any of the preceding senses. On the contrary, he is under grace, under a more benign, gracious dispensation. As he is no longer under the ceremonial law, nor under the Mosaic institution; as he is not obliged to keep even the moral law, as the condition of his acceptance: so he is delivered from the wrath and the curse of God, from all sense of guilt and condemnation, and from all that horror and fear of death and hell, whereby he was all his life before subject to bondage. And he now performs (which while under the law he could not do) a willing and universal obedience. He obeys not from the motive of slavish fear, but on a nobler principle, namely, The grace of God ruling in his heart, and causing all his works to be wrought in love.
4. What then? Shall this evangelical principle of action, be less powerful than the legal? Shall we be less obedient to God from filial love, than we were from servile fear?
'Tis well, if this is not a common case: if this practical Antinomianism, this unobserved way of making void the law thro' faith, has not infected thousands of believers.
- Has it not infected you? Examine yourself
honestly and closely. Do you not do now, what you durst not have done when you was under the law, or (as we commonly call it) under conviction? For instance. You durst not then indulge yourself in food. You took just what was needful, and that of the cheapest kind. Do you not
