ty to His mind
and character. True, if I obey the Gospel, my obedience is my own, but
the _law_, or the righteousness _prescribed_, is Christ's. It is when
men make a law of their own,--when they set aside God's law, and put
some other law in its place, and expect God's blessing in consequence of
obeying that, that they trust in their _own_ righteousness. And in all
such cases men's own righteousness, in God's sight, is "as filthy rags."
But hearty, loving obedience to God's _own_ law is never regarded by Him
"as filthy rags," but as a rich adorning. Real Christian goodness is, in
the sight of God, "of great price."

"Than gold or pearls more precious far,
And brighter than the morning star."

Christian obedience is a sacrifice with which God is well pleased: "To
do good and to communicate forget not, for with such sacrifices God is
well pleased." He alone trusts in the righteousness of Christ who hears
Christ's words and does them,--who cultivates Christ's mind, and lives
as Christ lived, and who, in doing so, expects, according to Christ's
promise, God's blessing and eternal life. The idea that God looks on any
persons as having lived like Christ when they have not done so; or that
He supposes any persons to be righteous, or treats them as righteous,
when they are not so, is foolish and anti-scriptural in the extreme. And
it is unmethodistical too. Yet here is a Methodist preacher so-called,
dealing out this mischievous and miserable folly. And alas he is not
alone. And these are the men who abuse others as heretics.

--The good done where preachers preach theology is not done by the
preaching, I fancy, but by stray truth from the Gospels, and by the
Christian lives and Christian labors of simple-minded, Bible-loving,
non-theological members of the church. God bless them!

--Wesley has thirty definitions of religion, and they all mean, in
substance, loving God and loving man, and living to do good. Wesley was
always sensible in proportion as he got away from under the influence of
the prevailing Theology.

--Some talk as if a religious education can never be the means of a
child's conversion,--that, do for your children what you will, they will
still, like others, require a distinct and full conversion when they
come of age. I cannot see why a good Christian mother talking to her
child from her old arm-chair, and praying with it as it kneels by her
side, or the good example and godly training of a pious