of all sin. The poor senseless sheep may be pitied, but cannot be blamed, for wandering from the fold, because they are unconscious of any obligation to abide under the direction of their shepherd. But our criminality in departing from God is exceeding great. Blind as we are to spiritual truths, we yet know that there is a God, whom we ought to love and serve. We know that, to live without him in the world, or to serve him only with our lips while our hearts are far from him, is an insult to his majesty, and a viola- tion of his commands. Yet these are the ways which we have chosen for ourselves in preference to those, which he has marked out for us in his word. What need we more to criminate us in his sight? What need we more to draw down upon ourselves his wrath and indignation ? The particular acts of sin which any commit, are only so many branches proceeding from this root, and so many ways of manifesting our aversion to him. There may indeed be degrees of guilt in respect of them ; but in respect to the general habit of our minds, we are all alike ; we are wilful, deliberate, and determined apostates from God : we have cast off our allegiance to him : we have made our own will the rule, and our own honour or interest the end, of all our actions : we have lived to ourselves, and not unto him : in a word, we have, as far as de- pended on us, banished God from the universe, and been a God unto ourselves. This is " the iniquity of us all."
What might have been expected, but that God should abandon such an impious race, and give them over to everlasting destruction '? yet behold, instead of leaving us to ourselves, he provided a way for our restoration to his favour. He took, not merely our particular transgressions, but the whole mass of ini- quity, that had accumulated from the beginning to the end of time, and laid it on his Son. As all the ini- quities of all the children of Israel were transferred to the scape-goat under the law, that he might bear them away into a land of oblivion, so were all the sins of the whole human race transferred to Christ, that,