nfluence. To generate
within yourself this new spiritual emotion which you have never yet felt,
is utterly impossible. Yet you must get it, or religion, is impossible,
and immortal life is impossible. Would that you might feel your straits,
and your helplessness. Would that you might perceive your total lack of
supreme love of God, as the young ruler perceived his; and would that,
unlike him, instead, of going away from the Son of God, you would go to
Him, crying, "Lord create within me a clean heart, and renew within me a
right spirit." Then the problem would be solved, and having peace with
God through the blood of Christ, the love of God would be shed abroad in
your hearts, through the Holy Ghost given unto you.

[Footnote 1: John ix. 41.]

[Footnote 2: Even if we should widen the meaning of the word "honest," in
the above-mentioned dictum of Pope, and make it include the Latin
"honestum," the same objection would lie against dictum. Honor and
high-mindedness towards man is not love and reverence towards God. The
spirit of chivalry is not the spirit of Christianity.]

THE SINFULNESS OF ORIGINAL SIN.

MATTHEW xix. 20.--"The young man saith unto him, All these things have I
kept from my youth up: what lack I yet?"

In the preceding discourse from these words, we discussed that form and
aspect of sin which consists in "coming short" of the Divine Law; or, as
the Westminster Creed states it, in a "want of conformity" unto it. The
deep and fundamental sin of the young ruler, we found, lay in what he
lacked. When our Lord tested him, he proved to be utterly destitute of
love to God. His soul was a complete vacuum, in reference to that great
holy affection which fills the hearts of all the good beings before the
throne of God, and without which no creature can stand, or will wish to
stand, in the Divine presence. The young ruler, though outwardly moral
and amiable, when searched in the inward parts was found wanting in the
sum and substance of religion. He did not love God; and he did love
himself and his possessions.

What man has omitted to do, what man is destitute of,--this is a species
of sin which he does not sufficiently consider, and which is weighing him
down to perdition. The unregenerate person when pressed to repent of his
sins, and believe on the Lord Jesus Christ, often beats back the kind
effort, by a question like that which Pilate put to the infuriated Jews:
"Why, what evil have I done?" I