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XIII.

THE TERMS OF SALVATION.

BY REV. PHARCELLUS CHURCH, D.D.,

PASTOR OF THE BOWDOIN SQUARE BAPTIST CHURCH, BOSTON.

"If thou shalt confess with thy mouth the Lord Jesus, and shalt believe in thy heart that God raised him from the dead, thou shalt be saved."-Rom. x. 9.

VARIED and complicated as God's revelation may appear, extended as are the periods over which its records are spread, minute and bare of thought as its genealogical details may seem, and uninteresting and unintelligible as many parts of the book may be in matter and style; yet all that is essential to salvation is compressed within limits astonishingly narrow, and expressed in terms surprisingly clear. There is a focal point to which all its rays converge, which the blindest eye might see, and the darkest mind confess the intensity of its illumination.

This was true even of the law of Moses-the epitome of the whole was contained in ten short precepts, and the sum and substance of these were so fully included in the one exercise of love to God and man, that the whole law is said to be fulfilled by love. Hence, Moses said to his nation, "The word is nigh thee, in thy mouth and in thy heart, that thou mayest do it." Thus, they could not plead ignorance in justification of their disobedience.

The Apostle accommodates the same words to the gospel terms of salvation. God does not require impossibilities of you, my unconverted friends. He is not a hard master, to mock your inability and insult your woes. He hath not complicated and mystified the conditions of your salvation, that you should find it difficult to comprehend and know them. The righteousness of faith does not encourage you in inquiring, "Who shall ascend into heaven to bring Christ down? nor, who shall descend into the deep, to bring him up again from the dead?" nor does it suggest anything impracticable or impossible; but it comes to tell you that the word, or the specific thing by which you may obtain salvation, is nigh you, in your mouth and in your heart, being the word of faith, the doctrine and duty of faith, preached in the gospel, "that if thou shalt confess with thy mouth the Lord Jesus, and shalt believe in thy heart that God raised him from the dead, thou shalt be saved."

Here it is, my friends-believe, confess, and the infinite, blessing of God's favor here, and life everlasting hereafter, will pour their full effulgence upon your souls. "This is the work of God, that ye believe on him whom he hath sent."

The availableness of the gospel remedy to the most debilitated and hopeless, is its crowning excellence. In this respect it is like God's remedy for the dying Israelites in the wilderness, who had only to look to the brazen serpent and live. We have only to believe on the Lord Jesus Christ, and we shall be saved; to behold the Lamb of God that taketh away the sin of the world, and then to follow up our faith with its appropriate modes of declaration or confession. If ordinances, and forms, and creeds, and a long course of outward amendments, were essential to salvation, what could the dying thief have done amid the agony and distraction of crucifixion, whose first prayer appears to have been reserved for the last hour of life? Who would dare to preach a gospel thus encumbered by conditions, thus unavailing in the extremest moments of agony and woe?

Glad should I be, my friends, to make the idea of believing clear to your minds. I am aware of the difficulty of doing it, partly on account of the much that has been said and written to confuse and darken your thinking on the subject, and partly from your liability to regard faith as simply the passive effect of evidence upon your reason, which you can no more make otherwise than you can alter the impression of light upon your eyes. How shall I disabuse your minds of this fatal deception, so as to make you feel, that believing in Jesus is simply yielding yourselves to all the legitimate tendencies of that pure and holy ideal and influence with which his name and truth are associated? Dark as your mind is, depraved and guilty as are your hearts and lives, the word is still within you, in the form of all those remonstrances against your sins, and all that solemn pleading with your reason and conscience in behalf of God and holiness, and all those fearful anticipations of a judgment to come, with which the truth of Christ is connected in your spiritual nature and history. I solemnly warn you against such an 'interpretation or use of the doctrine of depravity, as to assume or suppose that the word of Christ can have no response in your fallen nature. Even devils feel it and tremble; and how much may you who are under the mediatorial reign be supposed to

"Feel how awful goodness is!"

Forget not the affirmation of Paul in the connection of my text, that "the word is nigh thee, even in thy mouth and in thy heart; that is, the word of faith which we preach." Its powerful responses are within every human bosom who seriously attends to it, and you have only to repress what is contrary, and give yourselves up to its leading without reserve, to realize the blessed result of "believing with the heart unto righteousness.'

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Not to be too abstract, let me add, believing that God raised Christ from the dead, is taking hold of that fact as a reality, so that it is the same to us as those things which we hear, see, or know, and the same as if we had been present and witnessed the process of the resurrection, from the first pulsating struggle of life to resume its functions in the dead body of Jesus, till, disencumbered of his grave-clothes, he ascended from the stony confines of the sepulchre to the opening expanse of the dawning morning.

This event is the organ to our mind of two classes of truths-the visible and the invisible, the literal and the spiritual, the first of which we may believe without believing the other.

The visible or literal facts of Christ's resurrection are those which are addressed to the outward senses. The resurrection of the dead body of Jesus from the tomb of Joseph, where on the eve of the crucifixion it had been deposited by his afflicted followers, is just as much a matter of outward history as Alexander's passage of the Granicus, or Cæsar's of the Rubicon. How touching was the scene! The nails were extracted from his hands and feet, and his body was lowered from the cross, on which it had just expired in the pains of an agonized death. Here it lies pale and cold, to assure the cruel soldiers that their work had already been so terribly effective, that the bones need not be broken to complete the process of dissolution. But one of them, to make assurance sure, perforates his side with his spear, when the transfixed heart discharged its sanguinary contents of blood and water. The last drop of that divine fountain is poured out on the altar of his love

to man.

