One principal reason why the Biblical representations of human sinfulness exert so little influence over men, and, generally speaking, seem to them to be greatly exaggerated and untrue, lies in the fact that the Divine knowledge of human character is in advance of the human knowledge.  God’s consciousness and cognition upon this subject is exhaustive; while man’s self-knowledge is superficial and shallow.  The two forms of knowledge, consequently, when placed side by side, do not agree, but conflict.  There would be less difficulty, and less contradiction, if mankind generally were possessed of even as much self-knowledge as the Christian is possessed of.  There would be no difficulty, and no contradiction, if the knowledge of the judgment-day could be anticipated, and the self-inspection of that occasion could commence here and now.  But such is not the fact.  The Bible labors, therefore, under the difficulty of possessing an advanced knowledge; the difficulty of being addressed to a mind that is almost entirely unacquainted with the subject treated of.  The Word of God knows man exhaustively, as God knows him; and hence all its descriptions of human character are founded upon such a knowledge.  But man, in his self-ignorance, does not perceive their awful truth.  He has not yet attained the internal correspondent to the Biblical statement,—­that apprehension of total depravity, that knowledge of the plague of the heart, which always and ever says “yea” to the most vivid description of human sinfulness, and “amen” to God’s heaviest malediction upon it.  Nothing deprives the Word of its nerve and influence, more than this general lack of self-inspection and self-knowledge.  For, only that which is perceived to be true exerts an influence upon the human mind.  The doctrine of human sinfulness is preached to men, year after year, to whom it does not come home with the demonstration of the Spirit and with power, because the sinfulness which is really within them is as yet unknown, and because not one of a thousand of their transgressions has ever been scanned in the light of self-examination.  But is the Bible untrue, because the man is ignorant?  Is the sun black, because the eye is shut?

However ignorant man may be, and may desire and strive to be, of himself, God knows him altogether, and knows that the representations of His word, respecting the character and necessities of human nature, are the unexaggerated, sober, and actual fact.  Though most of the sinner’s life of alienation from God, and of disobedience, has been a blind and a reckless agency, unaccompanied with self-scrutiny, and to a great extent passed from his memory, yet it has all of it been looked at, as it welled, up from the living centres of free agency and responsibility, by the calm and dreadful eye of retributive Justice, and has all of it been indelibly written down in the book of God’s sure memory, with a pen of iron, and the point of a diamond.