selfish pursuit of wealth and distinction became their whole aim. And what made the case more desperate, was the fact, that this evil course appeared to their corrupt minds right enough: it was natural, and they did not see the evil of it. Thus it is, that evil in the will ever blinds and darkens the understanding; the fire of bad passions, burning in the heart, sends up a thick smoke which clouds the mind, till at length it is covered over with a veil of darkness. A mental night rests upon the soul: objects of thought, if discerned at all, are seen in false forms and colours: fallacies appear as truths, truths as fallacies; beauty is mistaken for ugliness, and ugliness for beauty: virtue is shunned, and vice embraced. In such a condition, man is a lost being. He has wandered far from the true path of life, and he cannot find it again; he has lost the standards of truth and right, has missed the guideposts that point the way to heaven; he is wandering about in a wilderness, and, unless help come soon, he will presently go over the precipice into the gulf of perdition.[1]
Now, just in this condition was man, when God sent His revealed Word, to be "a lamp to his feet, and a
- ↑ Here is the error of those (of the Rationalist school) who assert the needlessness of a written Revelation, maintaining that the revelation of truth from God into man's own mind is sufficient. They forget the difference between man's state of integrity and his present inherited perversion of mind. In the present morally diseased condition of man, the truth flowing from God into his mind is either suffocated and darkened, or perverted into falsity. Consequently, man can no longer be instructed from within, as he once was; and hence the need of an outward written Revelation.
