forsake them. It must be, that we shun God, and
will not allow the dew of His love to refresh us, —
that we will not be ^von by His mercy, — that we
make light of His pardon, and scorn His peace.

Among those who stay away from Christ, who
will not believe in Him, who ^vill not come to Him,
the motive of the chief part has ever been, that they
are destitute of the consciousness of sin, and of all
thoughts and "wishes rising above the objects of the
senses, or else that they love then* sins, and are de-
termined to cleave to them, in despite of all that God
can do to draw them away. Others there are, who
will not believe in Christ through pride and self-
righteousness. Others have involved themselves inex-



THE CONVICTION OF SIN. 99

tricably in the labyrinthine abstractions of a sceptical
understanding. Some will say, in their high-swelling
imaginations, that they need no Redeemer, no Ran-
som, no Reconciler, no Atonement, no Pardon, —
that they can find the way to God by themselves, —
that they can build up a tower of theiT own virtues,
a grand and gorgeous tower, virtue above virtue, the
top of which shall reach to heaven. Such men there
have been more or less in all ages ; and the way
their devices have been baffled has ever been the
same, by the confusion of tongues. They have been
unable to understand one another's language. When
one of them has asked for bread, his neighbor has
given him a stone ; when asked for a fish, he has
given a serpent ; indifference and scorn, instead of
sympathy and encouragement. The hand of each
has been against his brother. There has been no
unity of spkit amongst them, but variance and strife
and railing : they have never entered into the bond
of peace. This is the other form of sin, by which
men are kept away from Christ. The great mass
stay away, because their hearts are paralyzed and
crumbled by carelessness and self-indulgence, or rot-
ted by the cankering pleasures of sin ; the few, be-
cause their hearts are hardened and stiffened by
pride. The former cannot believe in Christ, the lat-
ter will not. Of both these sins, and of every other
form of sin by which men are witliheld from believ-
ing in Christ, the Comforter came to convince the
world. The Comforter I Docs it seem a strange
name to any of you, my brethren, for Him who came
on such an errand? Does it seem to you that, in
convincing you of your sins, instead of comforting

aKan'an



100 THE CONVICTION OF SIN.

you, He must needs cover you with shame and con-
fusion, and make you sink to the ground in unutter-
able anguish and dismay ? No, dear brethren, it is
not so. Those among you whom the Spirit has in-
deed convinced of sin, will avouch that it is not.
They will avouch that, in convincing them of sin,
He has proved that He is indeed the Comforter (r).
If the conviction and consciousness of sin arises
from any other source, then indeed it is enough to
crush us with shame, and to harrow us with unim-
aginable fears. But when it comes from the Spirit
of God, it comes with healing and comfort on its
wings. Remember what the sin is, of which He con-
vinces us, — that we believe not in Christ. All other
conviction of sin would be without hope : here the
hope accompanies the conviction, and is one with it.
If we have a deep and lively feeling of the sin of not
believing in Christ, we must feel at the same time
that Christ came to take away this along with all
other sins. He came, that we might believe in Him,
and that through this faith we might overcome the
world, with all its temptations, its fears and its
shame, as well as its pleasures and lusts. And O
what comfort can be like that, which it yields to the
broken and contrite spirit, to feel that the Son of
God has taken away his sins, — that, if he has a
true living faith in Christ, they are blotted out for-
ever, and become as though they had never been ?
What joy, what peace can be like this, to feel that
we are not our own, but Christ's? that we are be-
come members of His holy body, and that our life
has been swallowed up in His ? that we can rest in
His love with the same vmdoubting confidence with



THE CONVICTION' OF SIN. 101

which a child rests in the arms of its mother ? that,
if we believe in Him, we have nothing to fear about
the feebleness and falling short of our services ? for
that He will work out our salvation for us ; yea, that
He has v^Tought it out. V*"ho then is he that con-
demneth? It is Christ that died for us, to take away
our sins, and is risen again for us, to clothe us in His
righteousness, and sitteth at the right hand of God,
ever m.aking intercession for us, that we may be sup-
ported under every trial and danger, and strengthened
against every temptation, and delivered from the sin
of unbelief and all other sins, and girt with the
righteousness of faith, and crowned with all the
graces which spring from faith, and at length may be
received into the presence of the Father, into which
our Elder Brother has entered before us. To whom,
as He dwelleth in the bosom of the Father, ever
pleading in behalf of His Chui'ch, and to the Spirit
of the Comforter, whom He has sent to sanctify that
Church, and to bring the world into it by the convic-
tion of Sin and of Righteousness and of Judg-
ment, — in the Unity of the Eternal Godhead, — be
all glory and thanksgiving and blessing and adora-
tion now and forever.



