The godly man hates the evil he possibly by temptation hath been drawn
to do, and loves the good he is frustrated of, and, having intended,
hath not attained to do. The sinner, who hath his denomination from
sin as his course, hates the good which sometimes he is forced to do,
and loves that sin which many times he does not, either wanting
occasion and means, so that he cannot do it, or through the check of
an enlightened conscience possibly dares not do; and though so bound
up from the act, as a dog in a chain, yet the habit, the natural
inclination and desire in him, is still the same, the strength of his
affection is carried to sin. So in the weakest _sincere_ Christian,
there is that predominant sincerity and desire of holy walking,
according to which he is called a _righteous person_, the Lord is
pleased to give him that name, and account him so, being upright in
heart, though often failing.
Leighton adds, "There is a Righteousness of a higher strain." I do not
ask the reader's full assent to this position: I do not suppose him as
yet prepared to yield it. But thus much he will readily admit, that
here, _if_ any where, we are to seek the fine Line which, like stripes
of Light in Light, distinguishes, not divides, the summit of religious
Morality from Spiritual Religion.
"A Righteousness" (Leighton continues) "that is not _in_ him, but
_upon_ him. He is _clothed_ with it." This, reader! is the
controverted Doctrine, so warmly asserted and so bitterly decried
under the name of "IMPUTED RIGHTEOUSNESS." Our learned Archbishop, you
see, adopts it; and it is on this account principally, that by many of
our leading Churchmen his orthodoxy has been more than questioned, and
his name put in the list of proscribed divines, as a Calvinist. That
Leighton attached a definite sense to the words above quoted, it would
be uncandid to doubt; and the general spirit of his writings leads me
to presume that it was compatible with the eternal distinction between
_things_ and _persons_, and therefore opposed to _modern_ Calvinism.
But what it was, I have not (I own) been able to discover. The sense,
however, in which I think he _might_ have received this doctrine, and
in which I avow myself a believer in it, I shall have an opportunity
of showing in another place. My present object is to open out the road
by the removal of prejudices, so far at least as to throw some
disturbing _doubts_ on the secure _taking-for-granted_, that the
peculiar Tenets of the Christian Faith asserted in the articles and
homilies of our National Church are in contradiction to the common
sense of mankind. And with this view, (and not in the arrogant
expectation or wish, that a mere _ipse dixit_ should be received for
argument) I here avow my conviction, that the doctrine of IMPUTED
Righteousness, rightly and scripturally interpreted, is so far from
being either _irrational_ or _immoral_, that Reason itself prescribes
the idea in order to give a _meaning_ and an ultimate object to
Morality; and that the Moral Law in the Conscience demands its
reception in order to give reality and substantive existence to the
idea presented by the Reason.