3. From the confessions of God's most eminent
saints —
[Job, previous to his trials, was pronounced by God " a perfect man ;" yet, after his trials, confessed, " Behold, I am vile ! " Paul occupies a whole chapter in his epistle to the Romans in describing the internal conflicts of his mind ; sin and grace mutually striving to overpower each other, and disabling him from fully vanquishing the one, or carrying into effect the dictates of the other. " In his flesh," he says, " dwelt no good thing :" but there was, notwithstanding all the attain- ments of his renewed mind, " a law in his members warring against the law of his mind, and bringing him into captivity to the law of sin which was in his members." Will any other then of the children of men say, " I am pure from all sin?" From the dominion of sin every saint may affirm that he is freed ; yea, and from the ivilful and allowed indulgence of any. David justly appeals to God respecting his perfect freedom from sin, as to any intention and purpose to commit it^; as Job also does respecting the extinction of its reigning power : " Thou knowest, that I am not wicked *^." But, if any man should go farther, and say, that sin was not still living within him, and operating occasionally to the polluting of his soul, he must stand self- convicted, and self-condemned ; just as Job has said, " If I justify myself, mine own mouth shall condemn me : if I say, I am perfect, it shall also prove me perverse^."]
Such being the state of our fallen nature, it be- comes us to consider, II. The improvement we should make of it —
This truth should never be lost sight of for one mo- ment : it should regulate every feeling of the heart : it should never cease to call forth and to augment,
1. Our humiliation —
[We are sinful creatures at the best ; and are in the situa- tion of wretched captives, who, having a dead body fastened to them, were compelled to drag it about, till they themselves
were destroyed by its pestilential vapours'^ Tliis, it
must be acknowledged, is a most humiliating truth, and not unfitly expressed in the general Confession of our Liturgy, " There is no health in us." Hence, when we are taught to " lothe ourselves for our iniquities and our abominations," we must remember that it is not for the actions only that are long
e Ps. xvii. 3. f Job X. 7. « Job ix. 20, 30, 31.
^ See what is said of Mezentius in Virgil ; M\\. lib. viii. 1. 485 — 488.