fanatic delusion, destitute of sanction in Scripture, and alien to the plan of redemption; just because it is not included in the church's' inventory of Christian benediction. Surely we could show him, and surely the Bible shows him, a 'more excellent way.' At all events, it ill becomes him to misrepresent the principles upon which other Christians found more cheering and consolatory views of the gospel. Though they do not profess to derive them from the church's maternal wisdom or compassionate foresight, yet they profess to go to a higher source, and one for which Mr. Ward ought to have felt more reverence than to malign its doctrine of assurance;' and from which, if he would listen to the holy oracles of God rather than to its soi-disant and arrogant substitute, he might yet possess the happy secret of the witnessing Spirit, whereby we are sealed to the day of redemption.' If he despises everything of this sort as fanatical weakness, or an unattainable, supernal elevation of the soul, too lofty for any but apostles and their contemporaries, yet still he should have shrunk from the office of an accuser-an accuser, too, of his brethren, upon an indictment that is glaringly false. The protestant doctrine of assurance can lead neither to presumption nor the disregard of sanctification, except it be perverted and abused; and that liability it must share with every other revealed truth. Mr. Ward insists that it is chargeable, not only with the disregard of sanctity, but that it naturally, necessarily, and actually leads to enormities of licentiousness. Nothing could be more unfair than to assume the rankest Antinomianism as the type of evangelical doctrine. We know perfectly well, that Amsdorf, and a few others, at the time of the Reformation, were impelled to extreme opinions by a blind zeal against the popish doctrine of inherent righteousness for justification; and we admit, that the race of Antinomians has never been extinct. But a man of Romish bias should be the last in the universe to assume this class of persons as a type of protestants, or as the distinctive opprobrium of their system; for, assuredly, there have been Roman-catholic writers, ay, and saints too, bishops and cardinals and popes, who have, both theoretically and practically, plunged into the depths of vice.

As to all the speculative errors that may be charged upon the first reformers, or some of them, they are explained by the law of human nature, that extremes beget extremes; but time works the requisite correction and adjustment. Opinions undergo a defecating process. Few even of the first reformers fell into the perilous speculations in which some indulged. Luther himself deplored and corrected the errors and excesses of the first boundings of his liberty, by which he overleaped the truth. How un

generous, then, to throw all the confessed errors of youthful protestantism in the teeth of modern 'evangelicals.' We have nothing to do with them. We are accustomed to appeal to the dictates of no human master. Justification by faith alone is a doctrine of the Bible; and there we are exhorted to make our calling and election sure,' and to say, 'now are we the sons of God.' What, upon any intelligible theory, can justification mean, but our standing acquitted, even in the present life, in God's view, and upon the authority of his revealed will? It is classed with other present benefits, and declared to be ours NOW. Speaking of the former state of pollution in which believers were, the Apostle Paul contrasts their present state in these words: But 'ye are washed, but ye are sanctified, but ye ARE justified in the 'name of the Lord Jesus, and by the Spirit of our God.'-1 Cor. vi. 11. Surely the glad tidings of the gospel are put before us for some definite, some divine-that is, some comfortable end-to give us strong consolation who have fled for refuge,' (not to our church discipline and mortification,) but to lay hold on the hope set before us.' It must remain with individual consciousness, upon every theory, to ascertain whether or not we have accepted of the promised blessing on the terms laid down. Believe, and thou shalt be saved,' is a reference to that inward consciousness. The word of God assures us, that if we do this, there is no condemnation against us, that we ARE justified. By the declared will of God thus ascertained from his own intelligible, unmistakable words, we are acquitted. What can any church add to this? What repose can it offer to the soul beyond the Divine utterances? It is folly to dream of any. It is weakness to accept any. Church authorities may deceive, but they cannot assure, nor insure, after God's word of life is received by faith. And if they attempt to do either before that word is cordially received by faith, then they deceive and destroy our souls. Surely, then, the true believer in God's promise has a right—a right, conceded by the Divine communication, to the joy of assurance, provided he take those steps to reconciliation, to peace, and to obedience, which God has ordained. That a man may mistake, presume, and deceive himself, is nothing to the point. He is cautioned against all these evils by Scripture. The church can go no further. It can take no precautions which God has not taken. It can pry into no heart, and reveal no secret. The consciousness of believing is, after all, the emotion of the inmost soul. None can directly know it but God and the soul. The knowledge of God in each particular case is not revealed; and the accuracy of the soul's own conclusion has to be tested, to be demonstrated, to be exhibited to the world, by the trial of faith, by the fruits of

faith under its trial. The whole question, therefore, between Mr. Ward and protestants concerning Christian assurance may be thus stated: Can we rightfully attain to a consolatory knowledge of our justification; and is that fact an announcement of the Divine oracle made to all who, in the sight of God, comply with the one condition- Believe, and be saved'? Or, is justification, according to the Romish church and our author, a something suspended on a man's own efforts, co-extensive, therefore, with his whole conflict, and not to be known till he reaches the other world? The Scripture avouches the former; Mr. Ward renounces it.

