But besides this destitution of the experimental sense of sin, another ground of the need of Divine agency is found in the blindness of the natural mind.  Man’s vision of spiritual things, even when they are set before his eyes, is dim and inadequate.  The Christian ministry is greatly hindered, because it cannot illuminate the human understanding, and impart the power of a keen spiritual insight.  It is compelled to present the objects of sight, but it cannot give the eye to see them.  Vision depends altogether upon the condition of the organ.  The eye sees only what it brings the means of seeing.  The scaled eye of a worldling, or a debauchee, or a self-righteous man, cannot see that sin of the heart, that “spiritual wickedness,” at which men like Paul and Isaiah stood aghast.  These were men whose character compared with that of the worldling was saintly; men whose shoes’ latchets the worldling is not worthy to stoop down and unloose.  And yet they saw a depravity within their own hearts which he does not see in his; a depravity which he cannot see, and which he steadily denies to exist, until he is enlightened by the Holy Ghost.

But the preacher has no power to impart this clear spiritual discernment.  He cannot arm the eye of the natural man with that magnifying and microscopic power, by which hatred shall be seen to be murder, and lust, adultery, and the least swelling of pride, the sin of Lucifer.  He is compelled, by the testimony of the Bible, of the wise and the holy of all time, and of his own consciousness, to tell every unregenerate man that he is no better than his race; that he certainly is no better than the Christian Church which continually confesses and mourns over indwelling sin.  The faithful preacher of the word is obliged to insist that there is no radical difference among men, and that the depravity of the man of irreproachable morals but unrenewed heart is as total as was that of the great preacher to the Gentiles,—­a man of perfectly irreproachable morals, but who confessed that he was the chief of sinners, and feared lest he should be a cast-away.  But the preacher of this unwelcome message has no power to open the blind eye.  He cannot endow the self-ignorant and incredulous man before him, with that consciousness of the “plague of the heart” which says “yea” to the most vivid description of human sinfulness, and “amen” to God’s heaviest malediction upon it.  The preacher’s position would be far easier, if there might be a transfer of experience; if some of that bitter painful sense of sin with which the struggling Christian is burdened might flow over into the easy, unvexed, and thoughtless souls of the men of this world.  Would that the consciousness upon this subject of sin, of a Paul or a Luther, might deluge that large multitude of men who doubt or deny the doctrine of human depravity.  The materials for that consciousness, the items that go to make up that experience, exist as really and as plentifully