ons and ways. But the Scripture shall storm
that also. "The heart is deceitful above all things," who can know it? it
is "desperately wicked," Jer. xvii. 9. In a word, man is become the most
lamentable spectacle in the world, a compend of all wickedness and misery
enclosed within the walls of inability and impossibility to help himself,
shut up within a prison of despair, a linking, loathsome, and irksome
dungeon. It is like the miry pit that Jeremiah was cast into, that there
was no out-coming, and no pleasant abode in it.

Now, man's state being thus,--nay, having made himself thus, and "sought
out" to himself such sad "inventions," Eccl. vii. 29,--and having
"destroyed" himself, Hos. xiii. 9, What think ye? Should any pity him? If
he had fallen into such a pit of misery ignorantly and unwittingly, he had
been an object of compassion, but having cast himself headlong into it,
who should have pity on him? Or, who should "go aside to ask" how he did,
or bemoan him? Jer. xv. 5. But behold the Lord pities man as a father doth
his children, Psal. ciii. "His compassions fail not," he comes by such a
loathsome and contemptible object, and casts his skirts over it, and
saith, "Live!" (Ezek. xvi.) and maketh it a time of love. I say, no flesh
could have expected any more of God than to make man happy and holy, and
to promise him life in well-doing, but to repair that happiness after it
was wilfully lost, and to give life to evil-doers and sinners,--O how far
was it from Adam's expectation when he fled from God! Here then is the
wonder, that when men and angels were in expectation of the revelation of
his wrath from heaven against their wickedness, and the execution of the
curse man was concluded under, that even then God is pursuing man, and
pursues him with love, and opens up to him his very heart and bowels of
love in Jesus Christ! Behold then the second revelation and manifestation
of God, in a way of grace, pure grace--of mercy and pity towards lost
sinners "The kindness and love of God our Saviour toward man [hath]
appeared, not by works of righteousness which we have done, but according
to his abundant mercy showed in Christ Jesus," Tit. iii. 4-6. So then, we
have this purpose of God's love unfolded to us in the Scriptures, and this
is the substance of them--both Old and New Testament--or the end of them,
"Christ is the end of the law" (Rom. x. 4) to all sinners concluded under
sin and a curse. By it, our Lord Jesus, the