We have now arrived at the third point in Mr. Ward's statement of protestant doctrine which we were invited to examine. It is thus put:-The trust in Christ on which it follows (pardon or justification,) is a feeling which carries with it its own evidence, and which leads necessarily, without special pains or effort on our 'part, to a holy life.' We have placed in italics the portion to which we refer. Against this statement we urge a still heavier complaint of misrepresentation than against the former; because it is more artfully contrived, more maliciously fabricated, with the intention of grounding upon it a charge against justification by faith, as if it formally counted personal holiness a matter that might be left to take care of itself, or to flow of course from either assurance or faith; for it does not appear precisely from the author's grammar which he intended. Yet he durst not go so far as to represent the protestant doctrine wholly adverse to any connexion between faith and holiness; hence he inserts the word necessarily, without exhibiting what the protestant notion of that necessity is; and to nullify the force of the obscure admission represented by that word, he inserts the clause, which no sound protestant would ever have allowed, without special pains and effort on our part.' Hence the whole argument that follows, is a vain effort to fix upon the protestant doctrine a charge which is founded altogether upon the author's own fictitious representation. Sinking at once the important idea conveyed by the word necessarily, he dwells emphatically and triumphantly upon his own clause, without special pains and effort on our part,' and thus runs into the false and monstrous opinion that protestants consider holiness of no importance, and sin, open, extreme vice, of no detriment to the believer. Mr. Ward must either have been pre-eminently unfortunate in his acquaintance among protestant authors, or he must wilfully have misrepresented their opinions. Every divine of any repute in that school has insisted, as those we have before quoted, that the connexion between sanctification and justification is inseparable-is made necessary

in the strictest sense of that term, by the Divine appointmentso that no justification is held real or valid but that which is followed by sanctification. It is firmly maintained that no assurance of salvation can stand apart from holiness, and that this latter grace is strictly required in every case where life continues after believing. No class of theological writers, Roman catholics not excepted, have written more emphatically and frequently upon the obligation to bring forth the fruits of holy obedience: they have uniformly agreed that a holy life is absolutely necessary to prove the existence of a true faith, and have exploded as unsound and unscriptural that false confidence which is verified by no fruits of sanctity.

It may serve a purpose in controversy to represent the whole body of protestants as theoretically and practically Antinomians, to reproach them as solifidians, or rather mortui-fidians. Mr. Ward may allege, if he will, that such seems to him the inevitable consequence of making faith in Christ's mediatorial work the exclusive instrument of justification, and of separating our own obedience and personal righteousness from the consideration of the Supreme Judge in the act of our pardon; but the true cause of his opposition to the protestant theory in question is transparent enough. It leaves no place for the preparatory discipline of Romanists; it gives the priest no power over conscience; it exalts not the church to any office in the justification of a sinner; it brings him into immediate contact and connexion with the object of his faith, to the exclusion of all human intermeddlers; it suspends not the hope or the peace of the penitent upon his own merits, or the priest's will; and it teaches the sinner that would be saved, first to believe, and then to obey, or to obey in believing-first to become a living branch in Christ, the living tree, and then to bring forth fruit; or that sanctification must be the effect of justification, and not its cause. The entire scope of this doctrine leaves the church' nothing to do in the matter of justification; and hence the intense abhorrence' of Mr. Ward, and the powerless, pointless, rambling, and tiresome diatribe into which it has betrayed him.

We must now be allowed to call attention to the neglect with which he is chargeable, even of his own definition, and of the apparent ignorance he seems to display of the sense his opponents attach to the word 'necessarily' in the sentence-' leads necessarily to a holy life.' In the theory of the protestant, the sinner depends upon the grace of God, both for his moral rectification and his release from condemnation. The act of pardon ensues upon faith; but the divine gift of faith is the engrafting of a divine principle, which involves the power of God. If faith

were a speculative assent, merely, a human or natural emotion, a mere effort of what Mr. Ward calls our better nature,' and not the result of a divine influence, there could be no security for the production of holiness. But faith is, and he admits it, a divine principle in the soul of man, the fruit of the Spirit, and God's own workmanship. The vital germ of holiness is in it, because it unites to the living head, and is his gift in the first instance. It cannot, therefore, prove abortive. The effect of faith in the production of holiness is as necessary as the bestowment of pardon, in fulfilment of the divine promise, because both are in the divine intention. The one is the sovereign act of God as a judge and ruler, the other is the display of his mighty power, working in us to will and to do after his own good pleasure.' The security for holiness is found in the divine ordinance, that faith shall work by love, and that it shall be a divine principle, deriving its vitality from the truth of God, which it apprehends, and the divine Spirit which makes us his temples, transforming us by the renewing of our minds. This is the protestant's view of the necessity that connects holiness with faith. Instead of exhibiting no security for the production of holiness, we perceive in it an incomparably better security than can be found in natural conscience, natural religion, ecclesiastical discipline, or church authority, or all combined. The security exists in the divine appointment, constituting faith, as a divine endowment, efficient for the double purpose of justification through the merits of Christ, and sanctification by the influence of the Spirit with the word of God. This is an infallible security. This is the victory that overcometh the world, even our faith.' Mr. Ward's system displays nothing of the sort. The protestant's principle lays it down, that a justifying faith leads necessarily to a holy life; and the inevitable inference follows, that the absence of a holy life proves the absence of a justifying faith.

Here then appears, instead of inferiority, the superiority of the protestant theory of justification and sanctification, over the Romish. Mr. Ward's security rests upon the discipline of the church over the natural man, strangely and confusedly jumbled together with the doctrine of divine and gracious influence; though without explaining upon what ground a natural man is to receive, or hope for, the Spirit's influence. If such a man is to exercise faith, on what is that faith to rest, if not upon the divine promise of pardon and grace? The Romish theory, in fact, affords no valid security whatever for the production of holiness, because it imparts to the penitent no confidence for the conflict. It trusts not to the vital power of faith as a divine principle. It appeals not to the power of love and gratitude in the heart for