depravity, and are you in the right? Think you that the deathbed and the
day of judgment will prove this to be the fact? No! if you shall ever
know anything of the Christian struggle with innate corruption; if you
shall ever, in the expressive phrase of Scripture, have your senses
exercised as in a gymnasium [1] to discern good and evil, and see
yourself with self-abhorrence; your views will harmonize most profoundly
and exactly with theirs. And, furthermore, you will not in the process
create any _new_ sinfulness. You will merely see the _existing_ depravity
of the human heart. You will simply see what _is_,--is now, in your
heart, and in all human hearts, and has been from the beginning.

But all this is the work of a more powerful and spiritual agency than
that of man. The truth may be exhibited with perfect transparency and
plainness, the hearer himself may do his utmost to have it penetrate and
tell; and yet, there be no vivid and vital consciousness of sin. How
often does the serious and alarmed man say to us: "I know it, but I do
not _feel_ it." How long and wearily, sometimes, does the anxious man
struggle after an inward sense of these spiritual things, without
success, until he learns that an inward sense, an experimental
consciousness, respecting religious truth, is as purely a gift and
product of God the Spirit as the breath of life in his nostrils.
Considering, then, the natural apathy of man respecting the sin that is
in his own heart, and the exceeding blindness of his mental vision, even
when his attention has been directed to it, is it not perfectly plain
that there must be the exertion of a Divine agency, in order that he may
pass through even the first and lowest stages of the religious
experience?

In view of the subject, as thus far unfolded, we remark:

1. First, that it is the duty of every one, _to take the facts in respect
to man's character as he finds them_. Nothing is gained, in any province
of human thought or action, by disputing actual verities. They are
stubborn things, and will not yield to the wishes and prejudices of the
natural heart. This is especially true in regard to the facts in man's
moral and religious condition. The testimony of Revelation is explicit,
that "the carnal mind is enmity against God, for it is not subject to the
law of God, neither indeed can be;" and also, that "the natural man
receiveth not the things of the Spirit, neither can he know them, because
they are