9*



SEEM ox III.



THE CONVICTION OF EIGHTEOUSNESS.



When the comforter is come, he ■will convince the world of

SIN, AND OF righteousness, AND OF JUDGMENT; OF RIGHTEOUS-
NESS, because I GO TO JIY FATHER, AND YE SEE 3IE NO MORE. — Johll
xvi. 8, 10.

The first work of the Comforter, as set forth by
our Lord, when He promised to send the Spirit of
Truth to His disciples, is to convince the world of
sin : and we have seen what need there was of this
conviction, how greatly the world needed it, ho^v it
could not be wrought by any other power, and con-
sequently how it was necessary, for the fulfilment of
Christ's gracious purpose to save the world, that the
world should be convinced of sin by the Spu'it of
God. Ever since the Fall, the world has been lying
under sin. This was the crushing mountain cast
upon the race that had rebelled against God, a moun-
tain which sprang out of theii* own entrails, the root
of which was in their own hearts. Beneath it they
pined and groaned in theu forlorn anguish. Beneath
it ever and anon they heaved, and tried to shake off
some portion of the burden. At times, when a higher
power stirred them to more than ordinary efforts,
some clefts and fissures were rent in the mountain,
and they caught glimpses of the heavens, which it



THE CONVICTION OF RIGHTEOUSNESS. 103

mostly shut out from theii' sight. But such glimpses
were brief and fleeting : they were seldom caught,
except at the season when the heart of a nation was
teeming with the vernal energies of youth : ere long
the mountain of sin closed over it again : new sins
shot out to choke up the clefts and fissures : the
darkness seemed to become still thicker and more
hopeless : and they, who before hnd reared and strug-
gled against it, sank in torpid despondence into the
abysmal sleep of death. Even at best man only
strove to overcome some particular sins, not to over-
come and utterly cast away sin itself. For why?
Sin was his own child, the offspring of his own cor-
rupt nature : and though he was able to make out
that some of its features were unsightly, and some of
its limbs distorted, he could not recognize, — no
parent can, — that it was altogether a monster.
Being degenerate himself, he perceived not that sin
was not the rightful birth of his own true, aboriginal
nature : for he knev\^ not what that natiue ought to
have brought forth. He saw not, he had never seen,
any pattern of righteousness, by comparison with
which he might have discerned his own image, both
in its heaven-born purity, and in its earth-sprung de-
formity. He knew not what he ought to have been ;
and so he could not feel a due shame and horror and
loathing at the contemplation of what he Avas.

Such was the state of the world, when the Com-
forter came from heaven to convince it at once of
Sin and of Righteousness : and such also, more or
less, is the state of every soul, until the Spirit of God
comes to it to work the same twofold conviction. In
this, as in other respects, the life of each individual



104 THE CONVICTION OF RIGHTEOUSNESS.

is a sort of likeness and miniature of that of the
race. In every man there is a grow'th of sin, rooted
in the depths of his heart, and which has sprung up
from thence contemporaneously with the first awaken-
ing of his consciousness, so that he cannot even con-
ceive the possibility of being without it. He cannot
by nature even conceive it possible that he should
ever act from other motives, or with other aims, than
those which come from this root of sin. And this root
of sin is not single, but complex. For in every man
there is a root of selfishness. He will seek his own
good, or what he deems to be such, not the glory of
God, not the upholding of Order and Law, not the
manifestation and establishment of Truth, not, least
of all perhaps, the good of his fellow-creatures. Nay,
they who call themselves philosophers, tell him that he
cannot act from any other motive, that he must seek
his own good, that the notion of seeking any thing
else is a fantastical delusion, and that the only differ-
ence between ^visdom and folly, between virtue and
vice, is, that wisdom and virtue are longer-sighted,
and fix on remoter and more lasting benefits, on stars,
instead of ig-nps fatiti. Hence, so long as we follow
the impulses of our nature, we are apt to refer every
thing to some selfish end, to our own pleasure, to our
. profit, to our advancement and exaltation. We do
this, as the main business of our lives; and Ave think
it riii^ht and fittinof so to do : we are told on all sides
that it is right and fitting : we have no conception
that it can be wrong: we cannot even dream of act-
ing otherwise : and thus it is utterly impossible, until
our hearts and minds are lifted out of this state of
darkness, that we should have a true conviction



