the day of salvation. The gospel of the Son of God offers you, at this very moment, the forgiveness of your sins, and an inheritance among them that are sanctified. The blessing comes to you as a free gift-Accept it and live. Accept it, and be safe. Accept it, and put away the shudderings of guilt, and the fear of death. Then shall you, too, like our friend, go, in due season, to be with Christ. Your happy spirit shall rejoin hers in the mansions of the saved. God shall bring you in soul and body with her when he makes up his jewels-then shall he gather his elect from the four winds of heaven, shall perfect that which concerneth them, and make them fully and forever blessed. Be our place among them in that day!

FULL ASSURANCE OF FAITH AND HOPE.

A SERMON.

PREACHED AS PART OF THE ORDINARY MINISTRATIONS

IN

MURRAY STREET CHURCH, FEB. 18, 1821,

And published in the National Preacher, May, 1829.

VOL. III. 21

SERMON IX.

FULL ASSURANCE OF FAITH AND HOPE.

2. TIMOTHY. 1. 12.

For I know whom I have believed; and am persuaded that he is able to keep that which I have committed unto him, against that day.

If ever there was an unlikely subject of conversion to the Christian faith, it was Saul of Tarsus. His education, his habits, his prospects, his ardent and active zeal against Christians, his powerful intellect, his pride, his very conscience, all under the influence of wrong impressions, rendered his perseverance in Judaism morally certain, and the idea of his change, in the eyes of thinking men, perfectly chimerical. Satan himself seemed not less likely to become an apostle, than this fierce and intrepid Jew. His active spirit, and his implacable malignity, breathing out threatenings and slaughter against the disciples of the Lord, would, if permitted to take its course, have "made short work with the dissenters" from the order established at Jerusalem; would

have crushed the infant church; and scarcely left materials for one paragraph of the general historian. But the Lord Jesus had other views for his church, and other employment for the persecutor. In the height of his career -in the very act of executing the bloody commission of the high priest-when surrounded by armed men, to enforce his ordersat mid-day-on the public road-near a celebrated city-a burst of glory from the face of Jesus Christ eclipses the brightness of the sun; an invisible power smites him and all his company to the earth; and a voice, the authority of which made him feel that his Creator was speaking, addressed to him those memorable words; Saul, Saul, why persecutest thou me? The high priest, the Sanhedrim, the nation whose hopes all centre in him, his character, his commission, are forgotten in an instant. Men have no leisure for anything else, when they are conscious that God is speaking. Who art thou, Lord? exclaimed the astonished and trembling persecutor: I am Jesus, answers the heavenly voice, I am Jesus whom thou persecutest. Lord, replies he, every disposition to cavil or tamper being perfectly subdued, Lord, what wilt thou have me to do? Arise, and go into the city, and it shall be told thee what thou must do. Gentle as a lamb, the high-spirited and