and indicates a personal obligation, personal duty, personal responsibility. In all the exhortations to obedience, fidelity, and a life of holiness, no intimation occurs, that he, who is faithful, obedient, and holy, has any other danger to encounter; or that he. who fails in his trial, and neglects his duty, has anything but his own personal sins, from which he has to fear at the hand of God; but that for these he is fully answerable in his individual person; no excuse being admitted upon the ground of the strength of temptation, or the weakness of the power of resistance; and no pretence for removing the guilt and the censure from himself to another.

This principle of divine government and human responsibility operates through the whole system, and appears in every part of the dispensations of heaven. In all together, and in each separately, are implied, our imperfect and mortal nature, and our moral accountableness to the Author of our being; that we come from his creating hand feeble, but innocent; the objects of his complacency and favor, till we lose them by our own voluntary acts; and incapable of being regarded as guilty in his sight, till we have become so by our own personal disobedience.

We see nothing that is inconsistent with this, nor anything unaccounted for, in the alleged universality of sin, nor in its early prevalence. On the contrary, the facts in these respects are such, as to confirm the opinion of no single, original, and irresistible tendency of nature; but an equal susceptibility of nature to the worst and the best impressions, and an equal

liability to take at first a right or a wrong direction. Were the character early formed and the dispositions first manifested, those of unmingled depravity, it would indeed show the necessity of something further to account for the fact; and no account, it is admitted, would be more probable, or more satisfactory, than that of a uniform and irresistible tendency of nature. But what we see and experience is far different from this. It is not a scene of uniform depravity, but of mingled good and evil. In the first stages of moral life, as early as there is the power of distinguishing between right and wrong, and therefore as soon as there can be either good or ill desert, instead of that uniformity of character, disposition, and action, which a nature either wholly depraved or wholly inclined to virtue must produce, we meet with all that variety in these respects, which were to be expected, upon that view of our nature, which has now been given. The bad passions, it is true, appear at first, but so also do the kind feelings. Anger is not earlier in its development in children than love; selfishness does not appear sooner than benevolence; revenge than a disposition to forgiveness and reconciliation. This, I am sure, is the experience of every parent. The love of truth is, at least, as often the characteristic of early childhood as a disposition to deceive. If it is sometimes found a difficult task to restrain the bad passions, to form good habits, to prevent a tendency to corruption, and to give a right direction to the taste and the inclinations; is it not also true, that examples occur, in which the native love of truth and rectitude,

the sense of duty and the power of conscience, have triumphed over strong temptations; and all the inducements that could be presented have been insufficient to corrupt the mind, and to draw it away into a wrong course.

Yet we do not deny that the world is full of wickedness. All have sinned. It is so represented by the sacred writers. History and universal experience come in confirmation of their testimony. All come short of moral perfection, have much to be forgiven and much to be corrected, in order to be regarded with complacency and approbation by the moral Governor of the world. It is the great design of our religion and of all its provisions, to bring about this change in us, and thus to reconcile us to the Author of our being, and qualify us to be the just objects of his complacency.

And this has been thought to furnish another reason for regarding our condition by nature as sinful and helpless in another and more positive sense than has now been represented. But I apprehend not with good reason. Our Saviour, indeed, taught the necessity of all passing through a great moral change designated by the phrase, "born again ;" and this new birth, or regeneration, is mentioned by him, and by his apostles, under several forms of expression of great strength and solemn import; such as being born of God, born of the spirit, renewed, created anew, becoming new creatures, putting off the old man, and putting on the new. Such strong terms to express the change, required in every one in order to become a

Christian, are thought to imply, that by the natural birth we come into the world actual sinners; since in order to our becoming Christians, we must be born again. But this may appear, by a just view of the subject, not to be a necessary implication. By our birth into this world we become merely human beings, endued with certain faculties, and capable of certain improvements. This is being "born of the flesh." If our faculties be neglected and our natural powers perverted, we become morally corrupt and sinful; but if, on the other hand, they be so cultivated and improved, as that we attain to a resemblance of the divine character in holiness, we may be said, without any extravagance of figure, to be born again; and this is a moral or spiritual birth; and this birth to holiness, whether it take place before or after any positive corruption of heart were contracted, may with great propriety be termed a being born of the spirit. This term may be applied with equal propriety, whether we pass to that new character and condition to which it introduces us, from a previous state of positive wickedness, or only from one, in which we were equally destitute both of sin and of holiness,

CHAPTER XVIII.

MEDIATION.

A VARIETY of expression is made use of to show, that Jesus Christ is the medium by which are communicated to us the blessings and hopes, that relate to the forgiveness of sin, the favor of God, and another life. He is, for these purposes, the mediator between God and man; he is represented as redeeming us to God, obtaining eternal redemption for us, and God, as "reconciling us to himself by Jesus Christ."

Passing for the present, all inquiry into the exact import of these, and similar phrases applied to the subject; what appears in general is, that, in some intelligible sense, Jesus Christ is the medium through which we have reconciliation with God, the forgiveness of sins, the resurrection from the dead, and eternal salvation.

In this method of bestowing on men the most important blessings, our heavenly Father has not deviated from his usual manner of communicating good. We perceive an analogy between what the constitution of nature and course of providence present to our daily experience and observation, and what the Gospel teaches of the principles and laws of the divine conduct. We see marks of the same