2.  In the second place, the unfolding of this text shows the importance of using the law faithfully and fearlessly within its own limits; and in accordance with its proper function.  It is frequently asked what the sinner shall do in the work of salvation.  The answer is nigh thee, in thy mouth, and in thy heart.  Be continually applying the law of God to your personal character and conduct.  Keep an active and a searching conscience within your sinful soul.  Use the high, broad, and strict commandment of God as an instrumentality by which all ease, and all indifference, in sin shall be banished from the breast.  Employ all this apparatus of torture, as perhaps it may seem to you in some sorrowful hours, and break up that moral drowze and lethargy which is ruining so many souls.  And then cease this work, the instant you have experimentally found out that the law reaches a limit beyond which it cannot go,—­that it forgives none of the sins which it detects, produces no change in the heart whose vileness it reveals, and makes no lost sinner perfect again.  Having used the law legitimately, for purposes of illumination and conviction merely, leave it forever as a source of justification and sanctification, and seek these in Christ’s atonement, and the Holy Spirit’s gracious operation in the heart.  Then sin shall not have dominion over you; for you shall not be under law, but under grace.  After that faith is come, ye are no longer under a schoolmaster.  For ye are then the children of God by faith in Christ Jesus.[5]

How simple are the terms of salvation!  But then they presuppose this work of the law,—­this guilt-smitten conscience, and this wearying sense of bondage to sin.  It is easy for a thirsty soul to drink down the draught of cold water.  Nothing is simpler, nothing is more grateful to the sensations.  But suppose that the soul is satiated, and is not a thirsty one.  Then, nothing is more forced and repelling than this same draught.  So is it with the provisions of the gospel.  Do we feel ourselves to be guilty beings; do we hunger, and do we thirst for the expiation of our sins?  Then the blood of Christ is drink indeed, and his flesh is meat with emphasis.  But are we at ease and self-contented?  Then nothing is more distasteful than the terms of salvation.  Christ is a root out of dry ground.  And so long as we remain in this unfeeling and torpid state, salvation is an utter impossibility.  The seed of the gospel cannot germinate and grow upon a rock.

[Footnote 1:  Rom. vii. 9-12.]

[Footnote 2:  1 Cor. xv. 56.]

[Footnote 3:  SCHILLER:  Der Kampf.]

[Footnote 4:  Galatians iii. 19.]

[Footnote 5:  Galatians iii. 25, 26.]

SELF-SCRUTINY IN GOD’S PRESENCE.

ISAIAH, i. 11.—­“Come now, and let us reason together, saith the Lord; though your sins be as scarlet, they shall be as white as snow; though they be red like crimson, they shall be as wool.”