and there
is no name can express him sufficiently. If you say God, you say more
than can be expressed by many thousand other words. So it is here--sin is
purely sin, God is purely good and holy, without mixture, holiness itself,
sin is simply evil, without mixture, unholiness itself. Whatever is in
it, is sin, is uncleanness. Sin is an infinite wrong, and an infinite and
boundless filthiness, because of the infinite person wronged. It is an
offence of infinite Majesty and the person wronged aggravateth the
offence, if it be simply contrary to infinite holiness, it must be, in
that respect, infinite unholiness and uncleanness.

_Thirdly_, Look upon the sad effects and consequences of sin,--how
miserable, how ruinous it hath made man, and all the creation, and how
vile must it be!

I. Look on man's native beauty and excellency, how beautiful a creature!
But sin hath cast him down from the top of his excellency, sin made Adam
of a friend an enemy, of a courtier with God an open rebel. Was not man's
soul of more price than all the world, so that nothing can exchange it?
Yet hath sin debased it, and prostituted it to all vile filthy pleasures,
hath made the immortal spirit to dwell on the dunghill, feed on ashes,
catch vanities, lying vanities, pour out itself to them, serve all the
creatures--whereas it should have made them servants, yea, a slave to his
own greatest enemy, to the ground he treadeth upon. O what a degenerate
plant! It was a noble vine once in paradise, but sin hath made it a wild
one, to bring forth sour grapes. What is there in all the world could
defile a man? Matt. xv. 20. Nothing that goeth out or cometh in, but sin
that proceedeth out of the heart. Man was all light, his judgment sinned
into his affections, and through all the man, but sin hath made all
darkness, closed up the poor captive understanding, hath built up a thick
wall of gross corrupted affections about it, so that light can neither get
in nor out. The soul was like a clear running fountain, which yielded
fresh clear streams of holy inclinations, desires, affections, actions and
emptied itself in the sea of immense Majesty from which these streams
first flowed, but now it is a standing putrified puddle, that casteth a
vile stink round about, and hath no issue towards God. Man was a glorious
creature, fit to be lord over the work of God's own hands, and therefore
had God's image in a special manner, holiness and righteousness, God's