wish to make any useful
inquiry concerning true righteousness: How we can answer the _celestial
Judge_ when He shall call us to an account? Let us place that Judge
before our eyes, not according to the inadequate imaginations of our
minds, but according to the descriptions given of him in the Scriptures,
which represent him as one whose refulgence eclipses the stars, whose
purity makes all things appear polluted, and who searches the inmost soul
of his creatures,--let us so conceive of the Judge of all the earth, and
every one must present himself as a criminal before Him, and voluntarily
prostrate and humble himself in deep solicitude concerning; his
absolution." CALVIN: Institutes, iii. 12.]

ALL MANKIND GUILTY; OR, EVERY MAN KNOWS MORE THAN HE PRACTISES.

ROMANS i. 24.--"When they knew God, they glorified him not as God."

The idea of God is the most important and comprehensive of all the ideas
of which the human mind is possessed. It is the foundation of religion;
of all right doctrine, and all right conduct. A correct intuition of it
leads to correct religious theories and practice; while any erroneous or
defective view of the Supreme Being will pervade the whole province of
religion, and exert a most pernicious influence upon the entire character
and conduct of men.

In proof of this, we have only to turn to the opening chapters of St.
Paul's Epistle to the Romans. Here we find a profound and accurate
account of the process by which human nature becomes corrupt, and runs
its downward career of unbelief, vice, and sensuality. The apostle traces
back the horrible depravity of the heathen world, which he depicts with a
pen as sharp as that of Juvenal, but with none of Juvenal's bitterness
and vitriolic sarcasm, to a distorted and false conception of the being
and attributes of God. He does not, for an instant, concede that this
distorted and false conception is founded in the original structure and
constitution of the human soul, and that this moral ignorance is
necessary and inevitable. This mutilated idea of the Supreme Being was
not inlaid in the rational creature on the morning of creation, when God
said, "Let us make man in our image, after our likeness." On the
contrary, the apostle affirms that the Creator originally gave all
mankind, in the moral constitution of a rational soul and in the works of
creation and providence, the media to a correct idea of Himself, and
asserts, by implication, that