An answer to the discourse of Mr. William Sherlock, touching the knowledge of Christ,…

To the same purpose the Apostle discourses, ¹Rom. 7.4, 5, 6. Wherefore, my Brethren, you also are become dead to the Law, by the body of Christ, (who ⟨p. 379⟩put an end to that imperfect dispensation by his death) that you should be married to another, even to him who is raised from the dead, that we should bring forth fruit unto God; for when we were in the flesh, (under that carnal and fleshly dispensation of the Law of Moses) the motions of sins, which were by the Law (which grew more boisterous and unruly by the prohibitions of the Law, vers. 8.) did work in our members to bring forth fruit unto death; That is, did betray us to those wicked actions, which end in death: But now we are delivered from the Law; that being dead, in which we were held, that we should serve in newness of the Spirit, and not in the oldness of the Letter: So that the reason why the Law of Moses was abrogated, was, because it could not make men good, it nursed them up in a ritual external Religion, taught them to serve God in the Letter by Circumcision, Sacrifices, or external conformity to the Letter of the Law; but the Gospel of Christ alone teacheth us, to worship God in the Spirit; to offer a reasonable Sacrifice to him; to fulfil the [Greek or Hebrew], all the internal Righteousness, of which those legal Ceremonies were the Signs and Sacraments: This is the plain meaning of the ⟨p. 380⟩Apostles, which can never be reconciled with imputed Righteousness, which would make his argument foolish and absurd: Therefore he tells us in other places, what little reason we have to be so zealous for the Law of Moses, since we have the perfection of it in the Gospel: what need is there of the circumcision of the flesh, which the Law required? When in the Gospel we have the circumcision made without hands, [Greek or Hebrew], of that fleshly circumcision: What need of legal washing and purgations? When they are all fulfilled in the washing of regeneration, in the Gospel baptism: Thus we are complete in Christ, who bath perfectly instructed us in the will of God, and instituted such a Religion as is the perfection of all Ceremonies, Col. 2. We must now offer another Sacrifice, than the Law of Moses commanded, not the Sacrifices of dead beasts, but of a living and active soul,