e gloomy or not, but
whether they are true. As to their being gloomy, it seems to me that the
people who complain of our doctrine of human nature, as giving a
melancholy view of men, do really take a far more melancholy one. We
believe in a fall, and we believe in a possible and actual restoration.
The man to whom evil is not an intrusive usurper can have no confidence
that it will ever be expelled. Which is the gloomy system--that which
paints in undisguised blackness the facts of life, and over against
their blackest darkness, the radiant light of a great hope shining
bright and glorious, or one that paints humanity in a uniform monotone
of indistinguishable grey involving the past, the present, and the
future--which, believing in no disease, hopes for no cure? My text,
taken in conjunction with the grand words which follow, about 'The new
man, which, after God, is created in righteousness and true holiness,'
brings before us some very solemn views (which the men that want them
most realise the least) with regard to what we are, what we ought to be
and cannot be, and what, by God's help, we may become. The old man is
'corrupt according to the deceitful lusts,' says Paul. _There_ are a set
of characteristics, then, of the universal sinful human self. Then there
comes a hopeless commandment--a mockery--if we are to stop with it, 'put
it off.' And then there dawns on us the blessed hope and possibility of
the fulfilment of the injunction, when we learn that 'the truth in
Jesus' is, that we put off the old man with his deeds. Such is a
general outline of the few thoughts I have to suggest to you.

I. I wish to fix, first of all, upon the very significant, though brief,
outline sketch of the facts of universal sinful human nature which the
Apostle gives here.

These are three, upon which I dilate for a moment or two. 'The old man'
is a Pauline expression, about which I need only say here that we may
take it as meaning that form of character and life which is common to us
all, apart from the great change operated through faith in Jesus Christ.
It is universal, it is sinful. There is a very remarkable contrast,
which you will notice, between the verse upon which I am now commenting
and the following one. The old man is set over against the new. One is
created, the other is corrupted, as the word might be properly rendered.
The one is created after God, the other is rotting to pieces under the
influence of its lusts. The one