justified by their own works, shall by their own works be condemned; and it mattereth not whether the works that are added unto Christ, be works outward in the world, or inward in the heart. Therefore I say, that he who withholdeth a sinner from receiving Christ as his assured salvation, and rejoicing in him, and seeing at once God to be reconciled through Christ unto his soul, preacheth not the Gospel, and doth not convert souls unto God, nor yet build up souls unto Christ. He who maintaineth that a season and a time is necessary before a man can take hold of peace and rejoice in God his Saviour, declareth a lie; and they who believe it believe a lie; and both of them shall perish together in the lie wherein they believe. God hath sent me, and all ministers of Christ, to preach forgiveness of sins, and the good news, the Gospel, of the kingdom, unto all men. The thing I preach is, Thy sins are forgiven thee; thy sins are washed away in the blood of Christ: believe the good news.' And if the poor wight believeth that this is the verity of God, why should he any more grieve, but instantly rejoice? Being justified by his faith, let him have peace with God. Not to be at peace, is not to be reconciled; and how can that be, if you believe that you are reconciled? Therefore I say, faith giveth peace; and he that is not at peace hath fallen short of his faith, if he hath believed at all. Now, forasmuch as the spiritual and evangelical and moral have risen up as one man in the church, in our own church, against those who thus preach Christ as Christ ought to be preached; I say, they are not preaching Christ, but withholding the preaching of him. And it is no matter to me whom this condemneth-my own father, or my own brother-I say it to the face, as Paul did to Peter, that herein they are to be blamed. And for myself, I do bless God, that, while intent upon wholesome doctrine, and serving him as best I knew, he did instruct me in this very matter of the freeness and the peace of believing; which also I was not slow to receive, and now shall by his grace be bold to declare. Now, brethren, I say, that there is creeping in a false Gospel, which intermingles and intermarries a man's own experience of himself with the work of Christ; and he that believeth and receiveth this, is truly further from God than if he were a publican and a sinner you have swelled his own importance by marrying his vileness and worthlessness to the infinite preciousness of our blessed Lord. I would rather go and preach the Gospel to the most untutored of the people, to a company of wretched women in the prison, or to the sweepings of the streets, which are gathered into asylums for the night, than preach it to a congregation of men resting upon their experiences and their evidences: and therefore I hold it to be well spoken by our Lord, that these proselytes" are more the children of hell than before;" or, if you will have it more softly expressed, that they are farther from : ments are near. the kingdom of heaven: according as it is written, "The publicans and harlots enter into the kingdom of heaven before you." These are solemn and awful truths which I utter; but the time is uncertain, and admitteth not of delay the judg"Behold, he standeth at the door:" therefore I use penetrating and dividing words, which indeed set my brethren against me; but what can I do? I must obey God rather than man. Let men take heed how they read, and not be offended with these words, which are uttered in love, and in the desire to save my own soul and the souls of those who read: and I would fain profit the church, and warn our country, which is nothing without her church. Our conviction is, that God's dealings with the church in this land, and with the land itself, which is included in the church by reason of our Christian laws and government, have their parallel or antitype in his dealings with the former Jewish church and Jewish state; which, like our own, was a true church and state constituted on ecclesiastical principles, and therefore not destroyed, but only humbled and laid low for a season. To the end, therefore, of ascertaining what were the great capital offences for which the Jewish church and state were overthrown for a season, I have taken up the consideration of these woes, being minded, as I go along, to apply them unto the state and the church in our own land. IV. In the 16th verse our blessed Lord denounceth woe upon the Scribes and Pharisees, or the constituted authorities in the church, for their blind guidance of the people, in having taught them that it was a small thing to swear by the temple, but binding to swear by "the gold of the temple;" that it was nothing to swear by the altar, but binding to swear by "the gift" upon it. He rateth them as fools and blind, for not perceiving that the temple sanctified the gold, and that the altar sanctified the