robe with which your nature was invested, on that sixth day of creation, when the Lord God said, “Let us make man in our image, and after our likeness.”  Ponder these truths, and what is yet more imperative, act upon them.  Remember that you must, by some method, become a perfect creature, in order to become a blessed creature in heaven.  Without holiness you cannot see the Lord.  You must recover the character which you have lost, and the peace with God in which you were created.  Your spirit, when it returns to God, must by some method be made equal to what it was when it came forth from Him.  And there is no method, but the method of redemption by the blood and righteousness of Christ.  Men are running to and fro after other methods.  The memories of a golden age, a better humanity than they now know of, haunt them; and they sigh for the elysium that is gone.  One sends you to letters, and culture, for your redemption.  Another tells you that morality, or philosophy, will lift you again to those paradisaical heights that tower high above your straining vision.  But miserable comforters are they all.  No golden age returns; no peace with God or self is the result of such instrumentality.  The conscience is still perturbed, the forebodings still overhang the soul like a black cloud, and the heart is as throbbing and restless as ever.  With resoluteness, then, turn away from these inadequate, these feeble methods, and adopt the method of God Almighty.  Turn away with contempt from human culture, and finite forces, as the instrumentality for the redemption of the soul which is precious, and which ceaseth forever if it is unredeemed.  Go with confidence, and courage, and a rational faith, to God Almighty, to God the Redeemer.  He hath power.  He is no feeble and finite creature.  He waves a mighty weapon, and sweats great drops of blood; travelling in the greatness of His strength.  Hear His words of calm confidence and power:  “Come unto me, all ye that labor and are heavy-laden, and I will give you rest.”

[Footnote 1:  The Augustinian doctrine, that the entire human species was created on the sixth day, existed as a nature (not as individuals) in the first human pair, acted in and fell with them in the first transgression, and us thus fallen and vitiated by an act of self-will has been procreated or individualized, permits the theologian, to say that all men are equally concerned in the origin of sin, and to charge the guilt of its origin upon all alike.]

[Footnote 2:  CONFESSION OF FAITH.  VI. vi.]

[Footnote 3:  One of the points of difference between the Protestant and the Papist, when the dogmatic position of each was taken, related to the guilt of original sin,—­the former affirming, and the latter denying.  It is also one of the points of difference between Calvinism and Arminianism.]

[Footnote 4:  Coleridge; Works, VII. 295.]

THE APPROBATION OF GOODNESS IS NOT THE LOVE OF IT.