The Gospel Magazine

The Gospel Magazine 201
and cheerless; and sometimes they felt the pressure of His hand and
heard His voice, " It is I, be not afraid." But faith learns at length,
and by a slow and painful and humbling process, that all these varied
experiences of ours make no difference to the unchangeable God of
our salvation. We, sometimes in the dark; He is light and ill Him
is no darkness at all. We, mourning that our love is cold and faint;
He is love in all its embodiment and changelessness. Thus, folded
up in our experience, is His abiding word" Alway." And the word
of our heavenly Guide Who will and does" go before" us is, " And
10, I am with you alway, even unto the end." "I will never leave
thee nor forsake thee." Thus
"Though sometimes unperceived by sense,
Faith sees Him always np-ar,
A guide, a glory, a defence;
Then what have you to fC3.r?
As surely as He overcame,
And triumphed once for you;
So surely you that love His Name
Shall triumph in Him too."
The Mighty Breaker has gone up before His people and passed on
at the head of them, and straightened their crooked places, and broken
in pieces the gates of brass, and" cut in sunder the bars of iron," and
each from the least to the greatest, the weakest or the strongest,
shall know Him as " the LORD ... the God of Israel."
R.
IMPUTED
By AN
RIGHTEOUSNESS.
OLD DIVINE.
" THE fourth ground error of the Papists in the article of justification
is concerning that which we call the form thereof. For they denying
and deriding the imputation of Christ's righteousness (without which,
notwithstanding, no man can be saved) do hold that men are justified
by infusion, and not by imputation of righteousness; we, on the contrary,
do hold, according to the Scriptures, that we are justified before
God, only by the imputation of Christ's righteousness, and not by
infusion. And our meaning, when we say that God imputeth Christ's
righteousness unto us, is nothing else but this: that He graciously
aecepteth for us, and in our behalf, the righteousness of Christ, that
is, both as to His obedience, which, in the days of His flesh, He performed
for us; and passive, that is, His sufferings, which He sustained
for us, as if we had in our own persons both performed and suffered
the same ourselves. Howbeit, we confess that the Lord doth infuse
righteousness into the faithful; yet not as He justifieth, but as He
sanctifieth them."-(Bishop Downame on Justification, p. 261. Quoted
by Dr. C. Hodge in his Commentary on the Epistle to the Romans,
chapter iv. 4, 5.)