owe to God and to our fellow men. I would advise you, therefore, as soon as you can, to take up the decalogue in a series of discourses, more or less extended according to circumstances, so as to be sure that you touch upon all the requirements and prohibitions of the ten commandments, in the early part of your ministry. You will find it an exceedingly fruitful and interesting field, and when once you have fairly entered it, I have no doubt your congregation will be anxious to have you go over the whole ground. If you make thorough work of it, it will do you more good than a whole year in the best Theological Seminary, and lay a broad foundation for future success in your labors. It may cost you more hard study than to preach on various familiar topics, from isolated texts of Scripture; but it will be all the better for that, provided you have health to sustain it. In entering upon such a course of sermons, you will have a fine opportunity to hold up the law of God before your people, in all its strictness and spirituality; to insist upon the reasonableness of its claims, the justice of its penalty and the impossibility of being justified by it. Let me exhort you, in preaching upon the law of God as laid down in the ten commandments, to be very explicit in pointing out the difference between the letter and the spirit. Show your hearers, that outward obedience however exact, is nothing, without the heart; that no external act of worship or relative duty is rightly performed, unless it springs from love to God and love to man. This is the only right way of preaching the moral law. In this way, and in this way only, can it be

made to bear in a direct and practical manner upon the heart and the conscience.

sense of the term?

I know very well, that some persons cannot endure what they are pleased to stigmatise as "legal preaching," any more than they can bear sound doctrine." But what is legal preaching in the proper If you were to hold up perfect obedience to the moral law, as the ground of justification before God, and to tell your hearers, they can be saved by their own works, that would be legal preaching with a witness. But still, some will tell you that they do not want the law, but the gospel. They are mistaken. They "know not what they ask." They do want the law, "as a schoolmaster to bring them to Christ." Preaching the law in its length and breadth-in its deep and searching spirituality, prepares the way for the gospel. "The whole have no need of a physician, but they that are sick." The sinner must first be convinced, that if he lingers about Mount Sinai, the lightning may at any moment strike him dead, and then he will be glad to have you tell him the way to Calvary, but not before. I do not say that in preaching the law, you are bound to take all your texts from the twentieth chapter of Exodus. "Cursed is every one that continueth not in all things written in the book of the law, to do them," and other appropriate passages will do just as well. Nor do I say, that you are bound to begin your ministry with the law, and to say nothing about the gospel, till you have gone over all the ten commandments. Far from it. What I mean is this, and I hope I have made it sufficiently clear already, that

the law is to be preached as well as the gospel, and that a right view of its claims and sanctions is essential to the acceptance of the Gospel.

But here, you say, some one will ask, "Did not the Apostle Paul determine to know nothing among the Corinthians, save Jesus Christ and him crucified. And how, in consistency with this noble resolution, can any minister dwell so much in his preaching as I have recommended you to dwell, upon the law." To meet this objection fairly, we must ascertain, if we can, what and how much the Apostle meant by preaching Jesus Christ and him crucified. To understand him aright, we must take this verse in connection with that which immediately precedes it. "And I brethren, when I came to you, came not with excellency of speech or of wisdom, declaring unto you the testimony of God. For I determined not to know anything among you, save Jesus Christ and him crucified." Dr. Scott's Commentary on this passage is so judicious and satisfactory to my own mind, that I cannot deny myself the pleasure of quoting it.

"When the Apostle came, a Jewish stranger, among the polite, speculating and licentious Corinthians, he did not attempt to catch their attention, by affected elegancy or sublimity of language, by the trappings of human oratory, or by the speculations of philosophy. For his object was to declare the testimony of God, concerning the only method of salvation from eternal misery and of obtaining eternal life; and such a message would not admit of these worthless embellishments. Whatever knowledge, therefore,

he possessed, whether of Rabbinical or Grecian learning, he determined to keep it out of sight, and to preach as if he had known no other subject than that of Jesus the Messiah, even him who was crucified and who was generally despised and execrated, and those things that related to the redemption of sinners through his blood. This was the center and substance of his preaching; but it is evident, that he did not confine himself wholly to this one topic, so as to exclude other parts of the revealed will and truth of God: for we are sure from his own writings, that he preached man's relation to God as his Creator, Benefactor and Governor; the glorious perfections and the holy law of God; the future judgment and eternal state of righteous retributions; the lost estate of man, regeneration, repentance, conversion, the necessity of personal holiness, attention to relative duties, and in short, the whole counsel of God, as the great circumference to that circle, of which Christ crucified is the centre in which all the lines meet. But upon the most mature deliberation, he determined to know nothing, even among the refined and philosophical Corinthians, which did not elucidate, recommend, evince, or adorn this great doctrine of salvation by the cross of Christ."

This admirable exposition lays open the mistake of those, who think they have "fully preached the Gospel of Christ," when they have rung as many changes as they can upon a few phrases which relate to his sufferings, death and atonement; and it shows, that as "the field is the world," so the whole system of divine truth is the gospel, or is so essentially connected

with it, that the gospel cannot be said to be fully and faithfully preached, where any Bible doctrine or precept is kept out of sight. No one, I believe, will deny, that all the warnings and denunciations of the New Testament, as well as its great and precious promises, belong to the gospel. And if, my son, you preach the gospel as Paul preached it, as Peter preached it, those who cannot endure the terrors of the law will be quite as restless under the gospel, just as those who demand practical preaching, writhe under it, when it is brought home to their consciences, more than they ever did under the hardest doctrines.

In truth, you well know, the most awful threatenings in the Bible are found in the New Testament, and many of them were uttered by the Savior himself. "Ye serpents, ye generation of vipers, how can ye escape the damnation of hell?" "And if thine eye offend thee, pluck it out; it is better for thee to enter into the kingdom of God with one eye, than having two eyes, to be cast into hell fire, where their worm dieth not and the fire is not quenched." "Then shall he say to them on his left hand, depart, ye cursed, into everlasting fire, prepared for the devil and his angels." "For if we sin wilfully, after that we have received the knowledge of the truth, there remaineth no more sacrifice for sins, but a certain fearful looking for of judgment and fiery indignation which shall devour the adversaries. It is a fearful thing to fall into the hands of the living God." These alarming denunciations you must utter, as well as the invitations of the gospel, if you would be a good and faithful minister of Christ.