THE CONVICTIOX OF RIGHTEOUSNESS. 105

either of sin or of righteousness. Again, in every
man there is a root of worldly-mindedness. The
world is in all our thoughts ; and God is not. It
rushes upon us with an overv\'heIming torrent : it en-
ters into the soul through our eyes, through our ears,
through every inlet of the senses, through all our
instincts, through all our wants, which crave after the
things of this \vorld, through all our natural affec-
tions, which fix on the creatures of this world : and
thus it smothexs and almost extinguishes every germ
of feeling that would lead us to something higher, to
something beyond the reach of the senses. Hence
om' aims, our purposes, our wishes, om* hopes, our
fears are all hemmed in by the world, and summed
up in it. A vigorous effort is requisite to shake off
this crushing weight even for a moment, to look even
for a moment through this bright, gaudy mask, which
so dazzles and fascinates the senses : and what shall
prompt us to make such an effort ? what shall endue
us with -strength to persevere in it ? Even when
voices come to us and tell us of another world, the
unceasing din of this world overpowers them : we
fancy they must come from a region of dreams and
shadows, which the daylight of real life dispels : and
thus, as years roll on, and every year draws a fresh,
hard layer around the central spirit, we become more
and more thoroughly persuaded that this visible
world is our only home. Unless some higher power
enable us to shake off the yoke of the world, each of
us grows by degrees to deem of himself as only one
among the myriads of horses set to drag on the cha-
riot of Time, — to deem that his only pleasure is to
snatch what provender he can, as he rushes along the



106 THE COXYICTION OF RIGHTEOUSNESS.

way, — that his only glory is to surpass his yoke-
fellows in speed, — and that anon, when his strength
fails, the chariot ^vill pass over him, and millions of
hoofs will trample him to dust. Moreover in every
man there is a root of carnal or fleshly-mindedness.
His soul is drugged from childhood upward Avith the
stimulants and opiates of the senses ; and he looks
upon it as right and becoming and inevitable to de-
sire such ])leasures, to seek after them, to indulge in
them, so that it be not intemperately and hurtfuUy.

In every man's heart there is this triple root of
sin ; — no one Vviio knows his own heart will dispute
it; — the root of selfishness, from which spring self-
indulgence, self-will, self-esteem, and the vrhole brood
of vanity and pride; — the root of worldly-minded-
ness, which issues in ambition, in covetousness, in
the love of money, in the desire of advancement, of
honor, of po^ver ; — and the root of carnal-minded-
ness, from which, if it be not cut down betimes, and
kept diligently from shooting up again, the lusts of
the flesh will sprout rankly, and overrun and stifle
the soul. In their excess, indeed, when these vices
become injurious to a man himself, or to others, they
are reprobated by the judicious and sober-minded.
But when they are kept under a certain control, so
far are they from being reprobated, that the man
who so controls them is counted worthy of admira-
tion. These too are the motives and incentives con-
stantly urged and appealed to in men's dealings
with each other, even, alas I in the j^rocesses of edu-
cation ; which is too often a systematic training and
exercising of the young in habits of selfishness, of
worldly-mindedness, nay, not seldom of carnal-mind-



