our entire duty, of all existing obligations in respect to God and all other beings. It is perfect obedience to the moral law.”

This is well said. This is perfection in holiness, provided we are allowed to interpret the phrase "perfect obedience to the moral law" with the fulness of meaning which naturally belongs to the words, and which we have indicated above. But he who should assume, with that interpretation in mind, that man can, and that many do keep the law of God perfectly, would show a most lamentable ignorance, both of the history of the world, and of the corruption of the human heart. Mr. Mahan does not fall into this error. We have but to read a few pages farther in his work, to find his language so qualified, as to rob it of more than half its meaning. Here," says he,

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our powers are comparatively weak. The saint on earth is perfect when he loves with all the strength and intensity rendered practicable by the extent of his knowledge, and the reach of his powers in his present sphere."

The "perfect obedience to the moral law," for which he contends as "perfection in holiness," is merely the best obedience we can render in the "comparatively weak" state of our powers. If, therefore, we do, at every moment, the best we can, do all that is "rendered practicable" by our circumstances, we shall keep the law of God perfectly, and be perfect in holiness.

This, as any one will see, is narrowing down the infinite law to an infinitesimal point. For, according to this reasoning, the more men sin, and weaken their powers, and unfit themselves for the perfection of the unfallen man, the less the law of God requires of them, the nearer they come to perfect obedience, to the standard of holiness. The shortest, certainly the surest road to perfection, in this view of the subject is the highway of

sin.

This heresy seems to lurk in many minds. For we hear them say "I try to do as well as I can." Or, more selfrighteous still-"I do the best I can. I have no fear of the result. God will not require of us more than we are able to perform." This, it will be seen, is only another statement of the final clause of the Catechism at the head of this article. It is the form in which many a dying sinner appropriates it, to

blind his eyes, and quiet his conscience, just as he is to appear in the presence of God, to be judged, by an infinitely pure law, for a life spent in rebellion.

ners.

Multitudes seem to cherish the idea that the law of God is plastic, shaping itself in its requirements to the ability of sinAnd this matter is carried to such a result in the minds of great classes of men, as that they see no great difficulty in keeping the law, and appearing justified in the presence of God on the ground of works. Hence, they make little of Christ. They need no Divine Saviour. They need only an example to stimulate them, and teach them the possibility and method of doing all that is required of them. They will not feel the need of an atonement. This will be discarded. They will be led naturally to deny the utter depravity of man, because he is accounted capable of obedience perfect and complete, and may be supposed to have done many things that come up to the requirements of the moral law. As naturally will they be led to embrace the doctrine of the final salvation of all men, because in their view the race will have done nothing worthy of eternal death. While multitudes more, entertaining yet lower views of the standard of universal obligation, claim to have gone beyond its demands, and laid by a store of good works. These are ready, like the pharisee and the papist, to open a traffic with the world in works of supererogation.

Could we lay bare the hearts of men, we should find a vast amount of this practical Antinomian feeling, all of it growing naturally out of the assumption, that God requires no more of us than we are able to perform; that he graduates the requirements of his law to the weakness and depravity of the subjects of law.

It is not true, as we understand the Scriptures, that God requires no more of us, in our fallen state, than we are able to perform, or than is "rendered practicable by the extent of our knowledge, and reach of our powers." He requires us to be as perfect as he is perfect. He has placed the race under a perfect law; and it can accept of nothing less than perfection the most absolute and complete. We readily admit that such was the nature of the law under which the race was placed at

the first. It required of our first parents perfect obedience; a continuance in the state of perfection in which they were created. They broke the law. Did they overthrow it? Certainly not. It stands in its integrity yet. The miscreant, who violates the law of the State, and sets its authority at defiance, does not annihilate law; does not level down its claims to his self-debased condition, nor destroy his obligation to obey it perfectly. That obligation follows him into the prison, and to the scaffold. The law cannot be let down to his depraved inclinations, or self-induced disability. Considered as the rule of right action, as the measure of human obligation, it must remain just what it was before it was violated. The wretch who has trampled it under foot must pay the penalty. The very idea of penalty, and the visitation of it, shows that the law still exists in all its strictness.

