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Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: Lect. it. For wise, though to us mysterious, reasons He has been pleased to permit it, both among men and antecedently among angels, but He never caused it. Further than this we shall in vain try to penetrate: we shall only lose, and probably endanger ourselves. Sin, we know, is there: but why it is there, and how it came to be there, no human being can tell us; and God has not been pleased to tell us, probably because we could not understand. Sin is there, and there with God's permission; but why God gives this permission, why He ever gave it, is an enquiry utterly beyond us. But if we may not penetrate in this direction, there are other directions in which we are invited, and should strive, to penetrate. For no subject concerns us more than the subject of sin. Sin is the grand theme of Holy Scripture; and, according to our views of sin, will be our personal religion, will be the colour and complexion of our spiritual life. As with churches, so with individuals, the estimate of sin determines everything.1 And for aright estimate of sin we must turn to the Bible. Lect. 1 The real difference between the Pure faith and the Romish faith on the one hand, and the Rationalistic faith on the other, is constituted, not so much by particular dogmas, as by the conception of sin. For the conception of sin determines the conception of redemption. We need not turn thither to learn the fact of sin. That is palpably before us. We cannot separate ourselves from life's dread realities. Whether or not we are persuaded with the prophet that because of sin the earth mourneth and fadeth away; or, is. xxiv. 4. with the psalmist, that because of sin all the Ps. Ixxxii. foundations of the earth are out of course; or, with the apostle, that because of sin the whole...