THE CONVICTION OF KIGHTEOUSNESS. 107

edness, whereby those vices acquire an uncontested
sway in the heart. For they who are themselves
worldly-minded and carnal-minded, cannot under-
stand how it is possible to act upon others by any mo-
tives save those the force of which they themselves
acknowledge, whips and spurs, bribes and blows, the
hope of reward and the fear of punishment. They
cannot understand how a heart can be drawn, when
no other force is applied to it than the unseen cords
of love. Not knowing the power of God, not know^-
ing how that povc^er is essentially and indissolubly
one with His holiness, they think they shall never be
strong enough to contend against the powers of evil,
unless they enlist some of those powers on their own
side. They cannot believe that there is any sure
plan of driving out or keeping under one devil, ex-
cept by calling in the aid of another. Thus children
are made to wallv from the first in the way in which
they should not go. The very processes of educa-^
tion bear witness to the radical corruption of our
nature. They show that evil has spread through
every region of our tlioughts, until we cannot even
conceive the possibility of doing without it; so that,
in seeking strong medicines, we can find none but
poisons. The child is brought up under the persua-
sion that he is altogether a child of this world, that
he is so, and cannot be otherwise, and is not even to
think of being otherw-ise. He is made indeed to
learn a lesson out of a book, which tells him that he
is a child of God, and the heir of a heavenly King-
dom ; and h'e is bid to reverence this book as sacred.
But this, he is compelled to conclude, must mean
that the lesson has no manner of bearing on the



108 THE COXVICTIOX OF KIGHTEOUSNESS.

affairs of this world, and is only designed to be laid
by in some remote cellar of his mind, that it may
serve him instead when all things of higher value
and more pressing interest are sw^ept away. For
the present he is unremittingly admonished that his
main business is to get a permanent footing here on
earth, to appropriate as much as he can of the goods
of this world, to lift himself up as high as he can
in the eyes of his neighbors. Such is the ordinary
course of education even in this Christian land ; and
almost all the changes, almost all the improvements,
as they have been deemed, which have been made
in our systems of education since the beginning of
this century, have only tended more and more to call
out and inflame the worldly stimulants of action,
more and more to draw the student out of the quiet
garden of loving contemplation, into the throng and
pressure of emulous contention.

Thus wofuUy does our mode of education, which
in a Christian land ought to aim at convincing the
heart and mind from the first both of sin and of
righteousness, tend in all its stages, from the nursery
up to the university, to confound the ideas of the
two, setting up what is deemed a middle term be-
tween them as the object of aim and worship, but
what in fact is the mere offspring of sin, masking it-
self in the garb of righteousness. For hell is ever
striving to rise up into a likeness of heaven ; but
there are no steps or shadings off by which heaven
can descend from its ethereal purity to the borders
of hell. And then, when the youth, who has been
thus trained, comes forth into the world, he finds the
same deficiencies and the same confusion in the in-



THE COXVrCTION OF RIGHTEOUSNESS. 109

stitiitions and practices of society, which have abeacly
proved so delusive and pernicious to him. For ci\il
society, being the creature of this world, and having
its ground and its end in this world, inevitablv re-
gards its members as children of this world, and in
all its dealings with them treats them mainly, if not
absolutely, as such. Moreover its chief immediate
purpose is much rather protection from evil, than the
exercising of any positive influence for eliciting or
promoting good. I speak not of what it ought to
be, according to the highest idea of the body politic,
but of what it ever has been, and is. Even laws,
which are the utterance of the moral voice of the
State, confine themselves to prohibition and repres-
sion. They do not attempt to cultivate the fields of
righteousness, but merely to erect a palisade and net-
work against the inroads of crime, driving in new
stakes, and weaving new meshes, in proportion as
evil devises new snares and new modes of attack.
Their language is, Thou shall not, speaking to him
who is inclined to violate them, and seldom enjoin-
ing any thing good, because it belongs to them to be
imperative ; whereas good cannot be enforced ; it
being of the very essence of good to be free and
spontaneous, not to spring from constraint and com-
pulsion. On the other hand, while the very efforts
which society makes for the sake of righteousness,
are thus confined to that which is merely negative,
he who walks abroad in the world, and listens to its
voices, and mixes in its doings, finds a universal con-
spiracy, I might almost call it, in behalf of sin
against holiness and godliness. He finds the habits,
the manners, the customs, the practices of men, all
10



