The same truth may be said to have been substantially revealed to the servants of God under the old dispensation: there is no express mention indeed of a new creation of the individual; but the prophets every where assert, what is similar in effect, that no wicked person, without hearty repentance and an entire change of character, must expect the divine favour. To this purpose is the language of Isaiah: “Wash you, make you clean; put away the evil of your doings from before mine eyes; cease to do evil, learn to do well.” {213a} The unclean and unrighteous cannot stand before God. “As I live, saith the Lord God, (by the mouth of Ezekiel) I have no pleasure in the death of the wicked, but that the wicked turn from his way and live; turn ye, turn ye from your evil ways; for why will ye die, house of Israel?” {213b} The prophet thereto plainly intimating, that notwithstanding all that goodness and long-suffering of the divine nature, which is expressed in a most compassionate invitation, and is confirmed even by the solemnity of an oath, yet if sinners did not “turn from their evil ways,” there was no remedy, but they must die. And the same prophet on another occasion, uses language very similar to that of the text; “I will put a _new_ spirit within you, and I will take the stony heart out of their flesh—that they may walk in my statutes and keep mine ordinances, and do them, and they shall be my people, and I will be their God.” {214a} Agreeably to this, the same people are subsequently exhorted, to “cast away from them all the transgressions whereby they had transgressed, and to make them a new heart and a new spirit.” {214b} However therefore, the New Covenant doth exceed the Old, with regard to the clearness of its manifestations, and its fuller dispensations of grace, yet are there in both of them the same consistent terms of reconciliation and salvation for rebellious man; in both are injoined the same purity of spirit, and integrity of character; this is the plain, uniform, infallible intimation of both, that “without holiness no man shall see the Lord.” {214c}