When the soldiers departed, his mother, through whose soul a sword had pierced, and his sorrowing disciples, gathered round his lifeless but still loved remains, with touching interest prepared them for the burial, and then bore them to Joseph's new tomb; whence, after performing sepulchral rites, they retired smitten with the horrors of the scene, and with hearts wrung with anguish at the dreadful reality, that their Lord was crucified and slain. They waited with trembling but unbelieving anxiety for the morning of the resurrection; and when they were early at the sepulchre and found that he had indeed risen, they believed not for joy and amazement. And nothing finally overcame their doubts, but repeated and familiar interviews with him after his resurrection. Thus gradually, thus certainly, thus demonstrably, this sealing fact of revealed religion, by which life and immortality were brought to light, was unfolded to the minds of men, and became a fixed fact in the history of the human race.

Their testimony, often repeated in words, but still more powerfully affirmed in the voluntary sacrifices of ease, reputation, and life, in proclaiming to the world Jesus and the resurrection, together with the establishment of Christianity and the infinite train

of results which have followed, conspire to settle the resurrection of Christ on an immutable basis of evidence.

Now, all these outward facts a person may take hold of by a firm faith, and yet he may not be saved. This faith is genuine as far as it goes, but it does not go far enough to grasp those peculiar truths and influences therein involved, which are the organs of salvation to the soul.

There is an invisible and spiritual class of facts herewith associated, which we must believe before we can be saved. And it is to the belief of these that the Apostle alludes in our text; such as, that Christ was the Son of God, being thus declared with power, according to the spirit of holiness, by the resurrection from the dead; that the law which he illustrated by his life is holy, just, and good, and of universal obligation; that we are guilty in proportion to our dereliction from it, and hence that we are by nature in a ruined condition, without God and without hope in the world; that the object of Christ's life, death, and resurrection, was to save us from our sins; that his divine attributes, thus fully demonstrated by his resurrection, qualify him for the work; that he is to be our Judge as well as our Saviour, calling us from the grave, of which he was the first-fruits, that we may receive at his hands according to the deeds done in the body; and above all, that the ideal of virtue, goodness, holiness, thus present in Christ, is attainable; and that, by beholding him, we may be transformed into the same image from glory to glory, even as by the Spirit of the Lord. It is true, these several points may not come before a convicted sinner in the form and order here stated; but if we analyze his feelings, we shall find them in fact present and operative in the process of his spiritual transformation.

The significance of any given document or event comes from its connecting facts and relations, more than from anything in itself. If a gifted mind had written, as an exercise in composition, precisely such a document as our Declaration of Independence, word for word, it might have been regarded as an evidence of talent, but it would have had nothing of the significance of that document in its actual relations to our nation and to mankind. As a declaration of rights on the part of a people struggling against oppression, who stood ready to maintain it with life, property, and sacred honor, it has acquired a position in the world of mind, and in the memory of posterity, to which the composition in itself could never have raised it. The same amount of blood and carnage might accrue from a mob as from the battle of Bunker Hill, and yet one would be reckoned a deed of infamy, as the other is of glory.

So, great as a dead man's resurrection is, in itself considered, it could have nothing of the peculiar interest of Christ's resurrection in it. He was raised up as God manifest in the flesh; as the longpromised Messiah; as a Lamb slain from the foundation of the world; as the brightness of the Father's glory and the express

image of his person, from whose character the radiations of Divinity are reflected to our view, that we may see them without being. dazzled and overwhelmed with

"The darkness of light insufferable;"

as the High Priest of our profession, who, after making his soul an offering for sin, in fulfilment of the types of the previous dispen sations, entered into heaven itself, there to appear on the right hand of God in our behalf; yea, he was raised up to be the Judge of the quick and the dead, and to give the assured hope, that though a man die, yet shall he live again; and thus, his resurrection becomes to us an organ of the highest facts, influences, and associations ever brought within the compass of the human intellect, the keystone in the arch of redemption.

To believe this great fact in all its spiritual relations with the heart, is to believe it in the exercise of its appropriate affections and practices; yea, it is to surrender to its leading all the voluntary powers of our nature, so that Christ shall become to us the chief among ten thousand and altogether lovely. Let me give you an illustration: In looking over a marine list, we might, perhaps, notice the arrival of a hundred ships in the different ports of the world, and fully believe it, with little or no interest in the matter. But let one of us be the father of a son at sea, from whom he had not heard for so long a time that he had given him up as lost, see the arrival of the ship in which he sailed announced, and do you not think he would feel interested? All the feelings of the father gush up, and he believes with his heart. His faith in that arrival is no stronger than in any other, but his heart has much more to do with it.

So when sinners believe in the spiritual connections of Christ's resurrection, how powerfully are their feelings awakened! It becomes now a matter of inward experience that Christ has died for their sins, and rose again for their justification. Their conscience apprehends the holiness, faithfulness, and truth which shine in the person of Jesus, as the pattern of what they themselves ought to be. And just in proportion as they see, from what Christ was, what they ought to be, they abhor themselves and repent in dust and ashes. What contortions of conscience are sometimes awakened by this heart-believing? How did Jewish consciences writhe under its lacerations on the day of Pentecost! It is true, it is true, O God, that we have crucified the Lord of glory and hanged him on a tree. We are lost, we are lost. Men and brethren, what shall we do? How shall we escape the wrath of God? Such were their feelings, and such will be ours when faith reveals the relation of our sins to Christ's death. It gives us a sense of wonderful nearness to God. We may not rejoice in that nearness, because of the guilty fears which it awakens, and we see not how we

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