Let us press this truth, that we may feel its convicting and condemning energy.  When our Maker speaks to us upon the subject of His claims and our obligations, He tells us that when we came forth from nonentity into existence, from His hand, we were well endowed, and well furnished.  He tells us distinctly, that He did not create us the depraved and sinful beings that we now are.  He tells us that these earthly affections, this carnal mind, this enmity towards the Divine law, this disinclination towards religion and spiritual concerns, this absorbing love of the world and this supreme love of self,—­that these were not implanted or infused into the soul by our wise, holy, and good Creator.  This is not His work.  This is no part of the furniture with which mankind were set up for an everlasting existence.  “God saw everything that he had made, and behold it was very good.” (Gen. i. 31).  We acknowledge the mystery that overhangs the union and connection of all men with the first man.  We know that this corruption of man’s nature, and this sinfulness of his heart, does indeed, appear at the very beginning of his individual life.  He is conceived in sin, and shapen in iniquity (Ps. li. 5).  This selfish disposition, and this alienation of the heart from God, is native depravity, is inborn corruption.  This we know both from Revelation, and observation.  But we also know, from the same infallible Revelation, that though man is born a sinner from the sinful Adam, he was created a saint in the holy Adam.  By origin he is holy, and by descent he is sinful; because there has intervened, between his creation and his birth, that “offence of one man whereby all men were made sinners” (Rom. v. 18, 19).  Though we cannot unravel the whole mystery of this subject, yet if we accept the revealed fact, and concede that God did originally make man in His own image, in righteousness and true holiness, and that man has since unmade himself, by the act of apostasy and rebellion,[1]—­if we take this as the true and correct statement of the facts in the case, then we can see how and why it is, that God has claims upon His creature, man, that extend to what this creature originally was and was capable of becoming, and not merely to what he now is, and is able to perform.

When, therefore, the young ruler’s question, “What lack I?” is asked and answered upon a broad scale, each and every man must say:  “I lack original righteousness; I lack the holiness with which God created man; I lack that perfection of character which belonged to my rational and immortal nature coming fresh from the hand of God in the person of Adam; I lack all that I should now be possessed of, had that nature not apostatized from its Maker and its Sovereign.”  And when God forms His estimate of man’s obligations; when He lays judgment to the line, and righteousness to the plummet; He goes back to the beginning, He goes back to creation, and demands from His rational and