OF HUMAN NATURE. 279 centive to prayer, furnish an apology for making a fewpreliminary remarks on this great article of our faith. The doctrine is not the less a funda- mental doctrine, because it has been abused to the worst purposes ; some hav- ing erroneously considered it as leaving us without hope, and others, as lending an excuse to unresisted sin.-It is a doctrine which meets us in one unbroken series throughout the whole sacred volume ; we find it from the third of Genesis, which records the event of man's apostacy, car- ried on through the history of its fatal consequences in all the subsequent in- stances of sin, individual and national, and running in one continued stream from the first sad tale ofwoe, to the close of the sacred canon in the Apocalyptic Vision. And, to remove the groundless hope, that this quality of inherent corruption belonged only to the profligate and abandoned, the Divine Inspirer of the sacred writers took especial care, that I1
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