fellow-creatures, without repining: He loves his enemies, does good to them that hate him, blesses those that curse him, and prays for his persecutors and spiteful foes; Luke vi. 27. He pities all that are miserable, but takes a peculiar delight in his fellow-christians; (the christians must be known by this, that they love one another.) _He does good to all but especially to the household of faith_; Gal. vi. 10. Other religions know nothing of so generous and diffusive a love; the men of heathenism were _hateful, and hating one another, and spent their lives in malice and envy_; Tit. iii. 3. They did not so much as aspire to so divine a virtue as the love of enemies; this is the noble singularity of our gospel. The heathen professions encouraged revenge, and made it one ingredient of a hero: But envy and malice, wrath and revenge, must be banished from the heart and practice of a christian, to whom the kindness and love of God our Saviour has appeared; these vices must stand aloof from the saint, and thus bear a testimony to the truth and divinity of the doctrine of Christ. I grant that every one of these instances, and all these parts of eternal life which I have now described, are not to be found equally in all believers; nor are they in every believer in a very eminent and evident degree. But if we take all of them together, pardon of sin, peace of conscience, the favour of God, and a sense of his love, a pleasurable harmony of all our powers, an aversion to all sin, and hatred of every iniquity, a holy contempt of this world, in the pleasures, as well as in the pains and sorrows of it; delight in the worship of God, and desire after his enjoyment; zeal and activity in service for God, with a sincere aim for his glory, and a hearty love to fellow-creatures and fellow-christians: I say, if we join all these together, we shall find that the christian religion has a witness far superior to all other doctrines that ever pretended to divinity. We shall find that every believer has something of all these qualities wrought in his heart, and it is exemplified in his life. Truly, where none of these are found, that person cannot profess himself a christian with any just ground of hope: Where there is not such a witness as this to the truth of christianity, where there is not this eternal life begun in some sensible measure and manner, that person’s profession of christianity is but vain; and his practice and his course contradict the words of his lips, when he pronounces himself a believer in the Son of God.