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LECTURE LXVI.

ROMANS, viii, 33, 34.

"Who shall lay anything to the charge of God's elect; It is God that justifieth; who is he that condemneth? It is Christ that died, yea rather, that is risen again, who is even at the right hand of God, who also maketh intercession for

us.

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your first act be an act of reliance upon Christ for pardon; let this act be so repeated by you, day after day and hour after hour, as to ripen into a habit of reliance-and then shall we confidently look for the marks and evidence of your regeneration. And these marks may at length so multiply upon you they might so brighten and become palpable even to the eye of your own observation, that you shall begin to suspect-nay further to guess-nay further still to be assured, and to read the full assurance, that you are indeed one of the elect of God. That you are among the elect is not a thing to be presumed by you at the first; but a thing gathered by you afterwards, from your subsequent history as a believer. If you are wise, you do not meddle with the doctrine of election at the outset -whatever comfort or establishment of heart you may draw from it, in the ulterior stages of your spiritual progress. When you go forth on the career of Christianity, you look at the free offer of

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the gospel. You perceive it to be addressed to you, as well as to others. You yield a compliance therewith. You enter into peace with God-in obedience to His own call, whereby He now beseeches you to be reconciled to Him. It were great presumption indeed for you, to start with the assurance that your name is in the book of God's decrees; which He keeps beside Himself in heaven-but no presumption at all, to set out with the assurance that you are spoken to in that book of God's declarations, which he circulates through the world. The "look unto me all" and the come unto me all" and the "whosoever will let him come"-these are sayings in which one and all of the human family have most obvious interest. You presume nothing when you presume upon the honesty of these sayings. And if furthermore you proceed upon them-if now you strike the act of reconciliation, and forthwith enter upon that walk by which they who receive Christ and receive along with Him power to become the children of God are sure to separate themselves from the children of the world-and pray for grace, that you may be upheld and carried forward therein-and combine a life of activity with a life of prayer-Then, and after perhaps many months of successful perseverance, you may talk of your election, because now you can read it, not in the book of life that is in heaven, but in the book of your own history upon earth-not that you have drawn out the secret from among the archives of the upper sanctuary;

but because now it stands palpably engraven upon a character the light of which shines before the eye of the world, and which is read and known of all men -not that you have access to that tablet which has been inscribed from eternity by the finger of God; but that you have access to the tablet of your own heart, and, by the eye of conscience, can discern thereupon the virtues of the new creature, inscribed by the Spirit of God within the period of your own recollection. Even the apostle went no higher than this, when judging of the state of his own converts. Their election was to him not a thing of presumption, but a thing of inference-drawn, not from what he guessed, but from what he saw-brought, not from those third heavens which he had at one time visited, but lying palpably before him and within the precincts of his own earthly home. When he tells the Thessalonians that he knew their election, he tells them how he knew it, "Knowing brethren beloved your election of God-for our gospel came not unto you in word only, but also in power and in the Holy Ghost and with much assurance, as ye know what manner of men we were among you for your sake, and ye became followers of us and were ensamples to all." He concluded them to be of the elect, not from any access that he had to a book of mysteries, but simply from the manner of men they were. It was not because of any high communication that he had with Heaven upon the subject; but because of the daily companionship that he had with his disciples, and

in virtue of which he saw the very things that others saw also, and observed nothing else or nothing more than those evidences of faith, those graces of holy and new-born creatures, which were known and read of all men.

My anxiety is that you do not embarrass yourselves with this matter of election-for there is positively nothing in the doctrine which ought to encumber, or in any way to darken the plain and practical work of your Christianity. What I fear is that some may founder at the outset of their discipleship, by prematurely and previously meddling with it. I want that if they feel any speculative difficulty about it now, they may not waste their strength on the business of resolving it; but set out on the scholarship of the gospel in a plain way, and leave their election to be gathered afterwards from the progress which they have made in that way-which is neither more nor less than the way of holiness. Then they may both perceive a consistency, and feel a most precious comfort, in the doctrine; but now, and I speak to those who are meditating an entrance on that path which leadeth unto heaven, now their concern is to accept of Christ as He is freely offered to them in the gospel, and to take full encouragement from the reasoning of our preceding text, "He that spared not his own Son but gave him up unto the death for us all-how shall he not with him also freely give us all things?" I would have them to close alike with the pledge and the promise; and on the high

vantage-ground of Christ being theirs I would have their hearts to be gladdened even now with the assurance of faith, and thence that they should pass forward to the assurance that cometh from experience-giving all diligence to make their calling and election sure, and assiduously labouring at those things of which it is said in the New Testament, that if a man do these things he shall never fall.

The point at which God begins in the matter of our salvation, is not the point at which man begins. The apostle assigns the order of God's procedure when he says, "Whom he did foreknow, he also did predestinate, and whom he did predestinate them he also called, and whom he called them he also justified, and whom he justified them he also glorified." It is at the call that man's part commences. Let him listen to the call-let him yield a compliance with the call-let him take both the comfort and direction of the call-Understanding it to be both a call from wrath unto acceptance, and a call from sin unto righteousness. It were well that he kept by his own share of the process, and encroached not on the part or the prerogative of God. These ambitious speculations about God's eternal decree and man's eternal destiny, often argue a creature misconceiving his own place, and making himself like unto his Creator. He in fact comes in at the middle, between the decree that went before and the destiny that comes after; and, alike ignorant of both at the outset of his Christi

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