covenant revealed in the gospel of his grace; and the making of it is nothing else, but the making of a covenant of works with Christ, confounding the Law and the Gospel; a covenant he will never subscribe to, though we should sign it with our heart's blood, Rom. iv. 14, "For, if they which are of the law be heirs, faith is made void, and the promise made of none effect. Ver. 17, Therefore it is of faith, that it might be by grace, to the end the promise might be sure to all the seed. Chap. xi. 6, And if by grace, then it is no more of works; it is no more grace, otherwise work. But if it be of works, then it is no more grace; otherwise work is no more work." God's covenant is everlasting; once in, never out of it again: and the mercies of it are sure mercies, Isa. lv. 3. But that covenant of yours is a tottering covenant, never sure, but broken every day. It is a mere servile covenant, giving Christ service for salvation; but God's covenant is a filial covenant, in which the sinner takes Christ and his salvation freely offered, and so becomes a son, John i. 12, "But as many as received him, to them gave he power to become the sons of God." And being become a son, he serves his Father, not that the inheritance may become his, but because it is his, through Jesus Christ. -Šee Gal. iv. 24, and downward. To enter into that spurious covenant, is to buy from Christ with money; but to take hold of God's covenant is to buy of him "without money and without price," Isa. lv. 1, that is to say, to beg of him. In that covenant men work for life; in God's covenant they come to Christ for life, and work from life. When a person under that covenant fails in his duty, all is gone; the covenant must be made over again. But under God's covenant, although the man fail in his duty, and for his failures fall under the discipline of the covenant, and lies under the weight of it, till such time as he has recourse anew to the blood of Christ for pardon, and renew his repentance; yet all that he trusted to for life and salvation, namely, the righteousness of Christ, still stands entire, and the covenant remains firm, See Rom. vii. 24, 25, and viii. 1.

Now, though some men spend their lives in making and breaking such covenants of their own, the terror upon the breaking of them wearing weaker and weaker by degrees, till at last it creates them little or no uneasiness: yet the man, in whom the good work is carried on, till it be accomplished in cutting him off from the old stock, finds these covenants to be as rotten cords broke at every touch: and the terror of God, being thereupon redoubled on his spirit, and the waters, at every turn, entering into his very soul, he is obliged to cease

from catching hold of such covenants, and to seek help some

other way.

TENTHLY, Therefore the man comes at length to beg at Christ's door for mercy; but yet he is a proud beggar, standing on his personal worth: For, as the Papists have mediators to plead for them with the one only Mediator, so the branches of the old stock, have always something to produce, which they think may commend them to Christ, and engage him to take their case in hand. They cannot think of coming to the spiritual market without money in their hand. They are like persons who once had an estate of their own, but are reduced to extreme poverty, and forced to beg. When they come to beg, they still remember their former character; and though they have lost their substance, yet they retain much of their former spirit; therefore they cannot think they ought to be treated as ordinary beggars, but deserve a particular regard; and, if that be not given them, their spirits rise against him to whom they address themselves for supply. Thus God gives the unhumbled sinner many common mercies, and shuts him not up in the pit, according to his deserving: but all this is nothing in his eyes. He must be set down at the children's table, otherwise he reckons himself hardly dealt with, and wronged, for he is not yet brought so low, as to think, "God may be justified when he speaketh, (against him) and clear from all iniquity, when he judgeth him, according to his real demerit," Psal. li. 4. He thinks, perhaps, that even before he was enlightened, he was better than many others; he considers his reformation of life, his repentance, the grief and tears his sin has cost him, his earnest desires after Christ, his prayers, and wrestlings for mercy; and useth all these now as bribes for mercy, laying no small weight upon them in his addresses to the throne of grace. But here the Spirit of the Lord shoots a sheaf of arrows into the man's heart, whereby his confidence in these things is sunk and destroyed; and instead of thinking himself better than many, he is made to see himself worse than any. The naughtiness of his reformation of life is discovered. His repentance appears to him no better than the repentance of Judas, his tears like Esau's, and his desires after Christ to be selfish and loathsome, like theirs who sought Christ because of the loaves, John vi. 26. His answer from God seems now to be, Away proud beggar, "How shall I put thee among the children?" He seems to look sternly on him, for his slighting of Jesus Christ by unbelief, which is a sin he scarce discerned before; but now, at length, he beholds it in its crimson colours, and is pierced to the heart as with a thousand darts,

while he sees how he has been going on blindly, sinning against the remedy of sin, and in the whole course of his life, trampling on the blood of the Son of God. And now he is, in his own eyes, the miserable object of law-vengeance, yea, and gospel vengeance too.