gift; and he teacheth them that whoso sweareth by the altar sweareth by it and by all the things thereon, and whoso sweareth by the temple sweareth by it and all things thereon, and whoso sweareth by heaven sweareth by the throne of God and by Him who sitteth thereon. We are not to suppose that our Lord doth hereby justify or encourage oaths for the confirmation of a man's word or promise; seeing in his Sermon on the Mount he had taught the contrary doctrine, saying, "Swear not at all, neither by heaven, for it is God's throne; nor by the earth, for it is his footstool; nor by Jerusalem, for it is the city of the Great King; nor by your head, for ye cannot make one hair thereof white or black: but let your communication be Yea, yea, Nay, nay; for whatsoever is more than these cometh of evil." It was one of the evils founded upon the traditions of the elders, who said, "Thou shalt not forswear thyself, but shalt perform unto the Lord thine oaths." Yet evil in its principle as this was, VOL. I.NO. IV. 4 Q by giving encouragement to man's impiety, and making a difference in the obligation of our simple word and promise, and the same when confirmed by an oath, it still represented the state of moral obligation which man felt to man for those things which he had promised and here the Scribes and Pharisees had shewn their iniquity, by making the evil thing to be much worse, and by relaxing the obligations, not of a word or promise merely, but even of an oath; allowing some oaths to be binding, and permitting others to be broken. The injury hereby done to the confidence of man in man, under the sanction of the spiritual rulers and guides of the people, is not, however great it was, the main subject whereof our Lord complaineth; but the ignorance, the folly, and the wickedness displayed in the distinction which they took between those oaths which were obligatory and those which were not so. They forgot the sacredness of the temple, in their avaricious and vain-glorious exaggeration of the gold of the temple; they forgot the sacredness of the altar, in their covetousness of gifts: and therefore permitted oaths and promises confirmed by the temple and the altar to be avoided, but those confirmed by the gold of the temple and the gift of the altar they held to be binding. To such an extent did they carry this hunger and thirst after precious gifts, that they did not scruple to set aside the most binding of natural obligations, and the most solemn of Divine commandments, in order to gain their end: as our Lord expressly chargeth upon them in these words (Mark vii. 9), "Full well ye reject [or frustrate] the commandments of God. For Moses saith, Honour thy father and thy mother; and, Whoso curseth his father or his mother, let him die the death: but ye say, If a man shall say to his father or mother, It is corban, that is to say, a gift, by whatsoever thou mightest be profited by me; and ye suffer him no more to do ought for his father or his mother." Thus could they make the word of God of none effect through their tradition; and not in this instance alone, for the Lord addeth, "Many such like things do ye." Now, that which gave this extraordinary stimulus to the desire of gifts, to the hunger and thirst of golden ornaments for the temple, was, that for a long season, of almost forty years, they had been adorning the temple and enriching it, until it had become the wonder of the world. The sums of money expended in the time of Herod the Great, who was king when our Saviour was born, are not to be reckoned up and they were levied of the people under this system of deception and delusion; by giving to these acts of pecuniary bounty a value and an importance which neither the obligations of nature, nor the commandments of God, nor the ordinances of religion, could stand against. This false morality and false religion the Scribes and Pharisees : had brought to such perfection, that the people seem to have given with great liberality, if we may judge by an incident in our Lord's life, recorded in the xiith chapter of Mark, at the 41st verse; "And Jesus sat over-against the treasury, and beheld how the people cast money into the treasury; and many that were rich cast in much." And that the moral guilt attached to these gifts was a chief cause of the downfall of the temple and Jerusalem, seems to be implied in these words (Luke xxi. 5); "And as some spake of the temple, how it was adorned with goodly stones and gifts, he said, As for these things which ye behold, the days will come in which there shall not be left one stone upon another which shall not be thrown down." But, however this may be, it seems to be a constant progress in corruption to consummate itself in the love of gathering and hoarding money, and in making every thing sacred in religion, venerable in government, and dutiful in the relations of life, to bow unto this, the lowest, basest