l nor as personal. They have never gone deeply enough down into
the depths of their own hearts to have come up scared at the ugly things
that lie sleeping there, nor have they ever reflected on their own
conduct with sufficient gravity to discern its aberrations from the law
of right, hence the average man is quite unconscious of sin, and is a
complete stranger to himself. The cup has been drunk by and intoxicated
the world, and the masses of men are quite unaware that it has
intoxicated them.

They are ignorant of God as they are of themselves, and if at any time,
by some flash of light, they see themselves as they are, they think of
God as if He were altogether such an one as themselves, and fall back on
a vague trust in the vaguer mercy of their half-believed-in God as their
hope for a vague salvation. Men who thus walk in a vain show will never
feel their need of Jesus, and the lazy ignorance of themselves and the
as lazy trust in what they call their God, are a fortress against which
it will task the power of God to make any weapons of warfare mighty to
its pulling down.

II. The casting down of fortresses.

The first effect of any real contact with Christ and His Gospel is to
reveal a man to himself, to shatter his delusive estimates of what he
is, and to pull down about his ears the lofty fortress in which he has
ensconced himself. It seems strange work for what calls itself a Gospel
to begin by forcing a man to cry out with sobs and tears, Oh, wretched
man that I am! But no man will ever reach the heights to which Christ
can lift him, who does not begin his upward course by descending to the
depths into which Christ's Gospel begins its work by plunging him.
Unconsciousness of sin is sure to lead to indifference to a Saviour, and
unless we know ourselves to be miserable and poor and blind and naked,
the offer of gold refined by fire and white garments that we may clothe
ourselves will make no appeal to us. The fact of sin makes the need for
a Saviour; our individual sense of sin makes us sensible of our need of
a Saviour.

Paul believed that the weapons of his warfare were mighty enough to cast
down the strongest of all strongholds in which men shut themselves up
against the humbling Gospel of salvation by the mercy of God. The
weapons to which he thus trusted were the same to which Jesus pointed
His disciples when, about to leave them, He said, 'When the Comforter is
come He will convict the world of sin bec