Man is guilty and depraved as well as benighted; and this is also the true source of all that is disabling and afflictive in his native condition. There is such a thing as sin. It is upon all the race. Wherever there is a conscience not altogether seared and suppressed, there is also some sense of it. There is no right man living who does not have upon him the consciousness of many a wrong to which he has yielded, and of having had the opportunity of being a better man than he has been. The best as well as the worst are obliged to make this confession if true to the deepest convictions of their hearts. Marcus Aurelius, considering his circumstances and temptations as the supreme ruler of a vast empire in a wicked and sensual age, was the greatest phenomenon of virtue and goodness the pagan world ever produced, and yet he solemnly and sorrowfully declared, "I should have lived better than I have done had I always followed the monitions of the gods."

Somehow or other, universal humanity has become the subject of some powerful moral disease which is ever hurrying man into what his better wisdom condemns. Even a Socinian writer says: "A man must be a fool, nay, a stock or a stone, not to believe it. He has no eyes, he has no senses, he has no perceptions, if he refuses to believe it." What is the

meaning of locks and bolts and bonds and oaths and courts of justice and magistrates and police and watchmen and jails and penitentiaries and deathpenalties and military forces and territorial defences and fortifications, if it be not that man cannot trust his fellow-man and be safe in property, honor, life, and home? What is the staple of all secular history but an account of outbreaking passions and the efforts of men to subdue them and guard against them? What is all philosophy but the struggle of the human mind to rid itself of falsehood, error, and various weaknesses or depravities, which, after all, have still proved themselves invincible to the powers of reason? And what is the deepest undertone in all human feeling and utterance but lamentation over unconquerable evils-evils of which there is no adequate explanation, and no hope of cure apart from divine revelation ?*

*"It is rather a serious matter for skeptics to consider that there is so much incurable evil and suffering in the world. The Scriptures declare sin to be a fact, and our conscience, whether we like it or not, answers Yes. A disturbance has thus broken into the world, a hinderance and corruption of its development. Schopenhauer says: 'If anything could reconcile me to the Old Testament, it would be the myth (?) of the fall of man; for, in reality, the condition of the world looks precisely like the condition of punishment for a great past transgression.'. . The world is fundamentally only so well arranged as is necessary for its existence. If its arrangement were any worse, it could not exist.' Melchior Meyer says: 'God cannot have created the world in a state of actual perversion.' Thus, even they who do not believe in revelation come through their reason to

What, indeed, can unaided human reason do with sin? Reason must admit its presence and power. Even Seneca laid it down as a great universal truth, "We are all wicked; what one man blames in another, each will find in his own bosom. We are wicked, and we live among the wicked." Man is not absolute wickedness. We may still find something good and praiseworthy in all communities and in almost every man. But with all that is good, there is much more that is bad and continually overmastering the good. Revelation tells whence the trouble came, and revelation points out the way of its cure; but without revelation human reason stands for ever confounded and helpless in the presence of sin and depravity. Among all the gods of the heathen world there is no God of absolute purity, no God of grace, mercy, and forgiveness, no power of regeneration, no efficient Saviour to give hopesolid and substantial hope-to our alien and ailing

race.

It is pitiable to observe how the human soul has ever been crying out with Moab's king, "Wherewith shall I come before the Lord, and bow myself before

the fall of man, the result of which is the imperfection of the present world; and if the goal of completion which God set before the world shall still be reached, then it needs an intervention of God, a restoration, a redemption by miracle."-Uhlhorn's Representations of the Life of Jesus, Disc. iv.

the High God? Shall I come before Him with burnt-offerings, with calves of a year old? Will the Lord be pleased with thousands of rams, or with ten thousands of rivers of oil? Shall I give my firstborn for my transgression, the fruit of my body for the sin of my soul?" And how still more pitiable and sad are the conflicting answers which the unaided mind of man has given and accepted! "One man aims at deliverance from sin by means of a bath; another thinks to purify his heart by the aid of an emetic; here another sets prayer-mills in motion at the caprice of the wind; another pours out libations of wine or tea, sheds human blood, or offers his only child, as the most acceptable sacrifice. Here a man cannot rest until he has accomplished sanguinary vengeance on the manslayer; there a fanatical Mussulman seeks to purchase Paradise for himself by the number of Christians he can destroy.' And so the sickening list runs on almost without end, while yet there is no assurance for the soul— nothing to give confidence that any or all of these can serve to atone for sin, to propitiate Deity, or to remove the felt condemnation and distressing disability. We must have some word, some movement, some effectual coming forth of supernatural light and power, some revelation from almighty God, or * Christlieb's Modern Doubt, p. 86.

there is nothing left for man but to gather himself up in agony to die.

Thus, then, by the irrepressible and inextinguishable yearnings of the human spirit after some supernal almightiness; by the dark uncertainties and clashing contradictions in mere human reasonings respecting Deity; by the restless cravings of man's soul for some supreme object of faith and worship; by all the unauthorized and often unhallowed devotions and questionable means of man's devising to please God and secure His favors; by the ever-abiding need of adequate confirmation to render the teachings of reason effective, to make us sure where the powers of reason are uncertain, and to give man hope where reason is totally at a loss; and by all the immeasurable need to give us confidence in view of eternal judgment, to bring us consolation and comfort amid the inevitable trials and miseries of earthly life, and to afford us some gracious outlook beyond the deathbed and the grave;-by all these weighty and ever-pressing considerations I assume the unspeakable desirableness of a revelation from God, and argue its undeniable necessity to the proper well-being of man.

But some object and say that revelation means miracle, and that miracle is always questionable if not impossible. Of course revelation means miracle;