CHAPTER IX. THE HEART AS IT IS. "All our actions take Their lines from one complexion of the heart, "I care not, so my kernel relish well, How slender be the substance of my shell. "The heart is deceitful above all things, and desperately wicked: who can know it? I the LORD search the heart, I try the reins." — JER. xvii. 9, 10. "And GOD saw that the wickedness of man was great in the earth, and that every imagination of the thoughts of his heart was only evil continually. The earth also was corrupt before God, and the earth was filled with violence. And God looked upon the earth, and, behold, it was corrupt; for all flesh had corrupted his way upon the earth.” GEN. vi. 5, 11, 12. Ir needs not any additional remarks of mine, to enforce the truth I have endeavored, however feebly, to show, that a vast deterioration has taken place in all humanity. Its progression, during the series of 1,500 years that had elapsed from the creation of man, was in every instance towards worse, in no instance a retrogression towards the good that it had lost. Every faculty seems to have been injured, every affection to have become depraved, and the whole heart of man, in the expressive and almost awful language of the prophet, to have become "deceitful above all things, and desperately wicked." We were not left to draw this conclusion as an inference; it is the positive assertion of God, reiterated in almost every book of the Bible, and painfully confirmed by all the facts of the history of mankind. He who made the heart and knew it, and He who could search it and sift it, and see through all its wrappings, and detect it under all its multiplied disguises, pronounces of it the awful verdict in the 6th chapter of Genesis, that "every imagination of the thoughts of man's heart was only evil continually." "And it repented the Lord, and grieved him to the heart, that he had made man." What an expression of the awful depravity of man! and how bad must he have been, when the God who made him once so beautiful and fair, is said, in the language of earth, to have repented, and to have been grieved at the heart, that he had made him. But we have only to read modern history, and on the Continent from 1789 to 1853, to hear of the frightful excesses into which humanity, when let loose from the restraint of moral law, can plunge and precipitate itself. The language that God uses in Genesis is most strong “every imagination," every movement of the heart"every imagination of the thoughts," that is, that delicate tracery of thought which man cannot handle, and which man's blind eye cannot see, God sees, and pronounces to be tainted. "And every imagination of the thoughts of man's heart," not merely one, or a few, but "every imagination of the thoughts of man's heart" is evil, infected, the fountain is polluted, the root is poisoned; all the streams and all the fruit and branches must be so. And there is no suspension of this evil; for he says, it is evil, and that "continually." What an awful statement is this, that the thoughts that we think pure, seen by God, are really impure; and that our best doings have so much alloy in them, that they alone would disqualify us for the kingdom of heaven. Our moral sense, just like our physical sense, has become deadened by the Fall; but I have no doubt that to the eye of an infinitely pure Being, even the purest thought that leaps like the lightning through the heart of man, must present itself as infected, or poisoned in his sight. "Every imagination of the thoughts of man's heart was only evil continually." Now read the history of the race in after ages, and do we find any change? We come down to the days of the prophet Jeremiah, from whom I have read the passage that we are now considering, and in his days, 595 years before the birth of Christ, that is, about 3,500 years after the creation of man, and about 1,500 years after God's judgment in the verse in Genesis we find man's heart pronounced to be "deceitful above all things, and desperately wicked". the disease is too desperate to be cured. The words "desperately wicked" mean incurable; and Gesenius, the celebrated Hebrew lexicographer, who was a rationalist, defines the word to mean "so desperate as to be incurable by human power." In other words, the disease is too deep to be cured by human skill. There may be in man's heart modifying lights, relieving contrasts; there may be fragments of his primeval beauty still surviving; there may be thoughts that indicate the grand fountain out of which they came in Paradise, still lingering; but the great judgment is true of all humanity, that it is far worse than we know it, and our disease far more perilous than we ourselves admit or believe. It is " desperately wicked; who can know it?" Not ourselves, for the terra incognita to thousands is in their own bosoms, and men who know the secrets of chemistry, geology, astronomy, are ignorant of the secret depths and recesses of their own hearts. "Who can know it?" Not demons, not angels, not metaphysicians, not anatomists. God says, that there is a depth of depravity in it so great, that none can know it, and "I the Lord that search the hearts, and try the reins of the children of men, alone can know it." Did this heart mend itself when we come to the days of our blessed Lord? You are aware, it is a favorite theory with certain philosophers, that if you leave humanity, it will grow into perfection just as sure as if you leave a seed, it will grow into a tree, and blossom, and bear fruit; and that man is in a course of endless progression towards perfection. Is it the fact, that humanity is improved in its moral features? Separate from it the influence of the Christian religion, and is it not true that nations ignorant of Christianity are at this moment just what we are? Nay, that you can find among the ancient heathen, instances of devotedness, and self-sacrifice, and virtue,, such as you will not find in modern nations that are strangers to the restorative power of the gospel of Christ Jesus. Let us look, then, if there was any progress up to the days of our Lord, that is, 2,500 years after the Flood, when this judgment in Genesis was pronounced. What does the Lord say? He was "the truth;" his judgment must, therefore, be true. He was love itself, and could, therefore, have no pleasure in darkening the portrait that was already dark enough. He says, "Out of the heart of men proceed evil thoughts, adulteries, fornications, murders, thefts, covetousness, wickedness, deceit, lasciviousness, an evil eye, blasphemy, pride, foolishness." Such are the children of the heart - such the offspring of your heart and my heart, as that heart is in its native, unchanged, and unrenovated character. He who heard its lowest beatings, said so. He whose eye pierced its most subtle and exquisite structure, said so. He who had no pleasure in the death of the sinner, but rather that he should turn from his wickedness and live, said so. And as if in his own generation he should prove it to be so, when he, the perfection of all excellence, the brightness of the glory of God, came to earth, if there were one spark of love, one element of purity in human nature, surely it must have hailed so illustrious, so beneficent a messenger, come from the skies to restore it; but instead of doing so, the awful proof of its awful wickedness is in these words, "He came to his own and his own knew him not." He came, offering his life a ransom for sinners, and they shouted, as the representatives of all humanity, "Away with him, away with him! Crucify him, crucify him! It is not fit that such a one should live." If, again, we come down to the days of the Apostle Paul, we find no progress still. He gives a picture of the human heart, as that heart beat in his days, in the first chapter of the Epistle to the Romans, so awful, that we at once feel that the judgments of God in the sixth chapter of Genesis, and in the seventeenth chapter of Jeremiah, were not in the least overcharged. I am speaking, not of the heart of the Jew, or the heart of the Roman, but the heart of man. The portraits of Christianity are not topical, local, accidental, but the graphic pictures of all mankind-the just and accurate cartoons of what humanity was, is, and ever must be, till it be renovated by the holy Spirit of God. Of course, many will say, We cannot believe that the natural man is what you say, since we see so much in him that is the reverse. I admit that one man is constitutionally honorable, another man is constitutionally humble, and honest, and gentle. There are also repressive influences which keep down the outbreak of the heart's corruptions. It must be remembered that this is not a description of what is taking place without, but of what is lurking within. This is not a statement of a volcano exploding; but it is that of a volcano that has its retreat in the heart, and is there ever liable to explode, and demonstrate the fearful elements of |