self-inspection of that occasion could commence here and now. But such is
not the fact. The Bible labors, therefore, under the difficulty of
possessing an advanced knowledge; the difficulty of being addressed to a
mind that is almost entirely unacquainted with the subject treated of.
The Word of God knows man exhaustively, as God knows him; and hence all
its descriptions of human character are founded upon such a knowledge.
But man, in his self-ignorance, does not perceive their awful truth. He
has not yet attained the internal correspondent to the Biblical
statement,--that apprehension of total depravity, that knowledge of the
plague of the heart, which always and ever says "yea" to the most vivid
description of human sinfulness, and "amen" to God's heaviest malediction
upon it. Nothing deprives the Word of its nerve and influence, more than
this general lack of self-inspection and self-knowledge. For, only that
which is perceived to be _true_ exerts an influence upon the human mind.
The doctrine of human sinfulness is preached to men, year after year, to
whom it does not come home with the demonstration of the Spirit and with
power, because the sinfulness which is really within them is as yet
unknown, and because not one of a thousand of their transgressions has
ever been scanned in the light of self-examination. But is the Bible
untrue, because the man is ignorant? Is the sun black, because the eye is
shut?

However ignorant man may be, and may desire and strive to be, of himself,
God knows him altogether, and knows that the representations of His word,
respecting the character and necessities of human nature, are the
unexaggerated, sober, and actual fact. Though most of the sinner's life
of alienation from God, and of disobedience, has been a blind and a
reckless agency, unaccompanied with self-scrutiny, and to a great extent
passed from his memory, yet it has all of it been looked at, as it
welled, up from the living centres of free agency and responsibility, by