Then followed a lot of unscriptural and unwise talk about our own righteousness and Christ's righteousness. But the truth is, when we love God and keep His commandments,--when we love Christ and do as He bids us, and believe, in consequence, that we are approved of God, and in a fair way for heaven, we trust in _God's_ righteousness, or _Christ's_ righteousness, and not in a righteousness of our own. The righteousness of God means the righteousness which God _requires_; the righteousness of _Christ_ means obedience to His precepts, and conformity 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.