13. By this scriptural distinction, every thing is kept in its proper place. Justification and sanctification are not confounded; and their respective offices are so ascribed to faith and works, as that the honor of the one is not vacated, nor the declarative evidence of the other superseded; but both are established in their proper stations;—_that_ to justify before God;—_these_ to justify before men. By this distinction, the word of God is easily reconciled with itself; and while one branch of it furnishes an antidote to the insolent claims of self-righteousness, the other equally secures obedience to the law, against the presumptuous hope of the antinomian hypocrite. “Do we make void the law through faith? God forbid: yea we establish the law.” Rom. iii. 31.—“By _grace_ ye are saved through faith: _not of works_, lest any man should boast.” Ephes. ii. 8, 9. From all, which I have urged on this head, with studied copiousness because of its importance, it is manifest that a _righteous man_ is one, who renouncing his own, betaketh himself to the righteousness of Christ; who, through the infinite merit of the Saviour’s blood, and the perfection of his obedience to the law, is delivered from curse and condemnation, and is possessed of a legal title to heaven; who receiving this method of justification by faith, believeth to the saving of the soul; in whose heart the fruits of righteousness are implanted; and in whose life there is a complete portraiture of a consistent professor of the gospel. Such a man is now blessed in the possession of present good; but he has secured to him still greater happiness in reversion. Standing in Christ, he has nothing to fear from sin, Satan, the law, or justice. And having his loins girded and his lamp burning, he is ready at all times to arise and meet the bridegroom. To him to live is Christ, to die is gain.—But this brings me II. To consider the nature and extent of his happiness implied in the terms _entering into peace_. As _peace_ necessarily pre-supposes trouble or warfare, it consequently leads back our ideas to the state of the righteous in this howling wilderness, previous to their arrival at the heavenly Canaan. Here, as pilgrims and sojourners, in a strange land, they undergo a great variety of fatigue and hardship before they accomplish the important journey they are taking; and one can never contemplate the _rest_ they enter upon in a glorious hereafter, without tracing in idea the _wearisome steps_ that lead to it.