them to press obedience, and to dwell more upon the duties than upon the doctrines of religion. But the principles which have been explained leave no room to suppose that Calvinism is inconsistent with rational practical preaching; and as it is most desirable that the place which the Calvinistic system allows for this kind of preaching should be distinctly understood, I shall suggest, as the last conclusion which may be drawn from the view given of the connexion between justification and sanctification,

5. That as the Scriptures abound with precepts and exhortations, so it is the duty of those who preach the gospel to "affirm constantly this faithful saying" and to imprint it upon the minds of their people, "that they who have believed in God should be careful to maintain good works."* This duty may be performed in two ways, both of which ought occasionally to be employed. One of the peculiar doctrines of Christianity may be made the subject of discourse; and, after explaining it, as far as you are warranted by Scripture, you may illustrate its influence upon practice, the obligations and the motives to holiness which arise from it. Or you may make one of the precepts of the Old or New Testament, or one of the examples held forth in Scripture, your subject; and, after pointing out the duty enjoined by the precept, or the lesson conveyed by the example, you may enforce it, by adding to all the considerations which reason, and prudence, and experience suggest, those most interesting arguments which the gospel affords. In either way you conjoin evangelical and moral preaching; you follow the example of Christ and his apostles; and you minister most effectually to the instruction of those who hear you. If you omit all mention of the doctrines, the motives and the views of the gospel, you become mere moralists; you neglect the advantages which the religion of Christ gives you for laying hold of the minds of men; and you may learn from the history of the heathen world, that such discourses, however sound in argument, however rich in imagery, however ornate in style, are little fitted to promote the reformation of mankind. But if, on the other hand, you fail to follow out the doctrines of the gospel to those consequences which are always deduced from them in Scripture; if the pictures which you present of the corruption of human nature and the efficacy of divine grace tend to convey an impression that all exertions upon our part are unnecessary and unavailing; and if your discourses give any person occasion to think that saving faith may exist in the mind of him who continues in sin, you not only preach the gospel in a manner for which the Scriptures give you no warrant, and do unspeakable injury to the people by unhinging all their moral ideas, but you depart from the principles of that system upon which you profess to build such discourses, and show that you have viewed it only on one side, without comprehending the connection of its parts. For, although, in opposition to Pelagian and Semi-Pelagian errors, we hold that man is passive in his conversion, that the inclination of the soul to turn to God is the work of the Spirit, for which there are no preparatory dispositions originally and naturally belonging to the mind, until it be renewed by grace; yet we hold also, that when

* Titus iii. 8.

these dispositions are implanted, they seek for exercise as much as the propensities which are inseparable from our frame; that when the mind is renewed it delights in those employments which are congenial to the image after which it is created; that when our faculties are emancipated from bondage they use the liberty which is restored to them; that man, instead of being passive after his conversion, is directed by the Spirit in the exercise of those powers of action which he has recovered, and that because "God worketh in him both to will and to do of his good pleasure, he worketh out his own salvation."*

To man thus restored the precepts of the word of God are addressed. The obedience required of him is the obedience of faith, yielded in the strength which is given him, proceeding from the motives of the gospel, and relying for acceptance upon the grace there exhibited. But all the methods which according to the constitution of his nature may be of use in exciting him to this obedience are occasionally employed in Scripture. All the springs of action in the human breast, gratitude, love, hope, fear, emulation, the desire of honour, natural affection, and enlarged philanthropy, are there touched; and from thence we derive our example and our warrant for that variety in the style of practical preaching, by which we may, with the blessing of God, arrest the attention and reach the hearts of our hearers.

Although, therefore, the ministers of the gospel do not in every sermon lay down a system of theology, they are not to be supposed to have departed from the "form of sound words;" for that form admits of all the lessons of candour, justice, benevolence, temperance, piety, truth, and virtuous exertion; and of all the modes, historical, descriptive, argumentative, or pathetic, in which such lessons can be conveyed. Our discourses correspond to the design of preaching, when we inculcate these lessons in the method which appears to us most effectual for calling upon the people "not to receive the grace of God in vain," but "to stir up the gift of God which is in them :" and all who improve these lessons, so as to abound in the fruits of the Spirit, discover that they have felt that divine power, by which the disciples of Christ are created unto good works, and put forth the strength conveyed to their souls by him, "without whom they can do nothing," but "through whom they can do all things."

Fuller's Comparison of Calvinistic and Socinian Principles as to their moral tendency.

Phil. ii. 12, 13.

CHAPTER IV.

SANCTIFICATION.

THAT change of character, which is the effect of the operation of the Spirit, and the beginning of sanctification, is called conversion, because it turns men from the sentiments and habits which enter into our view when we speak of human nature as corrupt, to those sentiments and habits which are produced by the Holy Spirit. Hence it follows, that sanctification consists of two parts. In considering its nature, each of these demands our attention. The first part is that which we call repentance.

SECTION I.

REPENTANCE and faith are often conjoined in Scripture as necessary for the remission of sins; they originate in the same change of character, and they cannot be separated. For as the repentance of sinners cannot be accepted by the righteous Governor of the universe without the righteousness of Christ, which by faith is counted as theirs, so their faith is not such as gives them an interest in that righteousness, unless they forsake the sins which upon account of it are forgiven. We say, therefore, in the words of our Confession of Faith, that "repentance unto life is an evangelical grace, the doctrine whereof is to be preached by every minister of the gospel, as well as that of faith in Christ."* In preaching it, there is frequent occasion to illustrate the following propositions. 1. Repentance unto life proceeds upon the revelation made in the gospel of the mercy of God and the mediation of Christ; because, unless with the Socinians we deny the necessity of the atonement, we must account the case of every sinner desperate without that revelation.t 2. Repentance unto life does not consist merely in a reformation of the outward conduct, or an abstinence from those open transgressions which subject men to inconvenience and reproach; but it arises out of a heart which is renewed, as is intimated by the term μerava, which the sacred writers use to denote it, and it implies a hatred of sin; because, unless with the Socinians we deny the corruption of human nature, we cannot account a change permanent or acceptable, when the principles which produced former transgressions remain unsubdued. 3. Re+ Psalm cxxx. 3.

