e comparatively innocent, the sins of the
Jews were conscious and presumptuous. Their boasted superiority was
therefore inferiority. They were more deeply condemned than the
Gentiles they despised, and exposed to a heavier curse.

58. The truth is, Gentiles and Jews had both failed for the same
reason. Trace these two streams of human life back to their sources
and you come at last to a point where they are not two streams but one;
and, before the bifurcation took place, something had happened which
predetermined the failure of both. In Adam all fell, and from him all,
both Gentiles and Jews, inherited a nature too weak for the arduous
attainment of righteousness; human nature is carnal now, not spiritual,
and, therefore, unequal to this supreme spiritual achievement.

The law could not alter this; it had no creative power to make the
carnal spiritual. On the contrary, it aggravated the evil. It
actually multiplied offenses; for its clear and full description of
sins, which would have been an incomparable guide to a sound nature,
turned into temptation for a morbid one. The very knowledge of sin
tempts to its commission; the very command not to do anything is to a
diseased nature a reason for doing it. This was the effect of the law:
it multiplied and aggravated transgressions. And this was God's
intention. Not that He was the author of sin; but, like a skillful
physician, who has sometimes to use appliances to bring a sore to a
head before he heals it, He allowed the heathen to go their own way and
gave the Jews the law, that the sin of human nature might exhibit all
its inherent qualities, before He intervened to heal it. The healing,
however, was His real purpose all the time: He concluded all under sin,
that He might have mercy upon all.

59. The Righteousness of God.--Man's extremity was God's opportunity;
not, indeed, in the sense that, one way of salvation having failed.
God devised another. The law had never, in His intention, been a way
of salvation. It was only a means of illustrating the need of
salvation. But the moment when this demonstration was complete was the
signal for God to produce His method, which He had kept locked in His
counsel through the generations of human probation. It had never been
His intention to permit man to fail of his true end. Only He allowed
time to prove that fallen man could never reach righteousness by his
own efforts; and, when the righteousness of man