Chapter 6: Legal Religion the required amount of religious exercises, this satisfies them. Their conscience harasses them, not so much about sins of omission as sins of commission. They make a distinction between neglecting to do what God positively requires, and doing what he positively forbids.
The most you can say of them is that they are not very bad. They seem to think little or nothing of being useful to the cause of Christ, so long as they cannot be convicted of any positive transgression.
6. This class of persons are more or less strict in religious duties, according to the light they have and the sharpness with which conscience pursues them.
Where they have enlightened minds and tender consciences, you often find them the most rigid of all professors. They tithe even to mint and anise. They are stiff even to moroseness. They are perfect pharisees, and carry everything to the greatest extremes, so far as outward strictness is concerned.
7. They are more or less miserable in proportion to the tenderness of their conscience.
With all their strictness, they cannot be sensible that they are great sinners after all: and having no just sense of the gospel justification, this leaves them very unhappy. And the more enlightened and tender their conscience, the more they are unhappy. Notwithstanding their strictness, they feel that they come short of their duty, and not having any gospel faith, nor any of that holy anointing of the Holy Spirit that brings peace to the soul, they are unsatisfied, and uneasy, and miserable.
Perhaps many of you have seen such persons. Perhaps some of you are such, and you never knew what it was to feel justified before God, through the blood of Jesus Christ, and you know not what it is to feel that Jesus Christ has accepted and owned you as his. You never felt in your minds what that is which is spoken of in the text, "There is now no condemnation to them that are in Christ Jesus, who walk not after the flesh, but after the Spirit."
Does such language bring home any warm and practical idea to you, that it is a reality because you experience it in your soul? Or do you, after all, still feel condemned and guilty, and have no sense of pardoned sin, and no experimental peace with God, or confidence in Jesus
8. This class of persons are encouraged and cheered by reading the accounts of ancient saints who fell into great sins.
They feel wonderfully instructed and edified when they hear the sins of Gods people set forth in a strong light. Then they are comforted and their hopes are wonderfully strengthened. Instead of feeling humbled and distressed, and feeling that such conduct is so contrary to all religion that they could hardly believe they were saints if it had not been found in the Bible, and that they could not believe at all that persons who should do such things under the light of the Christian dispensation, could be saints; they feel gratified and strengthened, and their hopes confirmed, by all these things. I once knew a man, an elder too, brought before the session of a church for the crime of adultery, and he actually excused