in your moral state and character, as they do in that of the mourning and self-reproaching Christian who sits by your side,—­your devout father, your saintly mother, or sister,—­whom you know, and who you know is a better being than you are.  Why should they be weary and heavy-laden with a sense of their unworthiness before God, and you go through life indifferent and light-hearted?  Are they deluded in respect to the doctrine of human depravity, and are you in the right?  Think you that the deathbed and the day of judgment will prove this to be the fact?  No! if you shall ever know anything of the Christian struggle with innate corruption; if you shall ever, in the expressive phrase of Scripture, have your senses exercised as in a gymnasium [1] to discern good and evil, and see yourself with self-abhorrence; your views will harmonize most profoundly and exactly with theirs.  And, furthermore, you will not in the process create any new sinfulness.  You will merely see the existing depravity of the human heart.  You will simply see what is,—­is now, in your heart, and in all human hearts, and has been from the beginning.

But all this is the work of a more powerful and spiritual agency than that of man.  The truth may be exhibited with perfect transparency and plainness, the hearer himself may do his utmost to have it penetrate and tell; and yet, there be no vivid and vital consciousness of sin.  How often does the serious and alarmed man say to us:  “I know it, but I do not feel it.”  How long and wearily, sometimes, does the anxious man struggle after an inward sense of these spiritual things, without success, until he learns that an inward sense, an experimental consciousness, respecting religious truth, is as purely a gift and product of God the Spirit as the breath of life in his nostrils.  Considering, then, the natural apathy of man respecting the sin that is in his own heart, and the exceeding blindness of his mental vision, even when his attention has been directed to it, is it not perfectly plain that there must be the exertion of a Divine agency, in order that he may pass through even the first and lowest stages of the religious experience?

In view of the subject, as thus far unfolded, we remark: 

1.  First, that it is the duty of every one, to take the facts in respect to man’s character as he finds them.  Nothing is gained, in any province of human thought or action, by disputing actual verities.  They are stubborn things, and will not yield to the wishes and prejudices of the natural heart.  This is especially true in regard to the facts in man’s moral and religious condition.  The testimony of Revelation is explicit, that “the carnal mind is enmity against God, for it is not subject to the law of God, neither indeed can be;” and also, that “the natural man receiveth not the things of the Spirit, neither can he know them, because they are spiritually discerned.”  According