‘[Only] in the gospel do we so behold God as that we may love God. It is there, and there only, where God stands revealed as an object of confidence to sinners — and where our desire after Him is not chilled into apathy by that barrier of human guilt which intercepts every approach that is not made to Him through the appointed Mediator. It is the bringing in of this better hope, whereby we draw nigh unto God — and to live without hope is to live without God, and if the heart be without God the world will then have all the ascendency. It is God apprehended by the believer as God in Christ who alone can dispost it from this ascendency … Retain a single shred or fragment of legality with the gospel, and you raise a topic of distrust between man and God. You take away the power of the gospel to melt and to conciliate’. – Thomas Chalmers, ‘The Expulsive Power of a New Affection’, in The Works of Thomas Chalmers, D.D.: Complete in One Volume (Philadelphia: A. Towar/Hogan and Thompson 1833), 384, 387.

[H/T: Noel Due]