rest," until Christ is in him as the Father is in Christ, and he has "Christ's joy fulfilled" in his heart.

But how does this joy in God pass away? Most commonly, I answer, through sin for which the "heart condemns" the subject, and the sin is left upon the conscience unrepented of and unforgiven. In my own case, this was not the cause after which we are seeking. There has never been a period in my Christian life when I did not cherish a sacred respect for every form of the known will of God, or when "my heart condemned me" and I did not seek prompt forgiveness; yet there were years in which I "feared the Lord and trembled at His word," and still "walked in darkness and had no light." How did I lose that primal blessedness? In the first place, I answer, I expected to lose it. That I should lose it was a fixed article of the creed in which I had been taught from the beginning. In the heart of every believer whom I knew, and of whom I had heard or read, that blessedness had faded out. In my experience this joy passed away so gradually and imperceptibly that very little alarm was excited. As the light faded, I read my experience and inward life very distinctly in the seventh chapter of Romans, which, as I honestly supposed, reveals that experience and life in the best form to be expected this side heaven or the hour of death. The wretchedness that I experienced, and the abortive efforts I made to recover my former standing and overcome my evil tendencies and besetments, revealed to me, as I supposed, the fact that I was then in the identical moral and spiritual state in which Paul was when he wrote this and his other epistles. Thus, by my own faith and views of the express teaching of inspiration, was I frozen in, and that in " a land of darkness as darkness itself, where the light is as darkness."

Nor had I, at that time, any views of Christ, of the provisions of His grace, or of the power of the Spirit-views which had the remotest efficacy to relieve my difficulties, or reveal the path which would have conducted me out of that darkness into God's marvellous light." I knew Christ almost exclusively in the single sphere of our justification. Hardly "by the hearing of the ear" had I any knowledge of Him as our sanctification. Of "the promise of the Spirit" I was in total darkness. I consequently had no idea of what is meant by all that is revealed of Christ as a manifested, personal presence, "formed within us, the hope of glory," and, with the Father, "making His abode with us." All the promises and revealed provisions of grace were limited and eclipsed by what was supposed to be revealed of Christian experience and privileges in the chapter referred to, and other falsely interpreted passages. Yes, reader, I was in that dim twilight of a semi-faith, because, while I was studying diligently-and this is not wrong-what was called the great doctrines, my imperious need, as I afterward found, was some one to teach me what are the first principles of the oracles of God." Had some one thus taught me, how long would I have remained in that dark and dreary waste? No longer than I did. remain after the highway of holiness was opened upon my vision. If you, reader, are now dwelling in these low grounds, heed the voice which comes to us from God out of heaven, calling upon the sacramental host to go forward, and ascend those "delectable mountains " whose cloudless summits are ever warmed and illumined by the life-giving beams of the Sun of Righteousness.

CHAPTER XII.

LIGHT BREAKING IN,

In the moral and spiritual state above indicated, I entered, about the eighth year of my Christian life, upon my studies as a student in theology at Andover, Massachusetts. Our Biblical Professor was the celebrated Biblical scholar, Rev. Moses Stuart. In the progress of our Biblical studies, we came at length to the seventh chapter of Romans. Our learned Professor, to the surprise of not a few of his pupils, laid out all his learning and talents in rendering it demonstrably evident that the specific object of the apostle in this chapter is to elucidate a legal in distinction from a proper Christian experience. The express object of the entire epistle, as he showed us, is to elucidate and verify the doctrine of salvation in its entireness, salvation by faith, as opposed to the Jewish error of salvation by deeds of law and patriarchal descent. In the first five chapters, the Christian doctrine of justification by faith is most fully stated, elucidated, and verified, in opposition to the Jewish error of justification by deeds of law. In the next three chapters, a precisely similar course of demonstrative reasoning is pursued relatively to the fundamental doctrine of sanctification by faith, as opposed to the Jewish error upon the same subject. In the portion of the seventh chapter devoted to the subject, the apostle details, in fact and form, his own abortive legal experience as a Jew, and in

the eighth chapter details, in contrast with his former legal self and life, his Christian experience as a believer in Jesus. The contrast is most instructive and impressive. In the former state he was always under condemnation, bringing forth fruits unto death; in the latter, he was free from all condemnation, because he was justified freely by divine grace, and "dead indeed unto sin, but alive unto God through Jesus Christ our Lord." In the former state, in every purpose of obedience, and in every conflict with his evil propensities, "the law in his members," he suffered a sad and inglorious defeat, and was a stranger to victory in all its forms; in the latter state, in every condition of existence, and in every conflict with the powers of sin, he was "more than a conqueror through Him that hath loved us." In the former state, he found "a law that, when he would do good, evil was present with him;" in the latter, "the law of the spirit of life in Christ Jesus made him free from the law of sin and death." In the former state, "he was carnal, sold under sin;" in the latter, he was the Lord's freeman, "delivered from the bondage of corruption into the glorious liberty of the children of God." To explain the experience detailed in Romans vii. as Christian experience, is to annihilate, as our Professor showed us, all distinction between sanctification by faith and "by deeds of law," between the experience of the Jew and that of the Christian, and to affirm faith in Christ to be just as inoperative in the matter of sanctification as is the law. The views which our Professor presented, accord, as he rendered undeniably evident, with those received by the entire primitive Church directly from the apostle himself, and with the expositions of a vast majority of the most distinguished commentators of all ages. We were finally shown, by numerous quotations from heathen authors, that

the experience portrayed in this seventh chapter is identical with that of men living in sin, as portrayed by such writers, and that their language, in most important respects, perfectly corresponds with his upon the same subject. All our ideas of the Christian life, as we were shown, are marred when we identify the legal experience described in Romans vii. with the Christian experience described in the next chapter, and in other parts of the Bible.

The argument of our Professor was most manifestly unanswerable, and with the conviction induced, rays of light began to pierce "the horror of great darkness" in which my mind was involved. The supposed revealed necessity, that the believer shall remain "carnal, sold under sin," and carry about with him in his "captivity under the law of sin" and death "the body of this death," was taken away, and I was set free to inquire, and soon began most eagerly to inquire, in other portions of the Word of God "for the things which are freely given us of God." The manner in which these inquiries were pursued, together with the results, will be disclosed hereafter.