ess, yea, enmity to God, as it is
here. Our souls are not diseased properly, for that supposeth there is
some remnant of spiritual life, but they are dead in sins and trespasses.
And so it is not infirmity but impossibility,--such a weakness as makes
life and salvation impossible by us, both utter unwillingness and extreme
inability. These two concur in all mankind, no strength to satisfy justice
or obey the law, and no willingness either. There is a general practical
mistake in this. Men conceive that their natures are weak to good, but few
apprehend the wickedness and enmity that is in them to God and all
goodness. All will grant some defect and inability, and it is a general
complaint. But to consider that this inability is an impossibility, that
this defect is a destruction of all spiritual good in us,--the saving
knowledge of this is given to few, and to those only whose eyes the Spirit
opens. There may be some strugglings and wrestlings of natural spirits to
help themselves, and upon the apprehension of their own weakness, to raise
up themselves by serious consideration, and earnest diligence, to some
pitch of serving God, and to some hope of heaven. But I do suspect that it
proceeds in many from the want of this thorough and deep conviction of
desperate wickedness. Few really believe that testimony which God hath
given of man,--he is not only weak, but wicked, and not only so, but
desperately wicked. And that is not all, the heart is deceitful, too, and
to complete the account, "deceitful above all things," Jer. xvii. 9. A
strange character of man, given by him that formed the spirit of man
within, and made it once upright, and so knows best how far it hath
departed from the first pattern. O who of us believes this in our hearts!
But that is the deceitfulness of our hearts to cover our desperate
wickedness from our own discerning, and flatter ourselves with
self-pleasing thoughts. If once this testimony were received, that the
weakness of the flesh is a desperate wickedness, such a wretched and
accursed condition as there is no hope therein, as is incurable to any
created power, and makes us incurable, and certainly lost,--then, I say,
the deceitfulness of the heart were in some measure cured. Believe this
desperate wickedness of your natures, and then you have deceived the
deceitfulness of your hearts to your own advantage; then you have known
that which none can know aright, till the searcher of the heart and rein