* Confession of Faith, xv. 1.

pentance unto life does not rest in feelings of compunction and expressions of sorrow; because if the emotions excited by the recollection of the past are founded upon a change of mind, they must be accompanied with a solicitude, and a constant endeavour to abstain from those sins which gave them birth.

Some of the grossest errors and corruptions of the church of Rome respect the doctrine of repentance. According to the tenets avowed in the standards, and sanctioned by the practice of that church, repentance consists in three acts; confession of sins to the priest; contrition, or attrition; and satisfaction. 1. The practice of confessing their sins in private to the ministers of religion which the church of Rome requires of Christians, is unauthorized by Scripture. We are there commanded to confess our sins to God; and in one place we are commanded to confess to one another our faults, i. e. the offences we have given to one another. Persons guilty of notorious sins have, in all ages, according to directions left by Christ and his apostles, been excluded from the communion of the church. A desire of being re-admitted has led them to confess guilt in the presence of that society to whom they had given offence; and this voluntary confession, being accepted as a testimony of the sincerity of their repentance, has restored them to that communion from which they were excluded. Upon this kind of confession, which was at first voluntary, and available only for the purpose of relieving from ecclesiastical censures, the church of Rome grounded that private auricular confession, which it enjoins to all as necessary for their acceptance with God. The doctrine concerning repentance was thus made the occasion of flagrant abuse. Not only is auricular confession productive of much inconvenience to society, by giving the ministers of religion an undue and dangerous influence over the minds of the people in their most secret affairs; but it perverts their notions of the justification of a sinner, and it provides a method of quieting their consciences, which is so easy of access that it encourages them to sin with little fear. 2. If the word contrition means that sorrow for sin, which is connected with the hatred of it as a transgression of the divine law, and as rendering us odious to the Father of spirits, it is indeed indispensably required of every sinner, and it naturally produces a change of life; for as the apostle speaks, 2 Cor. vii. 10, "Godly sorrow worketh repentance unto salvation;" a text most significant and instructive in itself, and upon which there is a sermon by Bishop Sherlock, which may be of more use than any treatise that I know in giving a distinct and full conception of the nature of repentance. But the Church of Rome, wishing it to be thought that they possess the power of imparting the benefits of repentance to persons who manifestly have not attained this godly sorrow, because they do not repent of their sins so as to forsake them, substitute as an alternative for contrition that sorrow, to which they give the name of attrition. By this they mean a sorrow, which proceeds not from a sense of the evil of sin, but from the loss, the shame, or inconvenience of any kind, of which it has been the occasion. This sorrow may be expressed by words, by gestures, or by actions; and all these expressions of attrition, being considered

James v. 16.

by the church of Rome as parts of repentance, although they do not imply any change upon the mind of a sinner, as conspiring with the two other parts of repentance to entitle him to receive absolution, make men easy under the consciousness of past sins, and form an inducement not to forsake these sins, but merely to exercise a little more prudence in the repetition of them. 3. By satisfaction the church of Rome means such works as the following: the saying a prescribed number of prayers, the giving a certain portion of alms to the poor and of gifts to the church, the submitting to certain mortifications and penances, or the engaging in appointed hazards and toils; all which deeds being set over against the sins which were confessed, and for which attrition was expressed, are conceived to constitute a compensation, offered by us to God for the breach of his law, in consideration of which that breach is forgiven. This last part of repentance appears to all who hold the perfection of the sacrifice offered by Christ upon the cross to be most dishonourable to him, because it implies a necessity of our adding a personal atonement for sin to the " one offering by which he hath perfected for ever them that are sanctified." To all who entertain that opinion of our good works which I am by and by to state, it appears most presumptuous on our part; and, independently of any system of religious opinions, it plainly institutes a kind of traffic, which is most unseemly, which may be perverted to the worst purposes, and which totally unsettles the foundations of morality, by teaching that the performance of one duty is an excuse for the neglect of another.

In opposition to these errors and corruptions of the church of Rome, some of which may be traced in prejudices that still remain in the minds of the people of Scotland, we hold, and it is a great part of the business of our preaching to remind the people, that repentance, proceeding from a change of mind, and implying that sorrow which the Apostle calls godly, terminates not in certain formal acts which may be performed by any one, but in a change of life; that it is accepted by God, not as any compensation or atonement for the offences committed against him, but purely upon account of the merits of Christ; and that the only unequivocal marks of its being effectual for the remission of sins, or being what the Scripture calls repentance unto life, are to be sought for not in the impressions, or emotions, or resolutions, with which it is accompanied, but in the solicitude with which men avoid the sins of which they profess to repent, and in the zeal and the care with which they study to practice the opposite virtues.

It is possible, indeed, that repentance may be sincere, when there is no opportunity of exhibiting these marks: for it would be presumptuous in us to say, that the steps by which a criminal is conducted to his end are in no case the instruments which the Spirit of God employs in his conversion, or that sudden death, by cutting short the labour of virtue which had just been begun, blots the beginning of it out of the book of life. But it is very much our duty to warn the people of the folly, the guilt, and the danger of continuing in sin, and trusting to a late repentance: and although, when we are called to - witness those professions of repentance, which are sometimes produced by the near approach of death, we naturally express our earnest wish that they may find acceptance with the Searcher of