; it is "the carnal mind which is enmity against God; for it is not
subject to the law of God, neither indeed can be" (Rom. viii. 7).

But there is no more convincing proof of the position, that the degraded
creature of whom we are speaking is a self-deciding and unforced sinner,
than the fact that he _resists_ efforts to reclaim him. Ask these
faithful and benevolent missionaries who go down into these dens of vice
and pollution, to pour more light into the mind, and to induce these
outcasts to leave their drunkenness and their debauchery,--ask them if
they find that human nature is any different there from what it is
elsewhere, so far as _yielding_ to the claims of God and law is
concerned. Do they tell you that they are uniformly successful in
inducing these sinners to leave their sins? that they never find any
self-will, any determined opposition to the holy law of purity, any
preference of a life of licence with its woes here upon earth and
hereafter in hell, to a life of self-denial with its joys eternal? On the
contrary, they testify that the old maxim upon which so many millions of
the human family have acted: "Enjoy the present and jump the life to
come," is the rule for this mass of population, of whom so very few can
be persuaded to leave their cups and their orgies. Like the people of
Israel, when expostulated with by the prophet Jeremiah for their idolatry
and pollution, the majority of the degraded population of whom we are
speaking, when endeavors have been made to reclaim them, have said to the
philanthropist and the missionary: "There is no hope: no; for I have
loved strangers, and after them I will go" (Jer. ii. 25). There is not a
single individual of them all who does not love the sin that is
destroying him, more than he loves the holiness that would save him.
Notwithstanding all the horrible accompaniments of sin--the filth, the
disease, the poverty, the sickness, the pain of both body and mind,--the
wretched creature prefers to enjoy the pleasures of sin for a season,
rather than come out and separate himself from the unclean thing, and
begin that holy warfare and obedience to which his God and his Saviour
invite him. This, we repeat, proves that the sin is not forced upon this
creature. For if he hated his sin, nay if he felt weary and heavy laden
in the least degree because of it, he might leave it. There is a free
grace, and a proffered assistance of the Holy Ghost, of which he might
avail himsel