could predicate no good, nor any certain avoidance of evil, whatever: I have done it! O wretched man that I am! So by our sin, we ourselves do sin against Christ; we grieve His blessed spirit; and therefore are grieved in our own spirit; and nothing will serve us, but continual warfare with ourselves, until the flesh shall be mortified outright. It will never be better, though it be mortified, brought under, and kept in subjection, until it fails with the dying body, leaving the new-born spirit, begotten of it by the Holy Ghost, to live for ever. This glorious deliverance, how great a comfort and encouragement is it to us in our conflict! And it is observable that we see the key to all the mystery of the subject in the distinction between our new spirit and the flesh; the spirit regenerate, and the flesh as bad as ever.

SECTION VII.

ADMONITORY ENCOURAGEMENTS.

WHAT remains to be done, for the dominant conducting of this conflict, by the spirit new-born is obvious, and easily gathered from Holy Scripture. With the very deepest humility, we should constantly remember our high and holy character, that in the spirit we are of heavenly birth, of royal race, of divine nature! We are one with CHRIST, and He with us, by the indissoluble union of His spirit. We dwell in Him, and He in us; He liveth in us, and our life is hid with Him in God. We can never perish, neither shall any pluck us out of His hand. We are chosen to salvation through sanctification of the SPIRIT, and belief of the truth, (1 Pet. i. 2; 2 Thess. ii. 13.) God hath sent forth the SPIRIT of His Son into our hearts, (Gal. iv. 6,) crying Abba, Father. He witnesseth with our spirit that we are GOD's children, (Rom. viii. 16.) We are sealed with that Holy SPIRIT of promise, which is the earnest of our inheritance, until the final redemption; (Eph. i. 13, 14 ;) and having been regenerated, we are continually renewed, by Him; (Titus iii. 5; 2 Cor. iv. 6; Rom. xii. 2;) and

He is given ever more and more to them that ask for Him of God, (Luke xi. 13.)

And let it be remembered, that though we are never sure of being let alone, we are not always equally beleaguered. We have times of comparative rest; and what is better, we have a perpetual rest in the very midst of our conflict. We are not in the wilderness condition of mere outward separation as professing Christians, but like Caleb and Joshua, and the new race circumcised and baptized in Jordan, (a goodly symbol of the justified and spiritually regenerate,) we have entered into the true rest of the people of God in spiritual privileges. We have enemies to fight with, but they cannot take away our covenant of salvation in Christ, our Sabbaths, our jubilees, our holy services, our securities under the blessing of God, nor the peace of God which keeps our heart and mind. We are actually enjoying spiritually a land of promise, such as was symbolised by Canaan; and we have the grand promise before us of the rest that remaineth for the people of God in glory. It is the promise of eternal inheritance," (Heb. ix. 15.)

1 The Land of Canaan, and the rest of it, I look upon as a symbol of the Christian Church and the rest enjoyed therein by the believer; but the rest which remaineth for the people of God, into which the believer ultimately enters, I look upon as alone the subject of promise spoken of in Heb. iv. This accords with the language there used, and taken together, far better than supposing the Christian's rest on earth to be also adverted to. What else can be the "Sabbatism that remaineth for the people of God, and called His rest; " and what the ground of the earnest care which the apostle urges, when he says, "Let us therefore fear, lest a promise being left us

This promise, with others, is enjoyed in covenant with God, (Heb. ix. 15); and we are received into the covenant, sovereignly ordained by God, through death, as guilty sinners, as every sinner must be who becomes a covenanter with God at all, being justified freely by His grace. There "must of necessity be the death of the covenanter" coming in without his sin. Upon death alone can the covenant be established, (see Gen. iii. 21; viii. 20; xv.) We die in our Mediator, as is symbolised in all compacts made with sacrifice; and in Him we live, and so enter and receive the promises through faith in Him who has obtained them for us. This faith implies the new birth as well as justification.

So in the Christian Canaan we have covenant rest in privileges, which no conflict can destroy.1

Let the Christian consider what his spirit is in its new character, as born of God, essentially a mental being, without anything material or fleshly in it; originally an emanation of God, fitted with all the powers essential to an intellectual being or person; as distinct as an angel from a bodily hypostasis, and in its present state so recovered by the gracious power of God from its fallen condition as to be a new

of entering into His rest, any of you should seem to come short of it," through defect of faith or not ceasing from his own works. The men of faith alone do enter in ; but into the rest on earth they have entered, and they enjoy it more or less in all their warfare.

1"Testament" and "testator," in Heb. ix., ought to be covenant and covenanter. So should "Testament" be in the Gospels and 2 Cor. iii. 6, as it is in all the other epistles.

child, a new creature, begotten of God from the old, so as to be the same with it, though unspeakably more excellent and glorious; raised in power out of preceding weakness; and incapable of sinning any more for ever sin is chargeable upon the flesh alone. The Seed of the birth is Christ in the Word; His mind or Spirit, spoken to us sensibly by the written Word, and brought home to our spirit. "The words that I speak unto you," He says, "they are spirit, and they are life." "An incorruptible seed which liveth and abideth for ever;" a seed sown in the heart, in the understanding, in fact, in the spirit of the mind, (see 1 Pet. i. 23.) "Of His own will begat He us with the word of truth," (James i. 18.) By this the new being is generated from the spirit of man, born of God and of the human spirit also without sin, in mysterious unity. That God is instinct in the human spirit is plain: "That which is born of the Spirit is spirit." The unity of Deity and humanity in one person here is as real and as plainly found in Scripture as that of Christ, though of immeasurably subordinate character. Here is our consciousness of God. Here is the enlightened and holy conscience respecting everything. Let the believer respect and consult it. Let him walk according to its dictates, and in all he so wills, and designs, and says, and does, he will be right, conscious of the love of God, and humbly confident in communion with Him. All holy power of thought, of knowledge, of reason, of reflection, of determination, is in the new spirit,

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