d
before him.

Ye who have washen in this blood, ye may rejoice, for it shall make you
clean every whit. Your iniquities that so defiled you, shall not be found.
O the precious virtue of that blood that can purge away a soul's spots!
All the art of men and angels could not reach this. This redemption and
cleansing was precious, and would have ceased for ever; but this blood is
the ransom, this blood cleanseth, and so perfectly, that it shall not
appear, not only to men's eyes, but also God's piercing eye. Sinners, quit
your own righteousness,--why defile ye yourselves more? When your eyes are
opened, ye will find it so. Here is washing; apply yourselves to this
fountain; and if ye do indeed so; if ye expect cleansing from Jesus
Christ, I pray you return not to the puddle. Ye are not washen from sin,
to sin more, and defile yourselves more; if ye think ye have liberty to do
so, ye have no part in this blood.

Sermon XI.

Isaiah i. 16.--"Wash you, make you clean; put away the evil of your
doings from before mine eyes; cease to do evil," &c.

There are two evils in sin,--one is the nature of it, another the fruit and
sad effect of it. In itself it is filthiness, and contrary to God's
holiness; an abasing of the immortal soul; a spot in the face of the Lord
of the creatures, that hath far debased him under them all. Though it be
so unnatural to us, yet it is now in our fallen estate become, as it were,
natural, so that men agree with it, as if it were sunk and drunk into the
very soul of man. The other is guilt and desert of punishment and
obligation to it. All men hate this, but they cannot hold it off. They eat
the tree and fruit of death, they must eat death also: they must have the
wages of sin, who have wrought for it. Now, the gospel hath found a remedy
for lost man in Jesus Christ; he comes in the gospel with a twofold
blessing, a twofold virtue, a pardoning virtue and a sanctifying virtue,
"water and blood," 1 John v. 6. He comes to forgive sin, and to subdue
sin; to remove the guilt of it, and then the self(289) of it. God's
appointment had inseparably joined them; and Christ came not to dissolve
the law, but to establish it. If he had taken away the punishment, and
left the sin in its being, he had weakened the law and the prophets. That
conjunction of sin and wrath, which is both by divine appointment, and
suitable also unto their own natures, must stand, that divine justice may
be entire; a