ll, when He shows us the true path to escape,
and tells us, that the obstacles in our way have been cleared, and that
he will give us strength to accomplish, the task of escaping, and will
guide us that we do not miss the track; then what shall we say to those
who insist upon, remaining where they are, but that they are either
infatuated, or indolent and cowardly even to insanity; that they are
refusing certain salvation, and are, by their own act, giving themselves
over to inevitable death.

This, then, is the truth taught us by the doctrine of the Fall; not so
much that it is our certain destruction to remain where we are, for that
our own sense and reason declare to us, if we will but listen to them;
but that our present position is not that for which God designed us, and
that to rest satisfied with it is not a yielding to an unavoidable
necessity, but the indolently or madly shrinking from the effort which
would give us certain deliverance.

Now it is a part of our present evil condition from which we must
escape, that we know good and evil. We are in the world where evil
exists within us, and about us; we cannot but know it. True it is, that
it was our misfortune to become acquainted with it; this noisome
wilderness of reeds, this reeking swamp; it would have been far happier
for us, no doubt, had we never become aware of their existence. But that
wish is now too late. We are in the midst of this dismal place, and the
question now is, how to escape from it. We may shut our eyes, and say we
will not see objects so unsightly; but what avails it, if the marsh
poison finds its way by other senses, if we cannot but draw it in with
our breath, and so we must die? And such is the case of those who now
in this present world confound ignorance with innocence. This is a fatal
mistaking of our present condition for our past; there was a time when
to the human race ignorance was innocence; but now it is only folly and
sin. For as I supposed that a man lost in one of those noxious swamps
might shut his eyes, and so keep himself in some measure in ignorance,
yet the poison would be taken in with his breath, and so he would die:
even thus, whilst we would fain shut the eyes of our understanding, and
would so hope to be in safety, our passions are all the time alive and
active, and they catch the poison of the atmosphere around us, and we
are not innocent, but foolishly wicked.

We must needs consider this carefully; for, to say