+I. We are taught to examine and search our hearts by the law of God.+--1. When any sin is forbidden in any commandment of the law, under it all sins of the same kind are forbidden, all causes of them and all occasions. 2. A commandment negative includes the affirmative, and binds us not only to abstain from evil, but also to do the contrary good. 3. Every commandment must be understood with a curse annexed to it, though the curse be not expressed. 4. We must especially examine ourselves by the first and last commandments. The first forbids the first motions of our hearts against God, and the last forbids the first motions of our hearts against our neighbour. +II. The law of God to be reverenced.+--1. Because it was ordained or delivered by angels. 2. We are to fear to break the least commandment, because the angels observe the keepers and breakers of it, and are ready to witness against them that offend. 3. If thou offend and break the law, repent with speed, for that is the desired joy of angels. 4. If thou sin and repent not, look for shame and confusion before God and His angels. +III. God, the Author and Source of law, is one.+--1. He is unchangeable. 2. His unchangeableness the foundation of our comfort. 3. We should be unchangeable in faith, hope, love, good counsels, honest promises, and in the maintenance of true religion.--_Perkins._ Ver. 19. _The Use of the Law._ +I. It is a standard to measure our defects.+ +II. It is a sword to pierce our conscience.+ +III. It is a seal to certify that we are in the way of grace.+--_Tholuck._ _No Trust in Legal Prescriptions._--St. Paul, with the sledge-hammer force of his direct and impassioned dialectics, shattered all possibility of trusting in legal prescriptions, and demonstrated that the law was no longer obligatory on Gentiles. He had shown that the distinction between clean and unclean meats was to the enlightened conscience a matter of indifference, that circumcision was nothing better than a physical mutilation, that ceremonialism was a yoke with which the free, converted Gentile had nothing to do, that we are saved by faith and not by works, that the law was a dispensation of wrath and menace introduced for the sake of transgressions, that so far from being, as all the Rabbis asserted, the one thing on account of which the universe had been created, the Mosaic code only possessed a transitory, subordinate, and intermediate character, coming in, as it were in a secondary way, between the promise of Abraham and the fulfilment of that promise in the Gospel of Christ.--_Dean Farrar._ _The Use of the Law under the Gospel._ +I. The law never was intended to supersede the Gospel as a means of life.+ +II. The most perfect edition of the Gospel, so far from having abolished the least tittle of the moral law, has established it.+