03.12. [LIVING FAITH ESSENTIAL TO SALVATION.]

[LIVING FAITH ESSENTIAL TO SALVATION.] As to your seventeenth and eighteenth chapters, I shall say little, only I wish that your eighteenth had been more express in discovering how far a man may go, with a notion of the truth of the gospel, and yet perish because he hath it not in power.

Only in your inveighing so much against the pardon of sin, while you seem so much to cry up healing; you must know that pardon of sin is the beginning of health to the soul: He pardoneth our iniquities, and healeth all our diseases (Psalms 103:3). And where he saith, by the stripes of Christ we are healed, it is evident that healing beginneth at pardon, and not pardon after healing, as you would rather have it (1 Peter 2:24, compare Isaiah 53:1-12). As for your comparison of the plaster, and the physician’s portion, I say you do but abuse your reader, and muddy the way of the gospel. For the first thing of which the soul is sick, and by which the conscience receiveth wounding; it is the guilt of sin, and fear of the curse of God for it. For which is provided the wounds and precious blood of Christ, which flesh and blood, if the soul eat thereof by faith, giveth deliverance therefrom. Upon this the filth of sin appears most odious, for that it hath not only at present defiled the soul, but because it keeps it from doing those duties of love, which by the love of Christ it is constrained to endeavour the perfecting of. For filth, appears filth; that is irksome, and odious to a contrary principle now implanted in the soul; which principle had its conveyance thither by faith in the sacrifice and death of Christ going before. ’The love of Christ constraineth us; because we thus judge, that if one died for all, then were all dead: And that he died for all, that they which live should not henceforth live unto themselves, but unto him which died for them, and rose again’ (2 Corinthians 5:14). The man that hath received Christ, desireth to be holy, because the nature of the faith that layeth hold on Christ (although I will not say as you, it is of a generous mind) worketh by love, and longeth, yea, greatly longeth that the soul may be brought, not only into an universal conformity to his will, but into his very likeness; and because that state standeth not with what we are now, but with what we shall be hereafter: therefore ’in this we groan, - being burdened [with that which is of a contrary nature] to be clothed upon with our house which is from heaven’ (2 Corinthians 5:1-8). Which state is not that of Adam’s innocency; but that which is spiritual and heavenly, even that which is now in the Lord in heaven. But I will descend to your nineteenth chapter, it may be more may be discovered there.