If we suppose that through the clemency of the sovereign, or some sacrifice on the part of a friend, mercy is granted and pardon extended, this procedure has not abolished the law, or diminished in the least its strictness. It has not brought down its claims to the state of the transgressor. No government on earth could tolerate such a procedure and be respected. Pardon must be granted on such terms as to leave the law in full force, and honor it, or it cannot be granted. The transgressor comes out of his dungeon amenable to the same law he violated before. One condition of his release must be an acknowledgment of the righteousness of its claims, and an honest endeavor to meet them henceforth. True, human laws are defective, and but imperfectly administered. But the principle we have laid down is correct; and under a perfect government, where everything that is required is in itself, and eternally right, it must be carried out.

In the fall our ancestors broke the law that required perfect obedience, and incurred the penalty. Transgression did not take them out from under that law, nor alter its claims one jot or tittle. Their obligation to render perfect obedience was neither destroyed or lessened, and therefore a righteous lawgiver and ruler could not have absolved them from that obligation. Their posterity, the human family, are born under the same law. Every soul is required to be as pure and holy as Adam

was before the fall. quire less than that.

God could not make a law that should reHe would connive at sin were he to lower in the least the standard of duty, and to demand less of us than he did of Adam.

It will be replied: "No one can keep a law that requires perfect conformity to the character of God. All must fall under its penalty." True, this is the situation of the race. This made an atonement necessary, and those who are saved by it are saved by grace, which implies that they cannot help themselves, or be saved by works. Grace would be needless, or at least the need would not be imperative, if the law had shaped its demands to our ability, requiring the less, the more we unfitted ourselves for obedience. Grace comes in as an expedient which is one side of the law, or rather above the law; not overlooking its claims however, but honoring them all in laying its penalty upon the head of the Redeemer. It saves the sinner as a sinner, not as one who has kept, or can keep the law, for then grace would be no longer grace. The moment we detract anything from the strictness of the law's demands, we degrade grace, and lessen our esteem of Christ. The moment we seek to be justified by the law, we "fall from grace. Christ is become of none effect unto us." It is the strictness and unbending quality of its claims, that makes redemption by the blood of Jesus necessary. The law then remains in full force under the dispensation of grace. And it accomplishes various re

sults.

It reveals to us the depth of our fall. It was not above the ability of the unfallen Adam. He was created on a level with it. He easily obeyed its precepts, and enjoyed life and his Maker's favor thereby. His fall was voluntary, not necessitated by the severity of the law. And now that it is broken as the rule of life, it stands unchanged to reveal to us, as often as we contemplate it, the distance of our fall from its holy standard. "It becomes our schoolmaster to bring us to Christ." Sinai flashes out God's wrath on account of sin now, as terribly as the sword of the cherubim into the face of Adam. There stands the law, unrepealed and irrepealable. We know we ought to obey it; that every neglect to do so is sin. This is the ground of conviction. Our hopes of salvation by the law are slain. We

have not kept it. We cannot keep it. We have voluntarily broken it, and accepted the fallen state of our fallen ancestor willingly, and therefore all the weight of obligation remains to keep the whole law, while we have broken every precept of it. The extent of our obligation is not lessened by the weakness of our powers induced by voluntary disobedience. The moral law is the stable rock from which we have drifted, and from which we are forever to reckon the extent of our wanderings, the aggravation of our crimes.

Again, that law is the measure of the work of grace which God purposes to accomplish in our souls. Christ has come to restore the redeemed to the perfectness of the first man; to bring them up through all this interval of degradation and spiritual death, to the state of perfect obedience, perfect conformity to the divine character; to introduce them to Eden again, and give them "right to the tree of life" that stands in the midst of the garden; not by the way of the cherubims, but by a "new and living way." How it exalts the grace of God in their esteem, to know, that as the heavens are higher than the earth, so high is the holy standard to which they are to be raised, above their present low estate! Day by day, as they overcome sin and grow in grace, they get clearer glimpses of the great work God has purposed to accomplish in them and for them, and are stimulated to renewed efforts to "apprehend that for which they have been apprehended of God." Such is the process of sanctification, and the stimulus which the saint feels to grow in grace daily. The high standard which the law erects before him is a perpetual reminder of heights yet to be gained, heights, which, by the grace of God, shall yet be reached.

Such being the office of the law under the dispensation of grace, Christ took special pains to impress this truth upon his hearers that he had not come to destroy, but to establish it. He reconsecrated and epitomized it, and laid it anew on the conscience of the race, with all its original strictness, in the day it was first announced to Adam. In the sermon on the mount, he showed that it was a law for all ages and dispensations, as unchangeable as its author. What it was for Adam as a rule of life, such is it for his posterity as the measure of obligation,