292 A RATIONAL DEFENCE OF THE GOSPEL. -SERM. XVII. the perfect righteousness ofmy Saviour that has procured it. A life of holiness without defect, and a most submis- siveobedience toa painful and shameful death, have been the price and purchase of it." 3. This gospel is a most powerful means to subdue sin in the soul, to mortify corrupt nature, to inspire us with virtue, to wean our hearts from vice, sensuality, and trifles, and from all the insufficient pretences to blessedness that the world can flatter us with. The gospel of Christ, both in his own personal minis- try of it,' and in the writings of his apostles, sets before us the most divine scheme of morality, piety and virtue, that ever the world knew. The sacred dictates of pro- bity and goodness toward men, as well as the venerable rules of piety toward God, which are scattered up and down in an imperfect and obscure : manner among the philosophers, and shine like a star here andethere in the midnight darkness of heathenism; these are all collected and refined in the gospel of Christ, and fill the christian world with a pure and universal light like the sun un- clouded in a meridian sky: We know our duty infinitely better from the instructions of Christ and St. Paul, than all the Platos, and the Plutarchs, all the Zenòs and the Antonines ofGreece and Rome, could ever teach us. The most divine rules of the gospel are attended also with the noblest motives to love virtue, and to hate all vice ; for never was the evil of sin so displayed to the eyes and senses of men, as by the cross andgospel of our Lord Jesus Christ:: Never did sin appear so hateful, so abominable, so justly the object of divine and human hatred, as when it appearedpressing the soul of the holy One ofGod intoagonies and sharp anguish. A believer, who has seen the evil of sin as revealed in this gospel, will hate it, and will be led powerfully to a conquest over it. Besides, the terrors of hell are revealed to us among the doctrines of christianity, as the just punishment of sin; and that in such a manner as no other religion pre- tends to : For, as the doors of heaven are opened by our lord Jesus Christ, both by his ministry on earth, and by his ascent into heaven, and by the farther discoveries which his apostles have made of the future unseen happy world, so the doors of hell are opened too. Our Lord
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