SERMON XVII.

"The carnal mind is enmity against God."

Romans, viii., 7.

EVERY man who reads the Bible must have marked the pointed, not to say the singular, manner in which it speaks of the human family. He must have seen how it sweeps each and every one of them under the charge of a common character of hostility to God, and fixes upon them all, without reserve, the unsparing epithets of guilt and condemnation.

On what principle, my hearers, is this to be accounted for? The case is certainly different in the ordinary intercourse of life. Looking around us, we find some men, by the dignity of their virtues, and the lustre of their accomplishments, exalted so far above the level of the rest, that they deserve an entirely different classification. But whenever the pages of Inspiration are consulted, we hear but one general language applied to all the descendants of Adam. A language which admits of no exception, and listens to no compromise from the opinions of the world,which plainly tells us that whatever visible decencies we may possess, there is something by nature materially wrong in every individual's heart, and that man, not this class nor that class, but the whole, have become dead in trespasses and sins.

Now, if the positions be true which I have attempted, upon two former Sabbaths, to establish; if, in the first place, every one of us, as a thing of course, is born with a nature depraved, and prompting us to evil, and if, in the second place, every one of us, as a matter of fact, has yielded to that nature, instead of resisting it, and actually done evil, it becomes a subject of the deepest solemnity and the last importance, to inquire how far the catastrophe has extended-in what degree the charge of sinfulness does really belong to us-whether, in short, we have all a common disease, which, little as we may discover it in the extremities, is fastened with a fearful violence upon the vitals. It is to this discussion that we are now invited by the words of the text; and it will carry along with it one consideration, of which it is best we should be reminded upon the threshold. In ordinary discourses, nothing is more easy than to apply this part to one of our neighbors, and that part to another, and thus, after travelling through all our acquaintances, we find, when the preacher is done, that we have contrived to divert the application from ourselves entirely. But, to-day, the whole of our charity may remain at home. The business we have now to transact, is confined to our own bosoms, and our own characters, and our own hopes. If there be any one passage in the Bible which is meant for all of us, without exception, which knocks at every pew where we are sitting, and says to every person in it, "Thou art the man," it is the short but comprehensive sentence which has been selected for the text: "The carnal

mind," says the apostle, "is enmity against God.") And what is the "carnal mind"? The expression occurs only in Scripture, and from Scripture, therefore, are we to learn its import. It is the mind of a sinner in his natural state, unpardoned and unregenerated. And what is enmity against God? Here, too, we speak only on the authority of Revelation. It is not hatred to the Supreme Being, for the sake of hating him. It is not a thirst for revenge, and a corresponding vexation, that we cannot gratify it. It is not an entire and ungrateful insensibility to the mercies we receive. Feelings like these the lowest abandonment

of human nature does not harbor. But it is the want of every thing like spontaneous disinterested love to God, of every thing like that holiness which angels have, and which we shall have, when, and only when, we are renovated by the Holy Spirit.

Here, then, my brethren, we are all, in one sense, brought upon a level. Of the best of us and of the worst of us, it is equally true, that we are laboring under the same great moral defect, that, in a natural state, there is no principle of holiness in the heart, and, therefore, nothing which can carry us to Heaven, whatever may be our standing or our virtues in the eye of the world. I do not mean that the unregenerate have no regard for religion. They have not only this, but anxiety also. In all of them, probably, more or less, the subject awakens serious thought. But the question is, whether they have religion itself? Nor do I mean that they are all equally sinful. The man of morality and honor is not upon a par with the reprobate. But the point is, whether they may not differ never so much from each other, and yet neither of them be a follower of Jesus Christ. It is not, finally, my meaning, that the future punishment of the unregenerate will be equal. The sufferings of eternity consist in the remorse and reproaches of conscience; hence it is impossible for a man to suffer, except for what he has done, or for what he has left undone. If you had issued an order to two of your servants, and one neglects it, and falls asleep, while the other neglects it, and sets to plundering your house, there is no doubt that both are guilty, and that neither has any claim to your favor; but you surely will not inflict upon them the same punishment.

No, my hearers, the doctrine of the text involves no absurdity, and no injustice. On the one hand, Inspiration has stated in the clearest manner the terms upon which we

may be saved; on the other, the apostle comes forward, and tells us, to-day, that no man, in his natural state, has the least feeling of holiness or of love to God, without which every hope of salvation is groundless.

Now, brethren, what I have to ask of you is, if St. Paul has really spoken the truth? To this inquiry I need not apologise for expecting your serious attention, for certainly it is connected with the highest allotments of the human soul, with all that is valuable here, and all that is great and lofty hereafter. The doctrine, then, to be established is, that no unregenerate man has the least holiness, or the least love to God. I prove this melancholy and humiliating position, first, from the history of the world. What is history, but the record of perfidy, and disorder, and crime? Begin where we will, and ransack, if we please, every age, and every country, and we find the earth little else than one vast slaughter-house. Here, Paganism is seen kneeling at the shrine of idolatry, and shouting in triumph over the march of its desolations. There, is Christendom kindling the fires of the martyrs, and soaking the standard of the Cross in their blood. On the one hand, where ignorance and savagism have presided over the seclusion of the wilderness, nothing is heard but the cry of revenge, and the yell of the war-whoop, and the dying shriek of the victim. Fly to the other hand, where Christianity and science have shed refinement upon life, and we see the most polished nation on earth leading the infuriated efforts of Atheism, dethroning Almighty God, and eternising the slumbers of death, by a decree of the empire. This is man, under every form of society, Jewish, Pagan, Mahometan, or Christian. And is it possible that, in a nature like this, there can be a single pulsation of holiness?-a nature the very same as we possess, which time does not extinguish, which situation does not change, which, for nearly six thousand long and dismal years, has invariably, in the same circumstances, and with the same temptation, rushed on to the same dreadful excess.

Secondly, I prove the apostle's doctrine, that in our natural state we are altogether unholy from the observation of mankind. It is not my wish to send you abroad among the debased and abandoned, to lead you into our public receptacles of crime. The language which prisons, and penitentiaries, and places of exile, speak to us, is too loud and too emphatical to need a repetition. Nor will I recount, as recount I truly might, the ten thousand forms of depravity which we detect in our intercourse with each other-the treachery-the selfishness-the pride the ambition-the hypocrisies-that meet our eyes whereever we choose to turn them, from the highest to the lowest classes of society. Leave these things out of the computation for even could we or did we completely abstain from them, it would furnish no evidence of our holiness, because our abstinence might arise from a variety of other motives. Look rather upon the very fairest side of the picture, and see if there be any thing to comfort us. Where are we to find the indications of love to God? Is it in the warmth and fervor of our family religion? Is it in the care with which we husband our leisure hours for the devotions of the closet? Is it in the animated eye and kindling countenance, with which we tell each other with tears what God has done for our souls? On the contrary, have not subjects like these become almost synonymised with enthusiasm and superfluity ? Alas, my brethren, you must see that even if the heart had nothing to do in serving God, we serve Him so little, so very little, that it deserves not the name of affection. But when we come to know that we must love Him, and that too supremely, or not at all, we cannot in candor deny, that it actually is not at all.