3. This gospel is a most powerful means to subdue sin in the soul, to mortify corrupt nature, to inspire us with virtue, to wean our hearts from vice, sensuality, and trifles, and from all the insufficient pretences to blessedness that the world can flatter us with. The gospel of Christ, both in his own personal ministry of it, and in the writings of his apostles, sets before us the most divine scheme of morality, piety and virtue, that ever the world knew. The sacred dictates of probity and goodness towards men, as well as the venerable rules of piety toward God, which are scattered up and down in an imperfect and obscure manner among the philosophers, and shine like a star here and there in the midnight darkness of heathenism; these are all collected and refined in the gospel of Christ, and fill the christian world with a pure and universal light like the sun unclouded in a meridian sky: We know our duty infinitely better from the instructions of Christ and St. Paul, than all the Platos, and the Plutarchs, all the Zenos and the Antonines of Greece and Rome, could ever teach us. The most divine rules of the gospel are attended also with the noblest motives to love virtue, and to hate all vice; for never was the evil of sin so displayed to the eyes and senses of men, as by the cross and gospel of our Lord Jesus Christ: Never did sin appear so hateful, so abominable, so justly the object of divine and human hatred, as when it appeared pressing the soul of the holy One of God into agonies and sharp anguish. A believer, who has seen the evil of sin as revealed in this gospel, will hate it, and will be led powerfully to a conquest over it. Besides, the terrors of hell are revealed to us among the doctrines of christianity, as the just punishment of sin, and that in such a manner as no other religion pretends to: For, as the doors of heaven are opened by our Lord Jesus Christ, both by his ministry on earth, and by his ascent into heaven, and by the farther discoveries which his apostles have made of the future unseen happy world, so the doors of hell are opened too. Our Lord Jesus himself preached hell and terrors to sinners with a sacred vehemence, and set everlasting fire in a clearer and more dreadful light than ever had been done by all the philosophers in the world. The soul of every saint has been in some measure a witness of this truth, when it lay under the work of divine conviction. And not only the horrid nature and evil of sin, and the dreadful consequences of it, are powerful motives to make us stand afar off, and fear it: but “The sweet and constraining influence of the love of Christ does most effectually incline me, saith the believer, to hate every sin, and to follow after universal holiness: Shall I build up again the things which my Saviour died to destroy? This would be to make him suffer agonies in vain, and run counter to all the designs of his bleeding love, and the voluntary sacrifice of his soul?”