the great phenomenon in the history of the divine administration, that gives us an impression of God's love, which we could receive from no other quarter. I cannot conceive of a stronger evidence of the tender concern of the Creator for his creatures. It is true, the proofs of the divine love are heaped up around me in measureless abundance, and every day and hour my debt of gratitude swells beyond all my powers of calculation. But then in the ordinary providence of God, there is a mechanical regularity and an indiscriminate profusion, which weaken at the same time that they ought to increase the sentiment of gratitude. But when I turn to the Cross and consider what costly bloood God permitted to be poured out there for our sakes amidst agonies the most excruciating, when I think that the purest being that ever trod this earth, one, who realized in himself excellence which before he exhibited it po human imagination could have conceived and to whose character every age whether sceptical or believing has given its unqualified admiration, was permitted to suffer and die under every aggravating

circumstance for the sake of men, ungrateful and unworthy, that their hearts might be touched, the Cross, that horrible instrument of death, becomes to me a symbol of love the most expressive. As God is infinitely benevolent, nothing can be so abhorrent to his nature as the infliction of pain, the existence of misery among his creatures. If then a being so exalted as Jesus Christ is permitted to suffer most severely, the end for which this is allowed must be precious in the sight of God. What more affecting manifestation of God's concern for his creatures could we have? Herein is the love of God towards us made manifest with exceeding power, in that, while we were yet sinners, Christ, Christ the anointed, the Spotless, the Beloved, died for us. Does our faith in God, impeded by the mysteries of life, begin to falter? We may join in the thrilling triumph of the apostle. He who spared not

his own son but delivered him up for us all-how shall he not with him also freely give us all things?' After such an instance of his love what is there that God will not do for us? I am persuaded that neither death, nor life, nor angels, nor principalities, nor powers, nor things present, nor things to come, nor height, nor depth, nor any other creature, shall be able to separate us from the love of God, in Christ Jesus our Lord.'

Since the death of Jesus gives us such a peculiar sense of the Divine Love, it animates and strengthens our love toward God. As this sentiment grows within us, the dominion of sin is abridged. We fly to obey him whom we love. In the contest with temptation, we come off conquerors through Him who loveth us.

2. The death of Christ, as the highest evidence he

could furnish of his own love, is fraught with moral power. There is nothing moves man so deeply as kindness. Love evinced by another will soften the heart when every thing else has failed. It was to this power of his death that our Lord referred in that declaration which has already been quoted: "If I be lifted up I will draw all men unto me.' A stronger proof of love could not have been given. There is every thing to enhance its moral effect. The death which our Saviour suffered was deeply disgraceful, and accompanied with indescribable circumstances of pain. It was a death too, continually foreseen by him, and the foresight of suffering could not, as we well know, have diminished the approaching agony. An evil that comes upon us unexpectedly we may bear well and think lightly of. But one that is foreseen accumulates horrors, the longer it is contemplated. Again, Jesus Christ was in the flower of his age, and he not only abjured every earthly prospect, but he gave up his life and submitted to every variety of indignity and suffering. We are apt to regard him as a mere instrument of God. But it was willingly and of his own accord that he endured what he did. He laid down his life of himself. And this was the reason why God loved him, and why he should receive our warmest love. He understood the work that was given him to do. He saw that the salvation of the world from sin required a deliverer, who must save it by suffering for it. He sacrificed himself cheerfully in this great cause, and was actuated and supported by the sublimest and most generous purpose that the soul of man could entertain.

[To be continued.]

ORTHODOX FAULT-FINDING WITH ORTHODOX PREACH

ING.

We have not yet been able to comprehend how that sort of preaching, whereby men are led to fancy either that they never can do their duty, as the old Calvinists say, or that they never will do their duty, as the new Calvinists affirm, until God by a special act of his almighty power, constrains them to perform it, can have any very strong tendency to awaken sinners to personal efforts of repentance and obedience. Nor is this lack of comprehension, we are gratified to find, always to be characteristic of such only as are called liberal Christians. Orthodox as it has heretofore been deemed, to ring all possible changes on man's cannot or man's will not, in connection with the strict sovereignty of divine grace, orthodoxy itself is beginning to cry out against it. A specimen of this protestation we have now before us in the last volume* of the Christian Spectator, which we think worth transferring to our pages. It is from an article written by a Theological Professor in Yale College, and constitutes a part of an introduction to some strictures on Dr Spring's theory of the means of regeneration.'

'There is real occasion for fault finding in regard to much of the preaching that passes for the exactest Orthodoxy.' 'It is marred by an imperfection by which it ought not to be marred.' 'The gospel is not now, as it was by the apostles, brought before the human mind in the character and relations of a cause which is to produce an immediate effect.' 'The sword of the spirit is used under the conviction that God in his sovereignty has withdrawn from it its etherial temper.' 'The everlasting gospel is preached from sabbath to sabbath—a cause perfectly fitted by divine wisdom to secure the

Vol. for 1829, p. 1, sqq.