ighteousness as dung behind him, that
he may be found in Jesus Christ, he hath no life, he cannot have any right
to the eternal. You may think this is a strange assertion, that if a man
had the righteousness and holiness of an angel, yet he could not be saved
without denying all that, and fleeing to Christ as an ungodly man, and you
may think it as strange a supposal, that any person that reads the
scriptures, and walks righteously, and hath a zeal towards God, yet are
such as will not come to Christ and will not hear him whom the Lord hath
sent.

But the first is the very substance of the gospel. "There is none other
name whereby men may be saved, but by Jesus Christ," Acts iv. 12. Life
eternal is all within him. All the treasures of grace and wisdom and
knowledge are seated in him, Col. i. 19, ii. 3. All the light of life and
salvation is embodied in this son of righteousness, since the eclipse of
man's felicity in the garden. Adam was a living soul, but he lost his own
life, and killed his posterity. Christ Jesus, the second common man in the
world, is a quickening spirit. He hath not only life in himself, but he
gives it more abundantly, and therefore you have it so often repeated in
John, who was the disciple most acquainted with Christ, "in him was life,
and the life was the light of men," John i. 4. And he is "the bread of
life, that gives life to the world," John vi. 33, 35. He is "the
resurrection and the life," xi. 23, and "the way, the truth, and the
life," xiv. 6. The scriptures do not contain eternal life, but in as far
as they lead to him who is life, and whom to know and embrace is eternal
life and therefore, saith he, "these are they which testify of me." Man
lived immediately in God when he was in innocency, he had life in himself
from God, but then he began to live in himself without dependence on God
the fountain of life, and this himself being interposed between God and
life, it vanished even as a beam by the intervening of any gross body
between it and the sun. Now man's light and life being thus eclipsed and
cut off, the Lord is pleased to let all fulness dwell in his Son Jesus
Christ, and the fulness of the Godhead dwelt in him bodily, Col ii. 9,
that since there was no access immediately to God for life (a flaming
fire, and sword of divine justice compassing and guarding the tree of
life, lest man should touch it) there might be access to God in a mediator
like unto us that we might come to him, a