grace, or the love of an infinitely holy and just God towards guilty and polluted sinners. (2.) To this end, of his mere good pleasure, He predestinated those who were the objects of this love to the high dignity of being the children of God. (3.) That, to prepare them for this exalted state, He chose them, before the foundation of the world, to be holy and without blame in love. (4.) That in consequence of his choice, or in execution of this purpose, He confers upon them all spiritual blessings, regeneration, faith, repentance, and the indwelling of the Spirit. It is utterly incompatible with this fact that the foresight of faith and repentance should be the ground of election. Men, according to the Apostle, repent and believe, because they are elected; God has chosen them to be holy, and therefore their holiness or their goodness in any form or measure cannot be the reason why He chose them. In like manner the Apostle Peter says, believers are elect "unto obedience and sprinkling of the blood of Jesus Christ." (1 Pet. i. 2.) Such is the clear doctrine of the Bible, men are chosen to be holy. The fact that God has predestinated them to salvation is the reason why they are brought to repentance and a holy life. "God," says Paul to the Thessalonians (2 Thess. ii. 13), "hath from the beginning, chosen you to salvation through (not on account of) sanctification of the Spirit and belief of the truth." "We give thanks to God always for you all, making mention of you in our prayers; remembering without ceasing your work of faith, and labour of love, and patience of hope in our Lord Jesus Christ, in the sight of God and our Father; knowing, brethren beloved, your election of God." (1 Thess. i. 2-4.) He recognizes their election as the source of their faith and love.

From the Gratuitous Nature of Salvation.

5. Another decisive fact is that salvation is of grace. The two ideas of grace and works; of gift and debt; of undeserved favour and what is merited; of what is to be referred to the good pleasure of the giver, and what to the character or state of the receiver, are antithetical. The one excludes the other. "If by grace, then is it no more of works: otherwise grace is no more grace. But if it be of works, then is it no more grace: otherwise work is no more work." Rom. xi. 6. Nothing concerning the plan of salvation is more plainly revealed, or more strenuously insisted upon than its gratuitousness, from beginning to end. "Ye are saved by grace," is engraved upon almost every page of the Bible, and in the hearts of all believers. (1.) It was a matter of grace that a plan of salva

tion was devised for fallen man and not for fallen angels. (2.) It was a matter of grace that that plan was revealed to some portions of our race and not to others. (3.) The acceptance, or justification of every individual heir of salvation is a matter of grace. (4.) The work of sanctification is a work of grace, i. e., a work carried on by the unmerited, supernatural power of the Holy Spirit. (5.) It is a matter of grace that of those who hear the gospel some accept the offered mercy, while others reject it. All these points are so clearly taught in the Bible that they are practically acknowledged by all Christians. Although denied to satisfy the understanding, they are conceded by the heart, as is evident from the prayers and praises of the Church in all ages and in all its divisions. That the vocation or regeneration of the believer is of grace, i. e., that the fact of his vocation is to be referred to God, and not to anything in himself is specially insisted upon by the Apostle Paul in almost all his epistles. For example, in 1 Cor. i. 17-31. It had been objected to him that he did not preach "with the wisdom of words." He vindicated himself by showing, first, that the wisdom of men had not availed to secure the saving knowledge of God; and secondly, that when the gospel of salvation was revealed, it was not the wise who accepted it. In proof of this latter point, he appealed to their own experience. He referred to the fact that of their number God had not chosen the wise, the great, or the noble; but the foolish, the weak, and the despised. God had done this. It was He who decided who should be brought to accept the Gospel, and who should be left to themselves. He had a purpose in this, and that purpose was that those who glory should glory in the Lord, i. e., that no man should be able to refer his salvation (the fact that he was saved while another was not saved) to himself. For, adds the Apostle, it is of Him that we are in Christ Jesus. Our union with Christ, the fact that we are believers, is to be referred to Him, and not to ourselves.

The Apostle's Argument in Romans ix.

This also is the purpose of the Apostle in the whole of the ninth chapter of his Epistle to the Romans. He had asserted, agreeably to the predictions of the ancient prophets, that the Jews as a nation were to be cast off, and the blessings of the true religion were to be extended to the Gentiles. To establish this point, he first shows that God was not bound by his promise to Abraham to save all the natural descendants of that patriarch. On the contrary, that it was a prerogative which God, as sovereign, claimed and exercised,

to have mercy on whom He would, and to reject whom He would. He chose Isaac and not Ishmael, Jacob and not Esau, and, in that case, to show that the choice was perfectly sovereign, it was announced before the birth of the children, before they had done good or evil. Pharaoh He had hardened. He left him to himself to be a monument of justice. This right, which God both claims and exercises, to choose whom He will to be the recipients of his mercy, involves, the Apostle teaches us, no injustice. It is a right of sovereignty which belongs to God as Creator and as moral Governor. No one had a right to complain if, for the manifestation of his mercy, he saved some of the guilty family of men; and to show his justice, allowed others to bear the just recompense of their sins. On these principles God, as Paul tells us, dealt with the Jews. The nation as a nation was cast off, but a remnant was saved. And this remnant was an "election of grace," i. e., men chosen gratuitously. Paul himself was an illustration of this election, and a proof of its entirely gratuitous nature. He was a persecutor and a blasphemer, and while in the very exercise of his malignant opposition, was suddenly and miraculously converted. Here, if in no other case, the election was of grace. There was nothing in Paul to distinguish him favourably from other unbelieving Pharisees. It could not be the foresight of his faith and repentance which was the ground of his election, because he was brought to faith and repentance by the sovereign and irresistible intervention of God. What, however, was true of Paul is true of every other believer. Every man who is brought to Christ is so brought that it is revealed to his own consciousness, and openly confessed by the mouth, that his conversion is of God and not of himself; that he is a monument of the election of grace; that he, at least, was not chosen because of his deserts.

