The corruption of human nature is an universal dis- ease. It affects not only a man's heart, will, and con- science, but his mind, memory, and understanding. The very same person who is quick and clever in worldly things, will often utterly fail to comprehend the simplest truths of Christianity. He will often be unable to take in the plainest reasonings of the Gospel. He will see no meaning in the clearest statements of evangelical doctrine. They will sound to him either foolish or mysterious. He will listen to them like one listening to a foreign language, catching a word here and there, but not seeing the drift of the whole. " The world by wisdom knows not God." (1 Cor. i. 21.) It hears, but does not understand.
We must pray daily for the teaching of the Holy Ghost, if we would make progress in the knowledge of divine things. Without Him, the mightiest intellect and the strongest reasoning powers will carry us but a little way. In reading the Bible and hearing sermons, every- thing depends on the spirit in which we read and hear. A humble, teachable, child-like frame of mind is the grand secret of success. Happy is he who often says with David, " Teach me thy statutes." (Psalm cxix. 64.) Such an one will understand as well as hear.
We see, in the second place, from this passage, that the heart is the chief source of defilement and impurity in God's sight. Moral purity does not depend on washing or not washing — touching things or not touching them — eating things or not eating them, as the Scribes and Pharisees taught. " There is nothing from without a man, that entering into him can defile him : but the things which come out of him, these are they that defile the man."