the typical worship of the Old Testament and in the doctrinal
teaching of the New, leaven is ordinarily employed to denote the
insinuating, contagious advance of sin. When the Hebrews were instructed
to cast all leaven out of their houses during the solemnities of the
Passover, their lawgiver meant to teach them by type that in worshipping
God through his ordinances they should cast all malice and wickedness
out of their hearts. In like manner, when the great Teacher warned his
followers to beware of the leaven of the Pharisees and of the Sadducees,
he meant that they should eschew on the one hand the lie of
self-righteous superstition, and on the other the lie of libertine
unbelief. The Apostle Paul, too, while he does not forbid another use,
employs the conception, in point of fact, to illustrate the presence and
power of sin.

Evil is a mysterious, self-propagating principle, like leaven. In the
fact of the fall a piece of this leaven was hidden in the mass, and all
mankind have consequently become corrupted. The leaven of sin that
touched humanity at the first has infected the whole. The fact of a
universal corruption appears in all history, and its origin is explained
in the beginning of Genesis. The whole lump has been leavened: break off
a bit at any place, at any time, and you will find it tainted. "The
innocence of childhood" is a fond, false phrase, employed to conceal the
terrible reality: there is no innocence, no purity, except that which
comes through the gift of God, the sacrifice of Christ, and the ministry
of the Spirit.

Idolatry, for example, is a leaven that must have been small in its
beginning, but at a very early date it had grown great. The world was
idolatrous when Abraham was called out to become the nucleus of a
religious nation; and even his descendants, though constituted as a
commonwealth expressly for the purpose of maintaining the worship of
the true God while all the world beside had sunk into idolatry, were,
through contact with the contaminating leaven, frequently overrun by the
same sin. It became necessary that they should be poured from vessel to
vessel, and tried as by fire, in order to keep them separate.

Small and apparently harmless Popery began: with the power and
perseverance of a principle in nature it spread and defiled the Church.
How completely that leaven penetrated the lump may be seen everywhere
throughout Europe, in the architecture, sculpture, paintings,--in the
l