110 TUB CONVICTION OF RIGHTEOUSNESS.

leagued in favor of this world, all combined to hold
up the prizes of this \vorld as the sole objects of de-
sire and endeavor. He finds false notions of honor,
false views of propriety, false estimates of interest :
duty is left out of account : heaven is condemned to
remain within the church-door. The whole language
of conversation is infected with this taint ; and it
might fill a thoughtful man with sadness, if not with
despondency, to observe how subtily it insinuates it-
self into the commonest remark on the condvict of
others, to hear how people reason and jest and praise
and blame, as though it were utterly inconceivable
that a man should act from any motive, except such
as have respect to his own temporal advantage.
Thus the evil tendencies of our nature are rooted
and confirmed ; and the vices whicji spring from
them are perpetuated, and ti'ansmitted from genera-
tion to generation. Instead of checking and sup-
pressing them, the cvistoms of society rather foster
and strengthen, and in a manner legalize them ; so
that they could not but spread more and more wide-
ly, and become ranker and more ineradicable, with
the increase of civilization, unless the Comforter
were ever unweariably pursuing His gracious work
of convincing the world of sin and of righteousness.
We have seen in the last sermon, what great need
there was, what great need there ever has been, and
still is, that the Holy Spirit of God should come
down from heaven, to convince the world of sin.
We have seen how utterly impossible it was for this
conviction to be \^Tought in the world, how impossi-
ble it is for such a conviction to be wrought efficiently
and sufficiently in any single heart, by any other



THE CONVICTION OF RIGHTEOUSNESS. Ill

power than that of the Spirit of God. The remarks
just made may assist us in perceiving that there was
no less need of the help of the Spirit, to convince
the world of righteousness ; and moreover that there
is still the same need of His help, in order that this
conviction may be graven in deep and living char-
acters on each individual soul. We need the help
of the Comforter to do this, because no other power
can ; and because, unless we are indeed convinced
of righteousness, as well as of sin, the work of the
Spirit will be imperfect and fruitless. For why are
we to be convinced of sin ? why does the Holy
Spirit vouchsafe to work this conviction in us ? Not
in order that we may continue in sin ; but in order
that we may flee from it, — in order that, discerning
how hateful it is, how terrible, how deadly, we may
flee from it with fear and loathing, and seek shelter
in the blessed abode of righteousness. But the
natural man knows of no such abode : he knows of
no righteousness, of nothing really deserving the
name. As on the one hand he has no distinct and
full conception of sin, so on the other hand has he
none of righteousness. He has no notion of the
blackness of the one, no notion of the white, saintly
purity of the other : all morality with him is of a
dull, misty grey : liis virtues and vices run one into
the other ; and it is often hard to know them apart.
As his conception of sin seldom goes beyond the
outward acts, the vices and crimes which spring from
it, and takes little count even of these, until they are
full grown ; so his righteousness also is for the most
part made up of outward acts, and of forms and rites



112 THE coNviCTro:^ of righteousness.

and ceremonies, a thing of shreds and patches, full
of holes and darns.

The cause which makes man incapable of con-
•ceiving a true and perfect idea of righteousness, has
come before us already. A muddy pool, a cracked
and spotted mirror will not reflect a distinct and i)ure
image. That which is exalted S3 far beyond the
reach of our nature, cannot have place in any of our
thoughts. Man cannot even frame such an idea as
an object of intelledual contemplation: much less
can he embody it as an object of love and worship
for his heart. A slight glance at Ihe chief facts pre-
sented by the history of the world may sutlice to
show that this is so. For suppose the case had been
otherwise, — suppose that man had been able to
form a distinct and lively idea of righteousness, —
where should we look with 1he expectation of finding
the personification of that idea ? Surely we should
look to the objects of religious worship, to the gods
before whom men have bowed down. Surely we
might reasonably imagine that the gods worshipped
by each nation would express the most perfect idea
it could form of righteousness. And what do we
find ? There is hardly a sin by which human nature
has ever been degraded, but man in his blind mad-
ness has given it a throne in the hearts of his gods.
As though he had retained a dim consciousness that he
had been made in the image of God, he inverted the
truth in such manner, that each nation made its gods
in its own image, investing them with its own attri-
butes, with its own weaknesses and passions and vices.
Lust, and Fraud, and Hatred, and Envy, and Jeal-



THE CONVICTION 'OF RIGHTEOUSNESS. 113

onsy, and Bloodthirstiness were seated in linger
dimensions among the inhabitants of heaven. These
however, it may be objected, were the frenzies of
rude, barbarous ages ; and as each nation became
more enhghtened, it elevated and purified its concep-
tions of its deities. To a certain extent this is true.
At the same time, in proportion as the idea of the
Deity was refined and purified, it also lost its power,