jarring otherwise and inexplicable, of the great system of
the universe.

Revelation, however, here comes in, and sustains the fallible
conjectures of our unassisted reason. The Holy Scriptures speak of us as
fallen creatures: in almost every page we shall find something that is
calculated to abate the loftiness and silence the pretensions of man.
"The imagination of man's heart is evil from his youth." "What is man,
that he should be clean? and he which is born of a woman, that he should
be righteous[5]." "How much more abominable and filthy is man, which
drinketh iniquity like water[6]?" "The Lord looked down from heaven upon
the children of men, to see if there were any that did understand, and
seek God. They are all gone aside; they are altogether become filthy:
there is none that doeth good, no not one[7]." "Who can say, I have made
my heart clean, I am pure from my sin[8]?" "The _heart_ is deceitful
above all things, and desperately wicked, who can know it." "Behold, I
was shapen in wickedness, and in sin hath my mother conceived me." "We
were by nature the children of wrath, even as others, fulfilling the
desires of the flesh and of the mind." "O wretched man that I am, who
shall deliver me from the body of this death!"--Passages might be
multiplied upon passages, which speak the same language, and these again
might be illustrated and confirmed at large by various other
considerations, drawn from the same sacred source; such as those which
represent a thorough change, a renovation of our nature, as being
necessary to our becoming true Christians; or as those also which are
suggested by observing that holy men refer their good dispositions and
affections to the immediate agency of the Supreme Being.

SECTION II.

_Evil Spirit.--Natural State of Man._

But in addition to all which has been yet stated, the word of God
instructs us that we have to contend not only with our own natural
depravity, but with the power of darkness, the Evil Spirit, who rules in
the hearts of the wicked, and whose dominion we learn from Scripture to
be so general, as to entitle him to the denomination of "the Prince of
this world." There cannot be a stronger proof of the difference which
exists between the religious system of the Scriptures, and that of the
bulk of nominal Christians, than the proof which is afforded by the
subject now in question. The existence and agency of the Evil Spirit,
though so distinctly and repeatedly affi