rational nature, and add to them that other class of truths taught in Revelation, and you will find that he is predetermined against them.  He takes sides, with all the depth and intensity of his being, with that sinfulness which is common to man, and which it is the aim of both ethics and the gospel to remove.  This vicious and imbruted man loves the sin which is forbidden, more than he loves the holiness that is commanded.  He inclines to the sin which so easily besets him, precisely as you and I incline to the bosom-sin which so easily besets us.  We grant that the temptations that assail him are very powerful; but are not some of the temptations that beset you and me very powerful?  We grant that this wretched slave of vice and pollution cannot break off his sins by righteousness, without the renewing and assisting grace of God; but neither can you or I. It is the action of his own will that has made him a slave.  He loves his chains and his bondage, even as you and I naturally love ours; and this proves that his moral corruption, though assuming an outwardly more repulsive form than ours, is yet the same thing in principle.  It is the rooted aversion of the human heart, the utter disinclination of the human will, towards the purity and holiness of God; it is “the carnal mind which is enmity against God; for it is not subject to the law of God, neither indeed can be” (Rom. viii. 7).

But there is no more convincing proof of the position, that the degraded creature of whom we are speaking is a self-deciding and unforced sinner, than the fact that he resists efforts to reclaim him.  Ask these faithful and benevolent missionaries who go down into these dens of vice and pollution, to pour more light into the mind, and to induce these outcasts to leave their drunkenness and their debauchery,—­ask them if they find that human nature is any different there from what it is elsewhere, so far as yielding to the claims of God and law is concerned.  Do they tell you that they are uniformly successful in inducing these sinners to leave their sins? that they never find any self-will, any determined opposition to the holy law of purity, any preference of a life of licence with its woes here upon earth and hereafter in hell, to a life of self-denial with its joys eternal?  On the contrary, they testify that the old maxim upon which so many millions of the human family have acted:  “Enjoy the present and jump the life to come,” is the rule for this mass of population, of whom so very few can be persuaded to leave their cups and their orgies.  Like the people of Israel, when expostulated with by the prophet Jeremiah for their idolatry and pollution, the majority of the degraded population of whom we are speaking, when endeavors have been made to reclaim them, have said to the philanthropist and the missionary:  “There is no hope:  no; for I have loved strangers, and after them I will go” (Jer. ii. 25).  There is not a single