our nakedness! And should
it be called submission? Is it not rather the elevating and exalting of
the soul? Yet in respect of our natural posture of spirit, it is a matter
of great difficulty to make a self-condemned sinner submit to this, to be
saved freely, without money or price, by another's ransom. What empty,
vain, and frivolous expiations and satisfactions will souls invent, rather
than trust all to this! How long will poor souls wander abroad from hill
to mountain, seeking some inherent qualification, to commend them, and
leave this garden and paradise of delights, which is opened up in Christ?
Souls look everywhere for help, till all hands fail; and then necessity
constrains them to come hither; but indeed, when necessity brings in,
charity and amity keeps in, when once they know what entertainment is in
Christ. As for you, who as yet have not stooped to the sentence of wrath,
how will you submit to the righteousness of God? But I wonder how you
imagine this to be so easy a thing to believe. You say you did always
believe in Christ, and that your hearts are still on him, and that you do
it night and day. Now, there needs no other argument to persuade that you
do not at all believe in the gospel, who have apprehended no more
difficulty in it, no more contrariety to your rebellious natures in it.
Let this one word go home with you, and convince you of your unbelief,
"The natural mind is not subject to the law of God, neither indeed can
be." How, then, do you come so easily by it? Certainly it must be feigned
and counterfeit.

Sermon XXII.

Verse 8.--"So then they that are in the flesh cannot please God."

It is a kind of happiness to men, to please them upon whom they depend,
and upon whose favour their well-being hangs. It is the servant's
happiness to please his master, the courtier's to please his prince; and
so generally, whosoever they be that are joined in mutual relations, and
depend one upon another; that which makes all pleasant, is this, to please
one another. Now, certainly, all the dependencies of creatures one upon
another, are but shadows unto the absolute dependence of creatures upon
the Creator, for in him we live, and move, and have our being: the
dependence of the ray upon the sun, of the stream upon the fountain, is
one of the greatest in nature; but all creatures have a more necessary
connexion with this Fountain-being, both in their being and well-being;
they are nothing but