was the rise of all, and love did run alongst in
all, yet so, as there is room to speak out his holiness, and
righteousness, and justice, not so much to affright sinners, as to make
his mercy the more amiable and wonderful.

I know not a more pressing ground of strong consolation, nor a firmer
bulwark of our confidence and salvation, than this conjunction of mercy
and justice in the business. There might have been always a secret
hink(174) of jealousy and suspicion in our minds, when God publisheth
mercy and forgiveness to us freely. O how shall the law be satisfied, and
the importunity of justice and faithfulness, that hath pronounced a
sentence of death upon us, answered! Shall not the righteous law be a
loser this way, if I be saved, and it not satisfied by obedience or
suffering! How hard would it be to persuade a soul of free pardon, that
sees such a severe sentence standing against it! But now there is no place
for doubting. All is contrived for the encouragement and happiness of poor
sinners, that we may come to him with full persuasion of his readiness and
inclinableness to pardon, since Jesus Christ hath taken the law and
justice of God off our head, and us off their hand, and since he hath
reckoned with them, for what is due by us and paid it without us,--then we
have a clear way, and ready access to pardon, and to believe his readiness
to pardon. And this is it which is holden out here,--Christ condemning sin
in the flesh, or punishing sin in his own flesh, giving a visible and
sensible representation of the justice and righteousness of God in
punishing sin, and that in his own flesh, offering up himself as the
condemned sinner, and hanging up to the view of all the world, as an
evident testimony of the justice and righteousness of God against sin, and
by this means cutting off the very strength of sin,--the law, by fulfilling
it. In Christ's sufferings you may behold, as in a clear mirror, the
hatred and displeasure of God against sin, the righteousness of God in
punishing sin. Him hath God set forth to the world to be a propitiation,
to declare the righteousness of God. Rom. iii. 24, 25. In this crucified
Lord, you may behold the sensible image and the most lively demonstration
of holiness and righteousness. Christ's flesh bare the marks of
both,--holiness in hating sin, righteousness in punishing it, and both in
his beloved and only begotten Son's person,--in his flesh, and all for this
purpose, that the la