sin as well as of actual, a perplexity and an impossibility.  But every man who knows that the substance of piety consists in positive and holy affections,—­in holy reverence, love and trust,—­and who discovers that these are wanting in him by nature, though belonging to him by creation, will mourn in deep contrition and self-abasement over that act of apostasy by which this great change in human character, this great lack was brought about. 2.  In the second place, it follows from the subject we have discussed, that every man must, by some method, recover his original righteousness, or be ruined forever.  “Without holiness no man shall see the Lord.”  No rational creature is fit to appear in the presence of his Maker, unless he is as pure and perfect as he was originally made.  Holy Adam was prepared by his creation in the image of God, to hold blessed communion with God, and if he and his posterity had never lost this image, they would forever be in fellowship with their Creator and Sovereign.  Holiness, and holiness alone, enables the creature to stand with angelic tranquillity, in the presence of Him before whom the heavens and the earth flee away.  The loss of original righteousness, therefore, was the loss of the wedding garment; it was the loss of the only robe in which the creature could appear at the banquet of God.  Suppose that one of the posterity of sinful Adam, destitute of holy love reverence and faith, lacking positive and perfect righteousness, should be introduced into the seventh heavens, and there behold the infinite Jehovah.  Would he not feel, with a misery and a shame that could not be expressed, that he was naked? that he was utterly unfit to appear in such a Presence?  No wonder that our first parents, after their apostasy, felt that they were unclothed.  They were indeed stripped of their character, and had not a rag of righteousness to cover them.  No wonder that they hid themselves from the intolerable purity and brightness of the Most High.  Previously, they had felt no such emotion.  They were “not ashamed,” we are told.  And the reason lay in the fact that, before their apostasy, they were precisely as they were made.  They were endowed with the image of God; and their original righteousness and perfect holiness qualified them to stand before their Maker, and to hold blessed intercourse with Him.  But the instant they lost their created endowment of holiness, they were conscious that they lacked that indispensable something wherewith to appear before God.

And precisely so is it, with their posterity.  Whatever a man’s theory of the future life may be, he must be insane, if he supposes that he is fit to appear before God, and to enter the society of heaven, if destitute of holiness, and wanting the Divine image.  When the spirit of man returns to God who gave it, it must return as good as it came from His hands, or it will be banished from the Divine presence.  Every human soul, when it goes back to its Maker,