being a believer in Christ and a partaker of eternal life. Nothing short of this can be regarded as a direct divine testimony to any man's salvation. The sentiment I am opposing has been thrown, with the triumph of logical demonstration, into the form of a syllogism;—" He that believeth on the Son of God hath everlasting life :”—I believe on the Son of God:-therefore, I have everlasting life.-Alas, for the logic! Does not the very throwing of it into this form at once detect its fallaciousness? Does not the reader perceive, that the middle proposition of this syllogism-"I believe on the Son of God"-is no part of the divine testimony? it is only the sinner's testimony respecting himself. I am not proceeding on a denial of its truth. It may be perfectly true, and perfectly sincere. But still its truth must be ascertained by some other kind of evidence than that on which the reality of Christ's resurrection, or the truth of God's testimony, rests. One very simple question will in a moment make this evident. How does the sinner know that he himself believes the divine record? Know that I believe! he will say; how should I know it but by consciousness? and I may well be said to know it; for nothing can be more certain than that of which I am thus conscious.-Be it so-although the proposition is in some points questionable-yet be it so. I ask him, then, whether it be by consciousness that he knows the fact of the resurrection of Jesus? whether the reality of that fact, or the truth of any thing whatever testified by God in his word, depends upon any consciousness of his? The testimony of God is true, and remains for ever true, independently of the faith and the consciousness of any sinner on earth; and the sinner's saying, "I believe," is, I repeat, his own testimony, not God's. The glaring absurdity of the sinner who says so regarding the certainty of his salvation, as ascertained by the same precise evidence as that for the resurrection of Jesus, will be still more apparent when it is considered, that, if it be so, then, since all are bound to believe in the resurrection of Jesus, all must be equally bound to believe the certainty of that individual sinner's justification and acceptance with God. The faith of all that God testifies is equally obligatory; and if this sinner believes in the certainty of his own salvation as a part of the divine testimony, others must be bound to believe it too; and bound by the same obligation which binds them to the belief of God's word. And so every sinner's professed consciousness becomes a standard of truth, not to himself only, but to all mankind! The conclusion is inevitable; and its palpable absurdity may satisfy every mind of the utter untenableness of the sentiment in question. Independently of the deep deceitfulness of the heart, and of the possible erroneousness of the sinner's conceptions of that truth which he says he believes, and of his consequent con fidence of his salvation;-let his conceptions be supposed ever so correct, and his consciousness ever so sincere,—and let the peace derived from it be ever so immediate and well-founded-still, the evidence of the two things we can never, on any account, allow to be identified. We cannot admit, in behalf of any man on earth, amidst the multiplied possibilities of mistake and self-deception which we know to exist, that the certainty of his salvation is the same, in its evidence and its degree, with the certain ty of Christ's resurrection :—and it appears to me a most extraordinary and fearful inconsideration (to call it by no worse name) for any poor sinful creature, with a heart "deceitful above all things," to venture on the presumptuous affirmation, that if he is not a justified person, the God of truth is a liar! Should he at all qualify the affirmation, and say-" Certainly it is so, if I believe in Jesus ;"'—I grant it: but I remind him, that the very introduction of this if destroys the supposed identity of the evidence. The truth of Christ's resurrection, or of the divine testimony concerning him, depends on no such qualifying if. And I must say once more, that I can imagine no way in which any sinner can have the same precise evidence of the safety of his own state as he has of the truth of the divine testimony concerning Christ, except his finding and producing from the divine record a direct and explicit declaration respecting himself. Such a de claration no one ever can produce; and therefore the ground of the "knowledge that we have eternal life" must be something different from a direct divine intimation. On principles analogous to those which have now been stated, we must, in my judgment, set aside from the ground of this knowledge what has, in certain systems of theology, been denominated the appropriating act of faith.—If this phrase signified no more than that every sinner, in believing the gospel, must believe it for himself, it would, no doubt, signify what was true; but it would signify, at the same time, what had very little title surely to have a phrase invented to express it. It would signify a truism so silly, as not to be worth putting in words at all. The act of appropriation, as it is termed, signifies something quite different from this. It means, that saving faith is the belief that Christ is mine. I keep by this one phrase, because some others, (such, for example, as that Christ died for me,) although amounting to the same thing in the theological nomenclature of the systematic divines referred to, would lead us, were we to take time to explain them, into too wide a digression. The doctrine of appropriation, then, is that every sinner, when called to believe the gospel, is called to believe that Christ is his. Now, the ground on which we demur to this representation is the same as in the former case, that what the sinner is thus called to believe, forms no part of what is written; inasmuch as it is nowhere written, in reference to any sinner individually, that Christ is his.-The following observations will, I hope, set this in a clear light : 1. I assume it as a first principle, that saving faith must be the belief of something written,-something revealed in the divine word, and which will remain true, whether sinners believe it or not;-something that is true, antecedently to any call to the belief of it. But this is not the case with the proposition, in regard to any sinner individually, that Christ is his: and should any, who are invited to believe this, live and die in unbelief, it follows that they have been invited to believe what turns out a falsehood:-for there is unspeakable, I had almost said infinite, absurdity in the fancy (which has, however, been gravely propounded amongst the enigmas of a mystical theology) that a thing which was not true before may be rendered true by a man's believing it. 2. To believe that Christ is mine must be the same thing as believing that I am justified. But in scripture sinners are uniformly represented as justified by faith. According to this view, therefore, I am justified by believing that I am justified;—that is, by believing what must, of course, at the time of my believing it, be false. But 3. Sinners are usually told, by those who hold the sentiment under consideration, that Christ is theirs in |