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FICTITIOUS IMPUTATION.

taught; and that we shall never understand how necessary it is to the personal life of every man, until the connection is re-established. When once the idea of union with Christ ceases to be at the foundation of this doctrine, the phrases that we are accounted righteous for Christ's sake; that sin is not imputed to us; that the righteousness of Christ is imputed to us;-immediately assume a form which may well seem frightful and dangerous to one who worships a God of truth, and feels that the acknowledgment of truth in Him is essential to any truth and sincerity in our own minds. Vainly and impudently do men pretend that these fears are the effect of carnal reasoning, and the unwillingness of the proud heart to stoop to God's revelation. The persons who most abhor the notion of God being guilty of a fiction, are those who are most willing to receive that revelation as their teacher, and would be most ready to own that they should not have had that abhorrence, at least in nearly the same strength, if their love of truth had not been cultivated by its pure and holy instructions. Yet I am most willing to allow, most anxious to assert, that these words are not objectionable; that we cannot dispense with them; that we cannot, without the greatest peril to sound divinity, explain them away; that all their seeming evil has arisen from the carnal and intellectual notions with which persons who boast of high spirituality, and of humbling their understandings, have encompassed them. Once admit, that by

REAL IMPUTATION.

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the very constitution of humanity, a man is righteous only as he is united to Christ, that all righteousness in self is a contradiction in terms, and the notion of a sinner being accounted righteous is converted into the sternest reality. His Divine Judge looks upon him according to his true state, not according to that fictitious, anomalous, monstrous state, to which by sin he has reduced himself; his Divine Judge calls upon him to believe in the light, that he may be the child of the light; to assert that position, to claim that union which has been asserted for him. Rejecting this glorious invitation, he believes in a lie, he makes a lie. The light is come into the world; he loves darkness rather than light, because his deeds are evil. Hearing the proclamation of his freedom, and believing it, the sins which have held him down, and of which he seemed to be a part, become separated from him, -are no more treated as himself. He enters into the mind of God respecting them; he hates them as God hates them; he abjures them, for he feels that the same love which embraces him loathes them. He becomes the inheritor of a righteousness which is his own and is not his own; which is his as the light of the sun is his, because he enjoys it, is warmed by it as long as he walks in it; but which, the moment he claims it as his property, deserts him as the light and heat would desert him, if he thought that the stock of sunshine which was given him yesterday would serve him for to-day. If you meditate upon the thought

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FAITH AND ASSURANCE.

which I have just set before you, you will see, I think, that no language so well as that which has been constantly employed in all formularies since the Reformation, describes this justification, or explains the connection between the justification of Christ, by God raising him from the dead, and the justification of each man's conscience by his belief in Him who raised Christ from the dead.

But you will perceive also, I believe, that this life-giving truth in the mouths of those who seem to assert it most vehemently, has been changed into a dead and spiritless dogma. The justification by faith, taught by the modern Calvinists, and not less by the Arminian Methodists, is not that justification by faith which wrought such wonders at the time of the Reformation; it is a hard notion, galvanized occasionally by the hatred of its supporters to some other truths which they fancy opposes it, but at other times dry, withered, cheerless. Your seceding Friends will find, whether they expect it or no, that those to whom they fly for refuge from the unsatisfactoriness of Quakerism, instead of being carried, as Luther and the Reformers were, out of themselves, by this faith of union with the righteousness of another, are debating all day long questions which begin in self and terminate in self; questions about the nature of faith and the degree of assurance; how much apprehension, and how many spiritual experiences go to establish a man's claim to be a child of God, or whether some strong belief, some inward witness that he has been elected to eternal

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life, do not supersede the necessity of such inquiries altogether. In either case, what becomes of that truth with which Luther shook the Seven Hills? Witnesses, apprehensions, assurances !how he detested the words! How utterly Popish they sounded to him! But, again and again I ask, How have these notions intruded themselves, under cover, too, of that creed which was once used for the very purpose of setting the conscience free? Is it not because the doctrine of an actual union of the spirit of man with Christ has been lost sight of? And is not this also the reason why the distinction between the flesh and the spirit in man has been so forgotten and misinterpreted,-why the conflict described in the 7th of Romans has been a subject of such fierce controversy, why the blessings and curses of God, the Gospel, and the Law, are not directed against different parts of the same man,—the blessings to himself, the curses against the evil nature to which he has no right to be in bondage, but against two sets of persons, whom the minister assumes the divine prerogative of defining? And has not the same cause produced another effect, perhaps more melancholy?

Is not the union of the spirit of man with Christ treated as some high esoteric doctrine, a part of the Christian cabala, to be spoken of for the benefit of the initiated; but with which few have any concern. Such a view of the subject is inevitable, when this union is supposed not to be an actual fact, but only what may become

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JUSTIFICATION NOT THE

a fact, if men are enabled by diligent striving, or by the mere favour of God, to realize it. But who can tell the miserable effects produced by this view? When that which should cheer the labourer, as he walks in the morning to his plough; which should be with the weaver, at his loom; which is the only comfortable security for the honesty of the shopkeeper; which only can give cheerfulness and hope to the physician, in his ungrateful toil; which should go to the desk with the attorney, if he is to be anything better than a pettifogger;-is kept for those who aspire to the very heights of saintship-alas! what must become of the faith and life of a nation?

Surely, every step taken in religious notionality and dogmatism, where this habit of teaching and feeling prevails, must be only a step into greater self-delusion; surely, it may not be without truth, that men of experience say, that any servant, or workman, or physician, or attorney, may be more safely trusted than one who has the phrases of the sanctuary in his mouth, and is able to turn them to the purposes of his craft.

II. The Reformers declared the doctrine of which I have been speaking to be the sine qua non of the church's life. So I believe it is-needful for each man, and therefore necessary to a church composed of men. But there is an easy transition from this true and sound assertion to one which I maintain is utterly unsound and false; that justification is the foundation of a church.

The Calvinistic bodies, here and on the Con