the former part has been vicious, and the latter part virtuous, can be the same in his sight, as a life spent in virtue from beginning to end. But here again we may appeal to experience. The sinner returns with the sacrifice of a broken heart to an offended Deity. Under these circumstances, does conscience forego her office of condemning and punishing? Does remorse, the scourge which this just judge employs, abate its force and subside into nothing? So far otherwise, that the deeper the repentance, the more appalling becomes the recollection of past transgression the more intolerable the pain which that recollection occasions. Absolutely necessary as is the penitence of such an offender-approved of God and rejoiced in by angels it affords no peace to the offender himself. On the contrary, it breaks up his former tranquillity, nor can he again find repose, except in the mercy of God that mercy 'which is in Christ Jesus our Lord.

II. That mediation in the most general sense of the term is natural, no observer of nature can for a moment deny; for a large proportion of the comforts which we enjoy in life, and our very existence itself, are bestowed upon

us through the intervention of others. To what a number of middle agents — each performing his own office in the economy of Providenceare we all indebted for our food, our raiment, our habitations, our social pleasures, our mental cultivation, our intellectual habits!

But to consider the subject in the more restricted scriptural view of our being saved from the punishment of sin, through the intervention of a Mediator who does not know that such a mediation consists with the visible order of God's government, or in other words, agrees with experience?

Although the ruined spendthrift, the decrepit sensualist, and the condemned criminal, may be destitute of all power to assist themselves, yet if their excesses have not gone beyond a certain point, a brother, a physician, an intercessor, will often succeed in delivering them from the effects of their transgressions.

The world abounds with poverty, misery, and sorrow, and these are often the natural consequences of our own misconduct. It also contains many remedies for them, which for the most part, are applied to their purpose through the agency of others; and which are so many

examples not merely of goodness, but of mercy, in the known government of God. Now the punishments of a future state, may equally follow sin, in the way of natural consequence; and the prevention of them, through the mediation of Christ, is an infinitely higher, and yet a precisely analogous, example of the same divine mercy. Who then shall pretend that such a doctrine is strange or unnatural ?

But the innocent Jesus, it is objected, is represented as suffering in behalf of guilty sinners, and even in their stead. Such undoubtedly is the doctrine of Scripture, and to object to it, as if we were able to penetrate the counsels of an inscrutable Being, is a great absurdity. But how doubly absurd does such an objection become, when we look into the world around us, and perceive on every side innumerable instances of the innocent suffering for the guilty!

For example-A son, although carefully educated, yields to his evil propensities, and pursues a course of dissipation. For a long time he may himself escape without punishment, but his parents mourn on his behalf, and mourn in his stead. Every act of vice or folly

which he is known to commit, inflicts a fresh wound on the hearts of those who are guiltless of his offences; and the more they regard the law of righteousness, the more deeply they suf fer. Or, on the other hand, a parent neglects his business, and falls into intemperance; and what in consequence is the lot of his innocent offspring? They are deprived of a good education, reduced to poverty, and exposed to innumerable sorrows. view, the sins of the father are visited on his children even to the "third or fourth generation."

In a temporal point of

Almost all the crimes which men commit, and even their minor faults are the occasion, in various degrees, of misery or uneasiness to those who are no sharers in their guilt. More particularly, when we interfere on behalf of others, in order to prevent or remedy the afflicItions in which they are involved by their own vice or folly, we seldom succeed in our object, except at the cost of much labour and anxiety, and often of loss and injury, to ourselves. In all such cases, the pains which we endure are, strictly speaking, vicarious.

It is clear then that the suffering of the in

nocent for the guilty is permitted under the government of God; and there can be no doubt that it is often ordained for the most beneficial purposes. Now will any one who has a just sense of his own ignorance, and of the secrecy of the divine counsels, object to this providential appointment, even though the suffering in question be directly opposed (as is often the case) to the will of him who bears it.

But the apparent difficulty is considerably lessened, when the pains which men endure for the sake of others are voluntary. What skeptical mind is offended by the labours and difficulties which men so often undergo to serve a brother or a friend; or by the self devotion of the sisters of charity to the painful duties of the hospital; or by the perils which a Howard braves in visiting infected prisons; or by the banishment and privations which a Schwartz or a Brainerd endures, in order to preach the gospel to the heathen?

Now when the Lord Jesus, during his sojourn on earth, submitted himself to a life of hardship and poverty when he carried the sorrows and bare the sicknesses of the peoplehis sufferings on behalf of man, were purely