blood that pursues them, and what safety is within?
You are always imagining vain satisfactions to the law of God. How great
weight doth your fancy impose upon your tears, your confessions, your
reformations! If you can attain any thing of this kind, that is it which
you give to satisfy justice, it is that wherewith you pretend to fulfil
the law. But if it could be so, wherefore should God have sent his Son to
condemn sin, and purchase righteousness by him? I beseech you, once know
and consider your estate, that you may open your hearts to this Redeemer,
that you may be willing to be stripped naked of all your imaginary
righteousness, to put on this which will satisfy the law fully. Will you
die in your sins, because you will not come to him to have life? Will you
rather be condemned with sin, than saved with Christ's righteousness? And
truly, there is no other altar that will preserve you but this. Now, if
any, apprehending their own misery, be hardly pursued in their consciences
by the law of God, I beseech you come hither and behold it satisfied and
fulfilled. I beseech you in Christ's stead to be reconciled unto God,--to
lay down all hostile affections, and come to him, because God is in Christ
reconciling the world, and not imputing their sins, because he hath
imputed them already to Christ, "him who knew no sin," &c, and he is in
Christ, imputing his righteousness to sinners.

Sermon XV.

Verse 4.--"That the righteousness of the law might be fulfilled in
us," &c.

"Think not," saith our Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ, "that I am come to
destroy the law,--I am come to fulfil it," Matt. v. 17. It was a needful
caveat, and a very timeous advertisement, because of the natural
misapprehensions in men's minds of the gospel. When free forgiveness of
sins, and life everlasting, is preached in Jesus Christ, without our
works; when the mercy of God is proclaimed in its freedom and fulness, the
heart of man is subject to a woful misconceit of Christ, as if by these a
latitude were given, and a liberty proclaimed to men to live in sin. That
which is propounded as the encouragement of poor sinners to come to God,
and forsake their own wicked way, is miserably wrested upon a mistake, to
be an encouragement to revolt more and more. Righteousness and life, by
faith in a Saviour, without the works of the law, is holden out as the
grand persuasion of the gospel, to study obedience to the law. And yet
such is the