an _intellectual_ animal,
and the slave of his physical functions. Instead of being the master
of his appetites, he was mastered by them. His passions intended,
under right use, to be blessings, became curses; instead of angels,
they became as demons. Instead of dwelling in the midst of his
endowment in harmony with it and able to direct it, he found himself
at its mercy, incessantly smitten by it and suffering his own
equipment. Repudiating faith, walking by sight, talking of reason
and governed by his senses, he threw himself open to invasion by the
world, the flesh and the Devil.

As a result of his fall, man has become a degenerate, full of the
germs of evil, "every imagination of the thoughts of the heart only
evil continually"--an incurable self-corrupter.

In him there is not one thing that commends him to a holy God; and
even should he succeed in living a life of perfect morality, his
best righteousness in the sight of God would be no better than a
bundle of filthy and contagious rags.

There is no power within him by which he can change the essential
character and determined trend of his life. Men do not gather grapes
of thorns, nor figs of thistles. All the effort that the most
devoted and laborious of men might give to the culture of a hedgerow
of thorns would not succeed in producing one grape. Though men spent
life and fortune in cultivating a field of thistles, they would not
gather a single fig. No sooner (says the Bible) can the natural man
bring forth the fruit of righteousness unto God. The Ethiopian may
change his skin, the leopard his spots, before a natural man can
change himself into a spiritual man. "The carnal mind is enmity with
God; for it is not subject to the law of God, _neither indeed can
be_." "The natural man (the word 'natural' is psuchikos, soulical)
receiveth not the things of the Spirit of God: for they are
foolishness unto him: _neither can he know them_, because they are
spiritually (pneumatikos, _pneumatically_) discerned." "The heart is
deceitful above all things, and desperately wicked: who can know
it?" meaning thereby that God alone can sound the depths of its
measureless capacity for sin and iniquity; therefore, he says: "I
the Lord search the heart, I try the reins."

The end of man is to die.

Such an end is not natural.

It is unnatural.

It is violent.

It is penal.

It is an appointed punishment: as it is written: "It is _appointed_
unto men once to die." "