Time and again in the history of the church, the truth that sinners are ‘not justified by the works of the law but by faith in Jesus Christ’ (Gal. 2:16) has been hidden from sight by those striving to find a place for man’s own righteousness alongside the righteousness of Christ in justification.

Fearing that free justification through the imputed righteousness of Christ opened the floodgate to lawlessness, such teachers have so qualified the biblical doctrine as to obscure the only way in which sinners may obtain peace with God.

Robert Traill (1642–1716), son of a Scottish Covenanting minister, fugitive, exile, and prisoner on the Bass Rock during the ‘Killing Times’, wrote his masterly defence of the doctrine of justification by faith alone in 1692 to dispel such obscurity. Here he makes plain, with brevity and clarity, that only justification by faith alone shows sinners the way to a holy God, makes them a holy and obedient people, and gives them joyful assurance of acceptance with God.