A Goodly Heritage

"O foolish Galatians, who hath bewitched you, that you should not obey the truth! This only would I learn of you, Received ye the Spirit by the works of the law, or by the hearing of faith? Are ye so foolish? having begun in the Spirit, are you now made perfect by the flesh? These people did not intend to give up the Savior, they were only going to help Him; they did not intend to cast off the Spirit, they were only going to perfect that which was lacking in His work; they had begun in the Spirit, and were going to the law to be made perfect. Ah! says Paul, the law belongs to the children of the flesh; to them it speaks; the works of it are the works of the flesh. Your perfection from thence will be only perfection in the flesh, and where you go for perfection there you must go for righteousness. Christ is our righteousness and sanctification too; go to the law for one, and you must go to the law for the other; by going for perfection there that yoke will entangle you again, and...

Those that have felt the bondage, wrath, terrors, and death, that the law works, will prize their liberty, and take heed how they approach that blackness and darkness again; but those that never felt its power can play with it as with a bird, for they are alive without it. It is vain that ministers send men to Sinai in order to promote holiness: "the works of the flesh are these, adultery, fornication, uncleanness, lasciviousness, idolatry, witchcraft, hatred, variance, emulations, wrath, strife, seditions. heresies, envyings, murders, drunkenness." And will sending men to the law destroy these? Nay, says Paul, these are the motions of sin, which are by the law that works in our members to bring forth fruit unto death, Rom. 7:5. Nor was the law manifested to destroy these works of the devil, but to make them appear exceeding sinful; nor does the law weaken sin but aggravate it; for "the strength of sin is the law." It is grace that makes the believer what he is,...

Election secures every minister in his station, and all the success that shall attend his labours. It has been observed that those, who have been the most forward at lampooning me for an Antinomian, have been the greatest novices in divinity; and, while they have been contending for the law as the only rule of life, they have preached the greatest confusion, discovered the greatest ignorance of the nature of the law, and have evidently appeared in the strongest bondage: "He that leadeth into captivity shall go into captivity;" he that binds grievous burdens on other men's shoulders goes a sure way to load his own back. No wonder that legions are flocking back to Sinai; it is a proof that the law is not dead to them, nor they to it; they begun in the Spirit before they had been killed by the letter. Their first husband, it is to be feared, is not dead, therefore they are not loosed from that law: and being adulteresses, the first husband has taken them up and brought t...