ves is to cast it off, and to return to that better and holy
nature, which, in truth, although not in fact, is the proper nature
of man.

All individual experience, then, and all history begins in something
which is evil; all our course, whether as individuals or as nations, is
a progress, an advance, a leaving behind us something bad, and a going
forwards towards something that is good. But individual experience, and
history apart from Christianity, would make us regard this progress as
fearfully uncertain. Clear it is that we are in an evil case; we have
lost our way; we are like men who are bewildered in those endless
forests of reeds which line some of the great American rivers; if we
stay where we are, the venomous snakes may destroy us; or the deadly
marsh air when night comes on will be surely fatal; it is death to
remain, but yet if we move, we know not what way will lead us out, and
it may be that, while seeming to advance, we shall but be going round
and round, and shall at last find ourselves hard by the place from which
we set out in the beginning. Nay, we may even feel a doubt,--a doubt, I
say, though not a reasonable belief,--but a doubt which at times would
press us sorely, whether the tangled thicket in which we are placed has
any end at all; whether our fond notions of a clear and open space, a
pure air, and a fruitful and habitable country, are not altogether
merely imaginary; whether the whole world be not such a region of death
as the spot in which we are actually prisoned; whether there remains any
thing for us, but to curse our fate, and lie down and die. Under such
circumstances, although we should admire the spirit which hoped against
hope; which would make an effort for deliverance; which would, at any
rate, flee from the actual evil, although, other evil might receive him
after all his struggles; yet we could forgive those who yielded at once
to their fate, and who sat down quietly to wait for their death, without
the unavailing labour of a struggle to avoid it.

But when the declaration has been made to us by God himself, that this
dismal swamp in which we are prisoners is but an infinitely small
portion of his universe, that there do exist all those goodly forms
which we fancied; and more, when God declares too that we were in the
first instance designed to enjoy them; that our error brought us into
the thicket, having been once out of it; that we may escape from it
again; nay, much more sti