Twenty-Eighth Argument.
they did,” &c, &c. When louder summons and increasing fears compel him to renounce “the lusts of the flesh,” how strongly does he plead for those of the mind! And after he has given up his bosom sin with his lips, how treacherously does he hide it in the inmost recesses of his heart! Never did a besieged town dispute the ground with such obstinacy, and hold it out by such a variety of stratagems, as corrupt man stands it out against the repeated attacks of truth and grace. If he yields at all, it is seldom before he is brought to the greatest extremity. He “feeds on the dust of the earth;” he tries to “fill his” soul “with the husks” of vanity; and fares hard on sounds, names, forms, opinions, withered experience, dry notions of faith, and empty professions of hope, and fawning shows of love, till “the famine arises,” and the intolerable want of substantial bread forces him to surrender at discretion, and without reserve. Some stand it out thus, against the God of their salvation, ten or twenty years; and others never yield, till the terrors of death storm their affrighted souls, their last sickness batters down their tortured bodies, and “the poison of the arrows of the Almighty drinks up their” wasted “spirits.” What a strong proof is this of the inveteracy and obstinacy of our corruption!
TWENTY-EIGHTH ARGUMENT.
But a still stronger may be drawn from the amazing struggles of God’s children with their depravity, even after they have, through grace, powerfully subdued and gloriously triumphed over it. Their Redeemer himself “is the Captain of their salvation:” they are embarked with him, and bound for heaven; they look at the compass of God’s word; they hold the rudder of sincerity; they crowd all the sails of their good resolutions, and pious affections, to catch the gales of Divine assistance; they “exhort one another daily” to ply the oars of faith and prayer with watchful industry; tears of deep repentance and fervent desire often bedew their faces in the pious toil: they would rather die than draw back to perdition; but, alas! the stream of corruption is so impetuous that it often prevents their making any sensible progress in their spiritual voyage; and if in an unguarded hour they drop the oar, and faint in “the work of faith, the patience of hope,” or “the labour of love,” they are presently carried down into the dead sea of religious formality, or the whirlpools of scandalous wickedness. Witness the lukewarmness of the Laodiceans, the adultery of David, the perjury of Peter, the final apostasy of Judas, and the shameful flight of all the disciples.
TWENTY-NINTH ARGUMENT.
When evidences of the most opposite interest agree in their deposition to a matter of fact, its truth is greatly corroborated. To the last argument, taken from some sad experiences of God’s people, I shall therefore add one, drawn from the religious rites of Paganism, the confession of ancient heathens, and the testimony of modern Deists.
When the heathens made their temples stream with the blood of slaughtered hecatombs, did they not explicitly deprecate the wrath of Heaven and impending destruction? And was it not a sense of their guilt and danger; and a hope that the punishment they deserved might be transferred to their bleeding victims, which gave birth to their numerous expiatory and propitiatory sacrifices? If this must be granted, it is plain those sacrifices were so many proofs that the considerate heathens were not utter strangers to their corruption and danger.
But let them speak their own sentiments. Not to mention their allegorical fables of Prometheus, who brought a curse upon earth by stealing fire out of heaven; and of Pandora, whose fatal curiosity let all sorts of woes and diseases loose upon mankind; does not Ovid in his Metamorphoses give a striking account of the fall, and its dreadful consequences? Read his description of the golden age, and you see Adam in paradise; proceed to the iron age, and you behold the horrid picture of our consummate wickedness.
If the ancients had no idea of that native propensity to evil, which we call original depravity, what did Plato mean by our “natural wickedness.”f42 And Pythagoras, by “the fatal companion, the noxious strife that lurks within us, and was born along with us?”f43 Did not Solon take for his motto the well-known saying, which, though so much neglected now, was formerly written in golden capitals over the door of Apollo’s temple at Delphos. “Know thyself?”f44 Are we not informed by heathen historians, that Socrates, the prince of the Greek sages, acknowledged he was naturally prone to the grossest vices? Does not Seneca, the best of the Roman philosophers, observe, “We are born in such a condition that we are not subject to fewer disorders of the mind than of the body?”f45 Yea, that “all vices are in all men, though they do not break out in every one;”f46 and that “to confess them is the beginning of our cure?”f47 And had not Cicero lamented before Seneca, that “men are brought into life by nature as a stepmother, with a naked, frail, and infirm body; and a soul prone to divers lusts?”
Even some of the sprightliest poets bear their testimony to the mournful truth I contend for. Propertius could say, “Every body has a vice to which he is inclined by nature.”f48 Horace declared that” no man is born free from vices,” and that “he is the best man who is oppressed with the least:”f49 that “mankind rush into wickedness, and always desire what is forbidden:”f50 that “youth hath the softness of wax to receive vicious impressions, and the hardness of a rock to resist virtuous admonitions:”f51 in a word, that “we are mad enough to attack heaven itself, and” that “our repeated crimes do not suffer the God of heaven to lay by his wrathful thunderbolts.”f52 And Juvenal, as if he had understood what St. Paul says of the “carnal mind,” affirms that “nature unchangeably fixed” tends, yea, “runs back to wickedness,”f53 as bodies to their centre.
Thus the very depositions of the heathens, in their lucid intervals, as well as their sacrifices, prove the depravity and danger of mankind. And so does likewise the testimony of some of our modern Deistical philosophers. The ingenious author of a book called “Philosophical Inquiries concerning the Americans,” informs us it is a custom among some Indians, that as soon as the wife is delivered of a child the husband must take to his bed, where he is waited on by the poor woman who should have been brought there; and that to this day the same ridiculous custom prevails in some parts of France. “From this and other instances,” says our inquirer, “we may collect that, however men may differ in other points, there is a most striking conformity among them in ABSURDITY.”
The same philosopher, who is by no means tainted with what some persons are pleased to call enthusiasm, confirms the doctrine of our natural depravity by the following anecdote, and the ironical observation with which it is dosed:—The Esquimaux, (the wildest and most sottish people in all America,) call themselves men, and all other nations barbarians. “Human vanity, we see, thrives equally well in all climates; in Labrador as in Asia. Beneficent nature has dealt out as much of this comfortable quality to a Greenlander as to the most consummate French petit-maitre.”