ELEVENTHLY, The man being thus far humbled, will no more plead, "he is worthy for whom Christ should do this thing;" but, on the contrary, looks on himself as unworthy of Christ, and unworthy of the favour of God. We may compare him, in this case, to the young man who followed Christ, "having a linen cloth cast about his naked body: on whom, when the young men laid hold, he left the linen cloth and fled from them naked," Mark xiv. 51, 52. Even so the man had been following Christ in the thin and coldrife garment of his own personal worthiness; but by it, even by it which he so much trusted to, the Law catcheth hold of him, to make him prisoner; and then he is fain to leave it, and flees away naked, yet not to Christ, but from him. If you now tell him, he is welcome to Christ, if he will come to him, he is apt to say, Can such a vile and unworthy wretch as I, be welcome to the Holy Jesus? If a plaister be applied to his wounded soul, it will not stick: he says, "Depart from me, for I am a sinful man, O Lord," Luke v. 8. No man needs speak to him of his repentance, for his comfort; he can quickly espy such faults in it, as makes it naught: nor of his tears, for he is assured they have never come into the Lord's bottle. He disputes himself away from Christ, and concludes now, that he has been such a slighter of Christ, and is such an unholy and vile creature, he cannot, he will not, he ought not, to come to Christ; and that he must either be in better case, or else he will never believe. And hence, he now makes his strongest efforts to amend what was amiss in his way before; he prays more earnestly than ever, mourns more bitterly, strives against sin in heart and life, more vigorously, and watches more diligently, if, by any means, he may at length be fit to come to Christ. One would think the man is well humbled now; but ah! devilish pride lurks under the veil of all this seeming humility. Like a kindly branch of the old stock, he adheres still, and will not submit to the righteousness of God, Rom. x. 3. He will not come to the market of free grace, without money. He is bidden to the marriage of the King's Son, where the bridegroom himself furnisheth all the guests with wedding garments, stripping them of their own: but he will not come, because he wants a wedding garment; howbeit he is very busy making one ready. This is sad work; and therefore he must have a deeper stroke

yet, else he is ruined. This stroke is reached him with the axe of the law, in its irritating power. Thus the law, girding the soul with cords of death, and holding it in with the rigorous commands of obedience, under the pain of the curse: and God, in his holy and wise conduct, withdrawing his restraining grace, corruption is irritated, lusts become violent, and the more they are striven against, the more they rage, like a furious horse checked with the bit. Then do corruptions set up their heads, which he never saw in himself before. Here frequently atheism, blasphemy, and, in one word, horrible things concerning God, terrible thoughts concerning the faith, arise in his breast, so that his heart is a very hell within him. Thus, while he is sweeping the house of his heart, not yet watered with gospel grace, these corruptions, which laid quiet before, in neglected corners, fly up and down in it like dust. He is as one who is mending a dam, and while he is repairing breaches in it, and strengthening every part of it, a mighty flood comes down, overturns his work, and drives all away before it, as well what was newly laid, as what was laid before. Read Rom. vii. 8, 9, 10, 13. This is a stroke which goes to the heart, and, by it, his hope of getting himself more fit to come to Christ, is cut off.

LASTLY, NOW the time is come, when the man, betwixt hope and despair, resolves to go to Christ as he is; and therefore, like a dying man stretching himself, just before his breath goes out, he rallies the broken forces of his soul, tries to believe, and in some manner lays hold on Christ. And now the branch hangs on the old stock by one single tack of a natural faith, produced by the natural vigour of one's own spirit, under a most pressing necessity, Psal. lxxviii. 34, 35, "When he slew them, then they sought him: and they returned and inquired early after God. And they remembered that God was their rock, and the high God their Redeemer." Hos. viii. 2, "Israel shall cry unto me, My God, we know thee." But the Lord minding to perfect his work, fetches yet another stroke, whereby the brench falls quite off. The Spirit of God convincingly discovers to the sinner his utter inability to do any thing that is good, and so he dieth, Rom. vii. 9. That voice powerfully strikes through his soul, "How can ye believe?" John v. 44. Thou canst no more believe, than thou canst reach up thine hand to heaven, and bring Christ down from thence. And thus at length he sees he can neither help himself by working, nor by believing; and having no more to hang by on the old stock, he therefore falls off. And while he is distressed thus, seeing himself likely to be swept away with the flood of God's

wrath, and yet unable so much as to stretch forth a hand to lay hold of a twig of the tree of life, growing on the banks of the river, he is taken up, and ingrafted into the true Vine, the Lord Jesus Christ giving him the spirit of faith.

By what has been said upon this head, I design not to rack or distress tender consciences; for though there are but few such, at this day, yet God forbid I should offend any of Christ's little ones. But alas! a dead sleep is fallen upon this generation; they will not be awakened, let us go as near the quick as we will; and therefore, I fear there is another sort of awakening abiding this sermon-proof generation, which shall make the ears of them that hear it to tingle. However, I would not have this to be looked upon as the sovereign God's stinted method of breaking off sinners from the old stock; but this I assert as a certain truth, that all who are in Christ, have been broken off from all these several confidences; and that they who were never broken off from them, are yet in their natural stock. Nevertheless, if the house be pulled down, and the old foundation razed, it is all a case, whether it were taken down stone by stone, or whether it were undermined, and all fell down together.

Now it is, that the branch is ingrafted in Jesus Christ. And as the law, in the hand of the Spirit of God, was the instrument to cut off the branch from the natural stock, so the gospel, in the hand of the same Spirit, is the instrument used for ingrafting it in the supernatural stock, John i. 3, "That which we have seen and heard, declare we unto you, that ye also may have fellowship with us: and truly our fellowship is with the Father, and with his Son Jesus Christ." See Isa. lxi. 1, 2, 3. The gospel is the silver cord let down from heaven, to draw perishing sinners to land. And, though the preaching of the law prepares the way of the Lord, yet it is in the word of the gospel, that Christ and a sinner meet. Now, as in the natural grafting, the branch being taken up, is put into the stock; and being put into it, takes with it, and so they are united: even so in the spiritual ingrafting, Christ apprehends the sinner, and the sinner being apprehended of Christ, apprehends him, and so they become one, Philip. ii. 2.

FIRST, Christ apprehends the sinner by his Spirit, and draws him to himself, 1 Cor. xii. 13, "For by one Spirit, we are all baptized into one body." The same Spirit, which is in the Mediator himself, he communicates to his elect in due time, never to depart from them, but to abide in them, as a principle of life. Thus he takes hold of them, by his own Spirit put into them; and so the withered branch gets life. The soul is