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while they continue to reproach the living God, and make a mockery of his Christ; and shrinks from participation in their daring infidelity, with unfeigned and undissembled aversion: who justifies the pure and perfect law of God; and owns, that, if the Sovereign of heaven had dealt with him in justice, and laid the law's curse upon him, he would have sunk beneath its weight into irremediable, final, and hopeless misery :—and who then lifts up his soul in adoring love to that Saviour, who redeemed him from the curse of the law, being made a curse for him: who confesses his sins with broken-heartedness, as infinitely dishonourable to the God who hath borne with him, and spared him. and snatched him as a brand out of the burning-and who casts his salvation upon the Lord Jesus, venturing soul and spirit, and all his sins, and all his hopes, upon that very Jesus whom a world that lieth in unbelief and wickedness, is either coldly neglecting, or recklessly defying. And

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shall we not say, that this man hath a bible faith, the faith which is of the operation of God, even the faith of God's elect, although he may not be providentially gifted with lengthened days or opportunities, whereof man may take cognizance, enabling him to justify its scriptural character? We must pronounce him in the possession of a belief, which hath instrumentally made him one with the Lord and carried him across the great gulph, that separates death from life; and condemnation from the salvation that is in Christ Jesus, with eternal glory; because we thus speak on the authority of our Lord Himself. Thus doth our Redeemer often most triumphantly finish his work of love, in and for a sinner, when it seems only just begun, and cut it short in righteousness, when man is looking, in doubt and dread, whether the tree SO declared to be grafted into Christ, shall or shall not bring forth fruit.

Let no one be ashamed to learn from

the example of this believer in the Lord, what is that mortification of the flesh, that forgetfulness of present sufferings, and of self, and that reaching forth with hope and desire towards the joys of a hidden and a spiritual life, that loftiness of faith, that constancy of hope, that ardour of piety, which this truly penitent man exemplified, when faith in the King of Glory opened the springs of spiritual supply within him, by uniting him to the living fountain of holiness. Surely divine wisdom hath proposed to us this man's example, to humble the pride of human righteousness; and to shew us, that the more simply we draw nigh to Christ as our all, and in all, the more stedfastly shall we walk with God. O, if we felt in all our minds a power like that which made him a new creature in Christ Jesus, we should see such causes of loathing in ourselves, and such a glory in the Saviour, as would "make us count all things but loss for the excellency of his knowledge;" and find its power con

forming us to Him, and leading us in the blessed steps of his most holy life!

(3.) The prayer of this happy believer expressed the earnestness of his soul for that spiritual and everlasting salvation, of which he had learned the Redeemer to be the fountain :-"Lord, remember me when thou comest into thy kingdom." He reproves his hardened fellow-he acknowledges his own offences-he justifies God, in bringing him to shame and death for his iniquities, as perfectly just and unimpeachable; and then, he flees, in all the eagerness of desire, to the hope set before him,—to that anchor of the soul, sure and steadfast, which had been just revealed to him in the all-sufficiency of Jesus Christ. "Lord, remember me." It is a brief but powerful pleading. His whole heart went with it; the desire of his soul was to the Lord, and his soul spake in his prayer. It was like the impassioned cry of the father, "Lord, I believe, help thou mine unbelief." It was uttered in the spirit of

the jailor, when he sprang in, trembling, before Paul and Silas, and cried, "Sirs, what must I do to be saved?" Now that he is awakened to find his need of an atonement and righteousness, which nothing, and no one in the wide universe, save He who hung in agony by his side could supply, he is dead to every other consideration, and Christ reigns supremely in his desires. He was probably the first of those, under the Gospel dispensation, who truly believed in the intercession of his Lord. And if all who have since professedly come unto God by that blood, wherewith the Great High Priest entered into the holy place, having obtained eternal redemption for sinners, had really come, and were now coming, with the earnestness of this man's desire, with the ardent longing of his mind for mercy, and with his exalted views of Jesus Christ, as an Intercessor for his people, what honour would be put upon the Lord's priestly character-what comfort would abound in prayer—what

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