She asserts that she is misrepresented by the Protestants. She acknowledges Christ as the only Redeemer; she holds the doctrine of the Holy Trinity, the Incarnation, the Atonement, the work of the Holy Ghost. She retains the three ancient creeds. She boasts of having overcome in the early centuries all the blasphemous heresies which denied the humanity or divinity of Christ, or the fall and corruption of man, or the personality and grace of the Holy Ghost. She resisted the Gnostic, Manichæan, Arian, Pelagian, Macedonian, Apollinarian, Eutychian, and Nestorian heresies. She extinguished the Waldenses and Albigenses, defended the massacre of St. Bartholomew, and the revocation of the edict of Nantes. She is the orthodox church. She claims antiquity, universality, and general consent. She points to her fathers and saints, to her sisters of charity and her monastic institutions, to her learned Benedictines and Sorbonne divines. She bids you ⚫ contemplate the piety, humility, and spirituality of her Thomas á Kempis. She tells you that with her alone are the feelings of awe, veneration, and deep devotion to be found. She bids you, in a word, contrast her unity with the varieties and divisions of the reformed bodies.

But, brethren, you will never listen to these enticing words with the New Testament in your hands. You will pierce this whited sepulchre, and look within, and see the dead men's bones and all uncleanness. Instead of words and pretences you will

ask for facts. You will contrast St. Paul's method of sanctification with that of the pope. You will tell them that the three creeds are nullified by the thirteen suffrages of Pope Pius IV. You will tell them that the heresies they crushed, and the fathers they rely on, were chiefly before the ripening of the apostacy at the commencement of the seventh century. You will remind them that their persecution of the Waldenses and Albigenses, and their concurrence in the murders of Paris, and the banishment of the flower of the population from France, were amongst their foulest crimes. As to antiquity, tell her it is clearly against her. The universal consent claimed is all contradictory; and the general diffusion asserted, a lie. You will inform her that her Thomas à Kempis, and Pascal, and Nicole, in later ages, and her Cyprian and Augustine in earlier ones, were rescued by God's mercy from the idolatry and real spirit of Rome prevalent in their day, and protested against it. As to her feelings of awe and veneration, and her unity, you will let her know we possess them all in our own protestant churches, without pushing them to superstition, and without swamping them in the mass of idolatry which destroys all their real effect in the church of the apostacy.

Rome, in a word, is not misrepresented by the Protestants. She is perfectly understood; as she was by St. Paul and the other inspired writers who have delineated her features to the very life. Her

system is idolatrous; her worship frivolous and debasing; her discipline a tyranny; her doctrines in the very teeth of Christ's mediation; her external government an usurpation; and her false humility and show of wisdom only a cloak for pride and folly.

But St. Paul has settled all these points in the verses we have been considering; and will aid us in those we have yet to consider in learning further the gospel method of sanctification.

LECTURE XXVII.

MEANS OF CHRISTIAN SANCTIFICATION-MORTIFICATION AND RENUNCIATION OF SIN.

COL. iii. 5-9.

5. Mortify therefore your members which are upon the earth; fornication, uncleanness, inordinate affection, evil concupiscence, and covetousness, which is idolatry:

6. For which things' sake the wrath of God cometh on the children of disobedience:

7. In the which ye also walked some time, when ye lived in them.

8. But now ye also put off all these; anger, wrath, malice, blasphemy, filthy communication out of your

mouth.

9. Lie not one to another, seeing that ye have put off the old man with his deeds.

WE have concluded our remarks on the apostle's decisive and most weighty judgment on angel-worship, v. 18 and 19, including his condemnation of the Jewish notions, by means of which it was insinuated, v. 11-17; and the austerities to which it led, v. 20-23. We have considered, also, his contrasted and most striking view of the real method of our sanctification: chap. iii. v. 1-4.

on.

St. Paul proceeds now, in the twelve verses, of which the first five are to be the subject of this lecture, to urge on the Colossians the various means which are necessary to this " rising with Christ,” and by which it must be progressively carried These are, the mortification of the corruptions and vices which directly oppose the spiritual life: v. 5-9. The putting on all the graces and duties which become such a life, v. 13-15. And a diligent study of the word of Christ, the Holy Scriptures, as the divine rule of the faith and practice in which that life consists, v. 16 and 17.

Mortify, therefore, your members which are upon the earth. For how can they who " are dead, and whose life is hid with Christ in God," who are "risen with him," and dwelling in heart and affection continually in heaven, and who are humbly hoping to be manifested" with Christ in glory;"

how can they live in those sins which are hateful to God, and thus deny and defeat all the holy ends of his Gospel?

In order, therefore, that we may prove the sincerity of our professed resurrection with Christ to a heavenly life, and that we may be capable of rising more and more in him and by him, St. Paul exhorts us to mortify ourselves, not after the human inventions and austerities of Jewish or heathen doctors, but by putting to death our inordinate affections and appetites, according to the Gospel.

Hitherto the apostle had been condemning the false methods of access to God, and had been speaking of such a rising with Christ as implied a forsaking of the world and a worldly religion; now he enters on the next branch of real sanctification, the mortifying of the flesh, the crucifying of the interior vices of the mind and will, and the putting to death our whole corrupt nature. Being freed from the bondage and inefficiency of a false and superstitious religion, we must vigorously labour to oppose, subsue, and eradicate all the springs of evil in our members which are upon the earth.

By this last expression, we are not to understand the members and parts of the human body, the wonderful work of God; but something rising up in these members in rebellion against "the law of Rom. vi. our renewed mind," and turning them into "instruments of unrighteousness unto sin." The word members, then, is here elegantly put for the

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