For the words in the text belong to you as much as to me, or to St. Paul himself.  What is true for one man, is true for every man.  What is right for one man, is right for every man.  What God promises for one man, He promises to every man.  Man or woman, black or white, rich or poor, scholar or unlearned, there is no respect of persons with Him.  ‘In Christ Jesus,’ says St. Paul, ’there is neither male nor female, slave nor freeman, Jew who fancies that God’s promises belong to him alone, or Gentile who knows nothing about them, clever learned Greek, or stupid ignorant Barbarian.’

It is enough for God that we are all men and women bearing the flesh, and blood, and human nature which His Son Jesus Christ wore on earth.  If we are baptized, we belong to Him:  if we are not baptized, we ought to be; for we belong to Him just as much.  Every man may be baptized; every man may be regenerate; God calls all to His grace and adoption and holy baptism, which is the sign and seal of His adoption; and therefore, what is right for the regenerate baptized man, is right for the unregenerate unbaptized man; for the Christian and for the heathen there is but one way, one duty, one life for both, and that is the life of God, of which St. Paul speaks in the text.

Now of this life of God I will speak hereafter; but I mention it now, because it is the thing to which I wish to bring your thoughts before the end of the sermon.

But first, let us see what St. Paul means, when he talks about the Gentiles in his day.  For that also has to do with us.  I said that every man, Christian or heathen, has the same duty, and is bound to do the same right; every man, Christian or heathen, if he sins, breaks his duty in the same way, and does the same wrong.  There is but one righteousness, the life of God; there is but one sin, and that is being alienated from the life of God.  One man may commit different sorts of sins from another; one may lie, another may steal:  one may be proud, another may be covetous:  but all these different sins come from the same root of sin; they are all flowers of the same plant.  And St. Paul tells us what that one root of sin, what that same Devil’s plant, is, which produces all sin in Christian or Heathen, in Churchman or Dissenter, in man or woman—­ the one disease, from which has come all the sin which ever was done by man, woman, or child since the world was made.

Now, what is this one disease, to which every man, you and I, are all liable?  Why it is that we are every one of us worse than we ought to be, worse than we know how to be, and, strangest of all, worse than we wish and like to be.

Just as far as we are like the heathen of old, we shall be worse than we know how to be.  For we are all ready enough to turn heathens again, at any moment, my friends; and the best Christian in this church knows best that what I say is true; that he is beset by the very same temptations which ruined the old heathens, and that if he gave way to them a moment they would ruin him likewise.  For what does St. Paul say was the matter with the old heathens?