or moral, can reinstate you in right relations to God.  I do not summon you to the performance of any such service as that which you have in mind, in order to your justification and acceptance before the Divine tribunal. This is the work of God,—­this is the sole and single act which you are to perform,—­namely, that you believe on Him whom He hath sent as a propitiation for sin.  I do not summon you to works of the law, but to faith in Me the Redeemer.  Your first duty is not to attempt to acquire a righteousness in the old method, by doing something of yourselves, but to receive a righteousness in the new method, by trusting in what another has done for you.”

I. What is the ground and reason of such an answer as this?  Why is man invited to the method of faith in another, instead of the method of faith in himself?  Why is not his first spontaneous thought the true one?  Why should he not obtain eternal life by resolutely proceeding to do his duty, and keeping the law of God?  Why can he not be saved by the law of works?  Why is he so summarily shut up to the law of faith?

We answer:  Because it is too late for him to adopt the method of salvation by works.  The law is indeed explicit in its assertion, that the man that doeth these things shall live by them; but then it supposes that the man begin at the beginning.  A subject of government cannot disobey a civil statute for five or ten years, and then put himself in right relations to it again, by obeying it for the remainder of his life.  Can a man who has been a thief or an adulterer for twenty years, and then practises honesty and purity for the following thirty years, stand up before the seventh and eighth commandments and be acquitted by them?  It is too late for any being who has violated a law even in a single instance, to attempt to be justified by that law.  For, the law demands and supposes that obedience begin at the very beginning of existence, and continue down uninterruptedly to the end of it.  No man can come in at the middle of a process of obedience, any more than he can come in at the last end of it, if he proposes to be accepted upon the ground of obedience.  “I testify,” says St. Paul, “to every man that is circumcised, that he is a debtor to do the whole law” (Gal. v. 3).  The whole, or none, is the just and inexorable rule which law lays down in the matter of justification.  If any subject of the Divine government can show a clean record, from the beginning to the end of his existence, the statute says to him, “Well done,” and gives him the reward which he has earned.  And it gives it to him not as a matter of grace, but of debt.  The law never makes a present of wages.  It never pays out wages, until they are earned,—–­fairly and fully earned.  But when a perfect obedience from first to last is rendered to its claims, the compensation follows as matter of debt.  The law, in this instance, is itself brought under obligation.  It owes a reward to the perfectly obedient subject of law, and it considers itself his debtor until it is paid.  “Now to him that worketh, is the reward not reckoned of grace, but of debt.  If it be of works, then it is no more grace:  otherwise work is no more work” (Rom. iv. 4; xi. 6).