alive from the dead, and your members as instruments of righteousness unto God. Conform to his revealed will, and keep an eye single to his glory in the performance of every duty. To produce in his people this happy change, was the end of Messiah’s sufferings. But this was not all, for the apostle adds,—“By whose stripes ye were healed.” Divine philosophy! supernatural science! transcending all original conception of men and angels! Who could ever have dreamed of healing by his stripes, soundness by his wounds, pleasure by his pains, and life eternal by his death! We are afflicted by the old inveterate plague of sin, but there is balm in Gilead, and a Physician there. His blood alone can cure the malady, and that is infallible. All the way from Bethlehem to Calvary, he was employed in preparing his materia medica. The Gospel is the great store-house of this precious preparation. It is always full; it is always free; and the sign over its entrance is—“Able to save to the uttermost.” The Holy Spirit is continually making the application, and all who come are cured. It is a matter of all others the most momentous, that we know our personal interest in these things. If we be not dead to sins, and alive unto righteousness—if we be not healed by the stripes of Jesus—his sufferings upon the cross, and our theoretical faith in their vicarious character and saving power, will profit us nothing. “If any man have not the spirit of Christ, he is none of his.” There is a vast difference between sanctification and morality. A man may perform many excellent deeds, while the principle that actuates him is averse to true godliness. Happy are they, whose sins are pardoned, whose persons are justified, and whose bodies are become temples of the Holy Ghost. The Lord is their God and Father. They have passed from death unto life, and shall not come into condemnation. “There is now no condemnation to them that are in Christ Jesus, who walk not after the flesh, but after the Spirit; for the law of the Spirit of life, in Christ Jesus, hath made me free from the law of sin and death.” SERMON IX. THE PURIFICATION OF CONSCIENCE. “_How much more shall the blood of Christ_, _who_, _through the eternal Spirit_, _offered himself without spot to God_, _purge your conscience from dead works to serve the living God_?”—Heb. ix. 14. THE Hebrew Christians, to whom the apostle wrote, were well acquainted with the laws of ceremonial purification by the blood of beasts and birds, for by blood almost every thing was purified in the service of the temple. But it is only the blood of Christ that can purge the human conscience. In speaking of this purification, as presented in our text, let us notice—_the object_, _the means_, and _the end_. I. The object of this purification is the conscience; which all the sacrificial blood shed, from the gate of Eden, down to the extinction of the fire on the Jewish altar, was not sufficient to purge.