ly, and good Creator. This is not His work.
This is no part of the furniture with which mankind were set up for an
everlasting existence. "God saw everything that he had made, and behold
it was very good." (Gen. i. 31). We acknowledge the mystery that
overhangs the union and connection of all men with the first man. We know
that this corruption of man's nature, and this sinfulness of his heart,
does indeed, appear at the very beginning of his individual life. He is
conceived in sin, and shapen in iniquity (Ps. li. 5). This selfish
disposition, and this alienation of the heart from God, is _native_
depravity, is _inborn_ corruption. This we know both from Revelation,
and observation. But we also know, from the same infallible Revelation,
that though man is born a sinner from the sinful Adam, he was created
a saint in the holy Adam. By origin he is holy, and by descent he is
sinful; because there has intervened, between his creation and his birth,
that "offence of one man whereby all men were made sinners" (Rom. v. 18,
19). Though we cannot unravel the whole mystery of this subject, yet if
we accept the revealed fact, and concede that God did originally make man
in His own image, in righteousness and true holiness, and that man has
since unmade himself, by the act of apostasy and rebellion,[1]--if we
take this as the true and correct statement of the facts in the case,
then we can see how and why it is, that God has claims upon His creature,
man, that extend to what this creature originally was and was capable of
becoming, and not merely to what he now is, and is able to perform.

When, therefore, the young ruler's question, "What lack I?" is asked and
answered upon a broad scale, each and every man must say: "I lack
original righteousness; I lack the holiness with which God created man; I
lack that perfection of character which belonged to my rational and
immortal nature coming fresh from the hand of God in the person of Adam;
I lack all that I should now be possessed of, had that nature not
apostatized from its Maker and its Sovereign." And when God forms His
estimate of man's obligations; when He lays judgment to the line, and
righteousness to the plummet; He goes back to the _beginning_, He goes
back to _creation_, and demands from His rational and immortal creature
that perfect service which, he was capable of rendering by creation, but
which now he is unable to render because of subsequent apostasy. For,
God cannot a