ans, when he talks about the
Gentiles in his day. For that also has to do with us. I said that
every man, Christian or heathen, has the same duty, and is bound to
do the same right; every man, Christian or heathen, if he sins,
breaks his duty in the same way, and does the same wrong. There is
but one righteousness, the life of God; there is but one sin, and
that is being alienated from the life of God. One man may commit
different sorts of sins from another; one may lie, another may
steal: one may be proud, another may be covetous: but all these
different sins come from the same root of sin; they are all flowers
of the same plant. And St. Paul tells us what that one root of sin,
what that same Devil's plant, is, which produces all sin in
Christian or Heathen, in Churchman or Dissenter, in man or woman--
the one disease, from which has come all the sin which ever was done
by man, woman, or child since the world was made.

Now, what is this one disease, to which every man, you and I, are
all liable? Why it is that we are every one of us worse than we
ought to be, worse than we know how to be, and, strangest of all,
worse than we wish and like to be.

Just as far as we are like the heathen of old, we shall be worse
than we know how to be. For we are all ready enough to turn
heathens again, at any moment, my friends; and the best Christian in
this church knows best that what I say is true; that he is beset by
the very same temptations which ruined the old heathens, and that if
he gave way to them a moment they would ruin him likewise. For what
does St. Paul say was the matter with the old heathens?

First he says, 'Their understanding was darkened.' But what part of
it? What was it that they had got dark about and could not
understand? For in some matters they were as clever as we, and
cleverer. What part of their understanding was it which was
darkened? St. Paul tells us in the first chapter of the Epistle to
the Romans. It was their hearts--their reason, as we should say.
It was about God, and the life of God, that they were dark. They
had not been always dark about God, but they were _darkened_; they
grew more and more dark about Him, generation after generation; they
gave themselves up more and more to their corrupt and fallen nature,
and so the children grew worse than their fathers, and their
children again worse than them, till they had lost all notion of
what God was like. For from the very fir