passion of the human mind. If you will cast up in your memory the instances of God's judgments upon kingdoms-as, for example, the judgment of Croesus by Cyrus, of Darius by Alexander, and of India by the sultans of Gazna-you will ever find that the judgment is brought upon them in the midst of great wealth; and if you will make the same account of the destruction of temples-as, of the temple of Apollo at Delphi, of Diana at Ephesus-you will find that immense treasures were amassed in them at the time. And so it was with the temple of God at Jerusalem, shortly after those days in which our Lord warned them. The same hath been observed of the Papacy; that the building of St. Peter's at Rome, together with the luxury of the court of Pope Leo X., was the proximate cause of the Reformation, by driving on at such a rate all manner of exactions and imposts, under religious pretences, as brought the Papal system into shame and contempt, and made the kingdoms weary to bear it. They forgot the sacredness and the spirituality of every Christian ordinance, and sold it openly for money to the highest bidder. Now, if I err not, the same thing is proceeding in the Protestant church of Great Britain. An object the wildest, and most frantic, and most opposite to God's word, which ever deluded the minds of men-to wit, the conversion of the whole world— hath been started within these last thirty years; and to the attainment of this object it is openly avowed that money is the chief desideratum. Four years ago it was stated and argued, in one of their chief congregations, and published for the information of all, that the Lord had expressly undervalued money as a prerequisite to or condition of the Apostolical missionary unto the heathen. With high scorn, with bitter sarcasm, with cruel insinuations, all this was rejected and since that time the pursuit of money, as the chief, and I may say only, means-it is nearer the truth than to say chief means-of attaining this mighty and impracticable object, hath been going on with hotter haste and more fervid diligence until this day. Every means is taken, that human sagacity can devise, to increase the contributions of the people. I cannot tell what in the secret workings of the system may be done, but this I know, that in several places the laws both of God and man have been frustrated, under the sense of duty to these great money-getting societies. I myself—and I am ashamed to tell it-have been the preacher where the common people, and all who could not afford to give silver on entering the church, were not permitted to partake in the worship. It is needless to say, that I was not a party to this: I would sooner have lost my right hand. I knew not of the abomination till I was going to the pulpit, and before the service I entered my solemn protest against it. And the sorrow and the marvel was, that the pious men and ministers engaged in that missionary work could not see, could not be brought to see, the evil of it, but were greatly enraged that I should call it an abomination. This is only one instance, amongst many which I could mention as having occurred within my own experience. I found it common for the managers of these charities, in order to have the congregation chiefly made up of money-givers, to choose a time for the public worship at which the common people were not able to attend. There is a devotion to the mere pecuniary part of all these societies, which cannot fail to corrupt the morality and the religion of all concerned with them. And when I see the great strength of preaching put forth upon such occasions-the dignitaries of the church ascending the pulpit, almost exclusively, for such objects; the popularity of more humble men put in requisition for the same; the influence of high names and noble persons, every thing, in short, by which the matter of giving money can be exaggerated, called into operation-I believe, and I am not afraid to express it because I solemnly believe it, that the very same destruction of all morality and religion is going on in the church at this day, under the pretence of a great and a good cause, which went on in Jerusalem in the days of our Lord, and which went on in the Papacy in the days of Luther. And as the Jewish church soon came to an end; and the Papal church soon thereafter, in the Council of Trent, sealed itself the Apostasy; so believe I that the church in this land will soon, by the progress of this very same religious avarice, be visited and judged of God. Now, observe further, that as the temple was forgotten in the gold, and the altar was forgotten in the gift: so the church, which the temple did symbolize; every ordinance of the church -the sacraments, the creeds; the ordination of bishops, presbyters, and deacons; the discipline, and every venerable thing besidesis held at nought, in comparison with the contributions of money, |