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ject to each of the parties is the possession of ourselves, and the sway of a superior over the powers and the principles of our constitution. We are not to sit, and merely look on as passive and unconcerned spectators, during the pendency of a contest, by which our own interests are so momentously affected. And, accordingly, we are called upon to resist the Devil, and he will flee from us-to resist not the Spirit of God, and He will take up His abode in our hearts-to put away from us every instigation of evil, as coming from the evil one-to cherish every instigation of good, as coming from the Holy One and the Sanctifier-Thus to view ourselves as engaged in a warfare of which we are the subjects; and unseen but lofty and supernatural beings are the principals: And, to encourage us the more in the prosecution of this warfare, we are told that Satan shall be bruised under our feet shortly, and that greater is He that is in us than he that is in the world, and that Christ came to destroy the works of the Devil, and finally as in the text, that if God be for us, there is none who can successfully be against us.

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LECTURE LXV.

ROMANS, viii, 32.

"He that spared not his own Son but delivered him up for us all, how shall he not with him also freely give us all things?"

We have endeavoured to make it good, that the encouragement of the last verse might be taken on two separate grounds-first on the ground of direct faith in the calls and promises of the gospel, and secondly on the ground of certain fulfilments which personally and experimentally take place on those who have believed the gospel. The first encouragement then might be addressed to all-for it might be embodied in the very first overtures of the gospel; and these should be laid before all for their acceptance, on the moment of which a reconciliation with Heaven ensues and God is upon their side. The second encouragement is for those who have found and tasted that God is gracious, in the change that by grace He has wrought upon themselves-in the pledges which they have already received of a coming glory in heaven, even by a conscious preparation for it going on within their own heart and upon their own history on earth-in the first-fruits of the Spirit upon their souls, and by which the evidence of God's friendship has been carried forward from promises to gifts, from those

promises which they relied on at the moment of their first believing, to those gifts wherewith even in this life the believer is privileged.

Now it so happens that this very distinction is still more obviously spread before us in the 32rd and 33rd verses-for, instead of being enveloped under the covering of one verse as in the 31st that we have already attempted to expound, we find that of the two following verses, the former is addressed to a belief which may or may not have as yet been accompanied with experience; and the latter is addressed to experience alone. When He spared not His own Son, He delivered Him up for us all; and He is so far given to every one of you, that, though not yours in possession, He is at least yours in offer. In this sense God may be said to have given to each and to every eternal life, which life is in His Son. And so much has every one a warrant to lay hold of this gift, that God is offended if he do not-He feels it an indignity to Himself, if you not have confidence in the honesty of His offer— He is affronted by it as if by an imputation of falsehood, saying that "he who believeth not the record which God hath given of his Son makes God a liar, and this is the record even that God hath given to us eternal life, and this life is in his Son." All ought even now to close with this overture; and, on the instant of his doing so, he is instated in the full benefit of the apostle's argument, and might confidently join him in the question of my text He that spared not his own Son but delivered

do

him up for us all, how shall he not with him also freely give us all things?'

This is an argument of which the apostle seems on more occasions than one to have felt the great strength and importance, and to have urged it accordingly. There cannot, in fact, be imagined a firmer basis on which to rest our confidence in God. He has already done the greatest thing for us, and why not expect then that He will do what is less? The great and heavy expense has already been incurred, and surely He will not leave unfinished what with so much cost and difficulty He hath carried so far. He will not make abortive that, to begin which required such a sacrifice at His hand; but now to end or to complete which, will require but the free indulgence of His own kind and generous desires for the happiness of those whom He has formed. Before that He gave up His Son unto the death, there was a let and a hindrance in the way of His mercy to sinners; but now that the let is overcome, now that the hindrance is moved away, now that justice and truth have been vindicated and no longer forbid the exercise of His tenderest compassion towards the men of our guilty world— now will that compassion flow over in blissful and beauteous exuberance on all who shall put themselves in its way; and He who spared not His own Son, but gave Him up unto the death for us all, is now free and ready to give us all things.

There is an expression used elsewhere by the apostle of the unsearchable riches of Christ. We

VOL. III.

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are apt to look at the truth that is in Jesus, as if it were a meagre and very limited sort of doctrineconsisting perhaps of a few bare catechetical propositions, which we can get by heart just as we do the rules of syntax or arithmetic; and which, almost as little as these, excite any sensibility or awaken any glow, whether of imagination or feeling, on the part of its disciples. It is marvellous how many there be, who, familiar with all the terms of orthodoxy, are utter strangers to the warmth and the vividness and the power which lie in the truths of it; and who, though they can listlessly repeat the whole phraseology of evangelical sentiment, have not yet entered into the life and substance and variety of thought and of application which belong to it. The interrogation of the text, we will venture to say, may have been read by some of you a hundred times over, without your being aware of the comfort and power of argument wherewith it is so thoroughly replete-read with that sort of unmoved torpor in which so many prosecute their daily mechanical task of perusing a chapter in the Bible-run over much in the same way that a traveller passes rapidly along in a vehicle whose blinds have been raised so as to intercept all the diversified loveliness of that scenery which he has not once looked upon. He can speak of the miles he has described, as you can of the chapters. Both of

you have made progress; but the one without having had his senses regaled by the prospects of beauty and fertility in the landscape, and the other

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