powerfully minded to obedience to the law as a rule, by a view of the
holiness has no causual influence upon his everlasting happiness as a federal and conditional means thereof; but the perfect righteousness of Christ as a surety, is the believer's plea both with respect to law and justice, and that whether as to the purchase, or actual obtaining the possession of everlasting happiness.
5. That believers being heirs of heaven, though they ought to be powerfully minded to obedience to the law as a rule, by a view of the excellency of their inheritance of God in Christ, by their having the begun possession of this inheritance, and by the sure hope of the perfect possession thereof, being secured by free grace, through the blood of Christ; yet they ought not be influenced to obedience, by hopes of obtaining the possession of that inheritance, by any good works done by them; and that though believers are to entertain an holy dread of the majesty of God, and his power to cast into hell, and of the awfulness of his threatenings and judgments against sin and sinners, and to consider from these, the due desert of their sins; and though they ought to be influenced by the feeling or fear of afflictions in this life, temporal and spiritual, considered as the discipline of the covenant, sent by a kind Father on a kind design, to the study of habitual improvement of the blood and Spirit of Christ, for the mortifying of remaining corruption, and exercising gospel holiness; yet they ought not to be excited to obedience by any fear, that God shall for their sins actually cast them into hell; but ought always to believe their full security against falling into the pit, in order to influence them to a more cheerful obedience.
6. That believers are, through Christ, altogether delivered from the law as a covenant of works; the asserting of which, doth no way infer their being loosed from the law as a rule of life; and that though all unbelievers are under the law as a covenant of works, yet it doth not follow that they are obliged to seek justification by their own righteousness; nay, all of them are obliged to seek justification by the blood of Christ alone, without the works of the law.