HATE-GOOD is an awful enough name for any human being to bear.  Those who really know what goodness is, and then, what hatred is,—­they will feel how awful a thing it is for any man to hate goodness.  But there is something among us sinful men far more awful than even that, and that is to hate God.  The carnal mind, writes the apostle Paul to the Romans—­and it is surely the most terrible sentence that often terrible enough apostle ever wrote—­the carnal mind is enmity against God.  And Dr. John Owen annotating on that sentence is equally terrible.  The carnal mind, he says, has ‘chosen a great enemy indeed.’  And having mentioned John Owen, will you let me once more beseech all students of divinity, that is, all students, amongst other things, of the desperate depravity of the human heart, to read John Owen’s sixth volume till they have it by heart,—­by a broken, believing heart.  Owen On Indwelling Sin is one of the greatest works of the great Puritan period.  It is a really great, and as we nowadays say, a truly scientific work to the bargain.  But all that by the way.  Yes, this carnal heart that is still left in every one of us has chosen a great enemy, and it would need both strong and faithful allies in order to fight him.  The hatred that His Son also met with when He was in this world is one of the most hateful pages of this hateful world’s hateful history.  He knew His own heart towards His enemies, and thus He was able to say to the Searcher of Hearts with His dying breath, They hated Me without a cause.  Truly our hatred is hottest when it is most unjust.

‘Look to yourselves,’ wrote the apostle John to the elect lady and her children.  Yes; let us all look sharply and suspiciously to ourselves in this matter now in hand, and we shall not need John Owen nor anybody else to discover to us the hatred and the hatefulness of our own hearts.  Look to yourselves, and the work of the law will soon be fulfilled in you. Homo homini lupus, taught an old philosopher who had studied moral philosophy not in books so much as in his own heart.  ’Is no man naturally good?’ asked innocent Lady Macleod of Dunvegan Castle at her guest, Dr. Samuel Johnson.  ‘No, madam, no more than a wolf.’  That is quite past all question with all those who either in natural morals or in revealed religion look to and know and characterise themselves.  We have all an inborn propensity to dislike one another, and a very small provocation will suddenly blow that banked-up furnace into a flame.  It is ever present with me, says self-examining Paul, and hence its so sudden and so destructive outbreaks.  So the written or the printed name of our enemy, his image in our mind, his passing step, his figure out of the window; his wife, his child, his carriage, his cart in the street, anything, everything will stir up our heart at the man we do not like.  And the whole of our so honest Bible, our present text, and the illustrations