habit in diminishing a man’s ability to resist temptation is proverbial.  But what is habit but a constant repetition of wrong decisions, every single one of which reacts upon the faculty that put them forth, and renders it less strong and less energetic, to do the contrary.  Has the old debauchee, just tottering into hell, as much power of active resistance against the sin which has now ruined him, as the youth has who is just beginning to run that awful career?  Can any being do a wrong act, and be as sound in his will and as spiritually strong, after it, as he was before it?  Did that abuse of free agency by Adam, whereby the sin of the race was originated, leave the agent as it found him,—­uninjured and undebilitated in his voluntary power?

The truth and fact is, that sin in and by its own nature and operations, tends to destroy all virtuous force, all holy energy, in any moral being.  The excess of will to sin is the same as the defect of will to holiness.  The degree of intensity with which any man loves and inclines to evil is the measure of the amount of power to good which he has thereby lost.  And if the intensity be total, then the loss is entire.  Total depravity carries with it total impotence and helplessness.  The more carefully we observe the workings of our own wills, the surer will be our conviction that they can ruin themselves.  We shall indeed find that they cannot be forced, or ruined from the outside.  But, if we watch the influence upon the will itself, of its own wrong decisions, its own yielding to temptations, we shall discover that the voluntary faculty may be ruined from within; may be made impotent to good by its own action; may surrender itself with such an intensity and entireness to appetite, passion, and self-love, that it becomes unable to reverse itself, and overcome its own wrong disposition and direction.  And yet there is no compulsion, from first to last, in the process.  The man follows himself.  He pursues his own inclination.  He has his own way and does as he pleases.  He loves what he inclines to love, and hates what he inclines to hate.  Neither God, nor the world, nor Satan himself, force him to do wrong.  Sin is the most spontaneous of self-motion.  But self-motion has consequences as much as any other motion.  Because transgression is a self-determined act, it does not follow that it has no reaction and results, but leaves the will precisely as it found it.  It is strictly true that man was not necessitated to apostatize; but it is equally true that if by his own self-decision he should apostatize, he could not then and afterwards be as he was before.  He would lose a knowledge of God and divine things which he could never regain of himself.  And he would lose a spiritual power which he could never again recover of himself.  The bondage of which Christ speaks, when He says, “Whosoever committeth sin is the slave of sin,” is an effect within the soul itself of an unforced