Argument from Experience.

The whole history of the Church, and the daily observation of Christians, prove the sovereignty of God in the dispensation of saving blessings, for which Augustinians contend. It is true, indeed, first, that God is a covenant keeping God, and that his promise is to his people and to their seed after them to the third and fourth generations. It is, therefore, true that his grace is dispensed, although not exclusively, yet conspicuously, in the line of their descendants. Secondly, it is also true that God has promised his blessing to attend faithful instruction. He commands parents to bring up their children in the nurture and admonition of

the Lord; and promises that if thus trained in the way in which they should go, when they are old they will not depart from it. But it is not true that regeneration is the product of culture. Men cannot be educated into Christians, as they may be trained in knowledge or morals. Conversion is not the result of the development of a germ of spiritual life communicated in baptism or derived by descent from pious parents. Everything is in the hands of God. As Christ when on earth healed one and another by a word, so now by his Spirit, He quickens whom He will. This fact is proved by all history. Some periods of the Church have been remarkable for these displays of his powers, while others have passed with only here and there a manifestation of his saving grace. In the Apostolic age thousands were converted; many were daily added to the Church of such as were to be saved. Then in the Augustinian age there was a wide diffusion of the saving influences of the Spirit. Still more conspicuously was this the case at the Reformation. After a long decline in Great Britain came the wonderful revival of true religion under Wesley and Whitefield. Contemporaneously the great awakening occurred throughout this country. And thus from time to time, and in all parts of the Church, we see these evidences of the special and sovereign interventions of God. The sovereignty of these dispensations is just as manifest as that displayed in the seven years of plenty and the seven years of dearth in the time of Moses. Every pastor, almost every parent, can bear witness to the same truth. They pray and labour long apparently without success; and then, often when they look not for it, comes the outpouring of the Spirit. Changes are effected in the state and character of men, which no man can produce in another; and which no man can effect in himself; changes which must be referred to the immediate agency of the Spirit of God. These are facts. They cannot be reasonably denied. They cannot be explained away. They demonstrate that God acts as a sovereign in the distribution of his grace. With this fact no other scheme than the Augustinian can be reconciled. If salvation is of grace, as the Scriptures so clearly teach, then it is not of works whether actual or foreseen.

Express Declarations of Scripture.

6. The Scriptures clearly assert that God has mercy on whom He will have mercy, and compassion on him on whom He will have compassion. They teach negatively, that election to salvation is not of works; that it does not depend on the character or efforts of its objects; and affirmatively, that it does depend on

God. It is referred to his good pleasure. It is declared to be of Him; to be of grace. Passages in which these negative and affirmative statements are made, have already been quoted. In Rom. ix. it is said that election is "not of works, but of Him that calleth." "So then, it is not of him that willeth, nor of him that runneth, but of God that sheweth mercy." As in the time of Elias amid the general apostasy, God said, "I have left me seven thousand in Israel, all the knees which have not bowed the knee unto Baal." (1 Kings, xix. 18.) "So then," says the Apostle, "there is a remnant according to the election of grace. And if by grace, then is it no more of works: otherwise grace is no more grace.' (Rom. xi. 5, 6.) So in Rom. viii. 30, it is said, "Whom He did predestinate, them He also called," i. e., He regenerated and sanctified. Regeneration follows predestination to life, and is the gift of God. Paul said of himself, "It pleased God, who separated me from my mother's womb, and called me by his grace, to reveal his Son in me." (Gal. i. 15, 16.) To the Ephesians he says that those obtain the inheritance, who were "predestinated according to the purpose of Him who worketh all things after the counsel of his own will.” (Eph. i. 12.) In 2 Tim. i. 9, he says, we are saved "according to his own purpose and grace, which was given us in Christ Jesus. before the world began." The Apostle James, i. 18, says, "Of his own will begat He us with the word of truth, that we should be a kind of first-fruits of his creatures." The Apostle Peter speaks of those who "stumble at the word, being disobedient: whereunto also they were appointed." (1 Pet. ii. 8.) And Jude speaks of certain men who had "crept in unawares, who were before of old ordained to this condemnation." (Jude 4.) This foreordination to condemnation is indeed a judicial act, as is taught in Rom. ix. 22. God condemns no man, and foreordains no man to condemnation, except on account of his sin. But the preterition of such men, leaving them, rather than others equally guilty, to suffer the penalty of their sins, is distinctly declared to be a sovereign act.

The Words of Jesus.

Of all the teachers sent by God to reveal his will, no one more frequently asserts the divine sovereignty than our blessed Lord himself. He speaks of those whom the Father had "given Him." (John xvii. 2.) To these He gives eternal life. (John xvii. 2, 24.) For these He prays; for them He sanctified Himself. (John xvii. 19.) Of them He says, it is the Father's will that He should lose none, but raise them up at the last day. (John vi. 39.)