all consider this ; and, renouncing all dependence on them- selves, trust in Christ alone, and seek " life everlasting" solely " by believing in him" ]
2. No evil that can have been committed, shall exclude us from mercy, if we believe on Christ —
[This is the grand scope of the text, and of the discourse upon it. But it never can be repeated too often, or impressed too earnestly on the heart and conscience. It is uniformly attested by all the inspired writers'1. May God help us to believe the record ; and cause us all to experience its truth ! If our guilt have been as extraordinary as Paul's, it may, for ought we know, have been permitted, on purpose that, like him, we may be extraordinary monuments of grace. At all events, we may urge it as a plea with God, that he will be transcendently glorified in our salvation1.]
q Isai. i. 18. and lv. 7. and Acts xiii. 39. r Ps. xxv. 11.
1 Tim. ii. 3, 4. God our Saviour . . . will have all men to be saved, and to come unto the knoivledge of the truth.
IT is truly lamentable to see how men, in every age, have strained and wrested the Holy Scriptures, in order to make them speak the language of their own particular creed. Some, averse to the idea that God should express his good-will to all the sinners of mankind, limit the word "all," and make it signify nothing more than some of all descriptions and cha- racters; whilst others run to a contrary extreme, and deduce from this expression a persuasion that none shall ever perish. It were well, if, instead of contending for human systems, and especially those of Calvin and Arminius, we were content to receive the Scriptures with the simplicity of little children : for, after all that has been said or written in support of those two most prominent systems, it is impossible to reduce the Holy Scriptures either to the one or to the other of them : for, on both hypotheses, there are difficulties which can never be surmounted, and con- trarieties which man can never reconcile. It is by