Did you ever see that God’s wrath might justly fall upon you, on account of your actual transgressions against God?  Were you ever in all your life sorry for your sins?  Could you ever say, My sins are gone over my head as a burden too heavy for me to bear?  Did you ever experience any such thing as this?  Did ever any such thing as this pass between God and your soul?  If not, for Jesus Christ’s sake, do not call yourselves Christians; you may speak peace to your hearts, but there is no peace.  May the Lord awaken you, may the Lord convert you, may the Lord give you peace, if it be His will, before you go home!

But, further, you may be convinced of your actual sins, so as to be made to tremble, and yet you may be strangers to Jesus Christ, you may have no true work of grace upon your hearts.  Before ever, therefore, you can speak peace to your hearts, conviction must go deeper; you must not only be convinced of your actual transgressions against the law of God, but likewise of the foundation of all your transgressions.  And what is that?  I mean original sin, that original corruption each of us brings into the world with us, which renders us liable to God’s wrath and damnation.  There are many poor souls that think themselves fine reasoners, yet they pretend to say there is no such thing as original sin; they will charge God with injustice in imputing Adam’s sin to us; altho we have got the mark of the beast and of the devil upon us, yet they tell us we are not born in sin.  Let them look abroad and see the disorders in it, and think, if they can, if this is the paradise in which God did put man.  No! everything in the world is out of order.

I have often thought, when I was abroad, that if there were no other arguments to prove original sin, the rising of wolves and tigers against man, nay, the barking of a dog against us, is a proof of original sin.  Tigers and lions durst not rise against us unless it were as much as to say, “You have sinned against God, and we take up our master’s quarrel.”  If we look inwardly, we shall see enough of lusts and man’s temper contrary to the temper of God.  There is pride, malice, and revenge in all our hearts; and this temper can not come from God; it comes from our first parent, Adam, who, after he fell from God, fell out of God into the devil.

However, therefore, some people may deny this, yet when conviction comes, all carnal reasonings are battered down immediately, and the poor soul begins to feel and see the fountain from which all the polluted streams do flow.  When the sinner is first awakened, he begins to wonder, How came I to be so wicked?  The Spirit of God then strikes in, and shows that he has no good thing in him by nature; then he sees that he is altogether gone out of the way, that he is altogether become abominable, and the poor creature is made to lie down at the foot of the throne of God and to acknowledge that God would be just to damn him, just to cut him off, tho he never had committed one actual sin in his life.