III.

DIGNITY OF HUMAN NATURE SHOWN FROM ITS RUINS.

ROMANS iii., 13-18.-" Their throat is an open sepulchre ; with their tongues they have used deceit; the poison of asps is under their lips. Whose mouth is full of cursing and bitterness. Their feet are swift to shed blood. Destruction and misery are in their ways. And the way of peace they have not known. There is no fear of God before their eyes.

A MOST dark and dismal picture of humanity, it must be admitted; and yet it has two sides or aspects. In one view, it is the picture of weakness, wretchedness, shame and disgust; all which they discover in it who most sturdily resent the impeachment of it. In the other, it presents a being higher than even they can boast; a fearfully great being; great in his evil will, his demoniacal passions, his contempt of fear, the splendor of his degra dation, and the magnificence of his woe.

It is this latter view of the picture to which, at the present time, I propose to call your attention, exhibiting,

The dignity of man, as revealed by the ruin he makes in his fall and apostacy from God.

It has been the way of many, in our time, to magnify humanity, or the dignity of human nature, by tracing its capabilities and the tokens it reveals of a natural affinity with God and truth. They distinguish lovely instincts, powers and properties allied to God, aspirations reaching

after God; many virtues, according to the common use of that term; many beautiful and graceful charities; and, by such kind of evidences, or proofs, they repel, sometimes with scorn, what they call the libelous, or even the insulting doctrine of total depravity. And this they do, as I will add, not without some show of reason, when the fact of our depravity is asserted in a manner that excludes the admission of any such high aspirations and amiable properties, or virtues, as we certainly discover in human conduct, apart from any gifts and graces of religion. And it must be admitted that some teachers have given occasion for this kind of offense; not observing the compatibility of great aspirations and majestic affinities with a state of deep spiritual thraldom; assuming, also, with as little right, the want of all appropriate sensibilities and receptivities for the truth, as a necessary inference from the complete destitution of holiness. They make out, in this manner, a doctrine of human depravity, in which there is no proper humanity left.

I am not required by my subject to settle the litigation between these two extremes; one of which makes the gos. pel unnecessary, because there is no depravation to restore; and the other of which makes it impossible, because there is nothing left to which any holy appeal can be made; but I undertake, in partial disregard of both, to show the essential greatness and dignity of man from the ruin itself which he becomes; confident of this, that in no other point of view, will he prove the spiritual sublimity of his nature so convincingly.

Nor is it any thing new, or a turn more ingenious than just, that we undertake to raise our conceptions of human

nature in this manner; for it is in just this way that we are accustomed to get our measures and form our conceptions of many things;-of the power, for example, of ancient dynasties and the magnificence of ancient works and cities. Falling thus, it may be, on patches of paved road here and there, on lines leading out divergently from ancient Rome, uncovering and decyphering the mile-stones by their sides, marked with postal distances, here for Britain, here for Germany, here for Ephesus and Babylon, here for Brundusium, the port of the Appian Way, and so for Egypt, Numidia and the provinces of the sun; imagining the couriers flying back and forth, bearing the mandates of the central authority to so many distant nations, followed by the military legions trailing on to execute them; we receive an impression of the empire, from these scattered vestiges, which almost no words of historic description could give us. So, if we desire to form some opinion of the dynasty of the Pharaohs, of whom history gives us but the faintest remembrances and obscurest traditions, we have only to look on the monumental mountains, piled up to molder on the silent plain of Egypt, and these dumb historians in stone will show us more of that vast and populous empire, measuring by the amount of realized impression, more of the imperial haughtiness of the monarchs, more of the servitude of their people and of the captive myriads of the tributary nations, than even Heroditus and Strabo, history and geography, together.

The same is true, even more strikingly, of ancient cities. Though described by historians, in terms of definite measurement, with their great structures and defenses and the royal splendor of their courts, we form no suffieicnt conception of their grandeur, till we look upon their

ruins. Even the eloquence of Homer describing the glory and magnificence of Thebes, the vast circuit of its walls, its hundred gates, and the chariots of war pouring out of all, to vanquish and hold in subjection the peoples of as many nations, yields only a faint, unimpressive conception of the city; but, to pass through the ruins of Karnac and Luxor, a vast desolation of temples and pillared avenues that dwarf all the present structures of the world, solemn, silent and hoary, covered with historic sculptures that relate the conquest of kingdoms-a journey to pass through, a maze in which even comprehension is lost-this reveals a fit conception of the grandest city of the world as no words could describe it. Beheld and judged by the majesty of its ruins, there is a poetry in the stones surpassing all majesty of song. So, when the prophet Jonah, endeavoring, as he best can, to raise some adequate opinion of the greatness of Nineveh, declares that it is an exceeding great city, of three days' journey; and, when Nahum follows, magnifying its splendor in terms of high description that correspond; still, so ambiguous and faint is the impression made, that many were doubting whether, after all, "the exceeding great city" was any thing more than a vast inclosure of gardens and pasture grounds for sheep, where a moderate population subsisted under the protection of a wall. No one had any proper conception of the city till just now, when a traveler and antiquary digs into the tomb where it lies, opens to view, at points many miles asunder, its temples and palaces, drags out the heavy sculptures, shows the inscriptions, collects the tokens of art and splendor, and says, "this is Nineveh, the 'exceeding great city," and then, judging of its extent from the vast and glorious ruin, we begin to have some fit impression

of its magnitude and splendor.

And so it is with

Babylon, Ephesus, Tadmor of the desert, Baalbec and the nameless cities and pyramids of the extinct American race. All great ruins are but a name for greatness in ruins, and we see the magnitude of the structure in that of the ruin made by it, in its fall.

So it is with man. Our most veritable, though saddest, impressions of his greatness, as a creature, we shall derive from the magnificent ruin he displays. In that ruin we shall distinguish fallen powers, that lie as broken pillars on the ground; temples of beauty, whose scarred and shattered walls still indicate their ancient, original glory; summits covered with broken stones, infested by asps, where the palaces of high thought and great aspiration stood, and righteous courage went up to maintain the citadel of the mind,—all a ruin now, "archangel ruined."

And exactly this, I conceive, is the legitimate impres sion of the scripture representations of man, as apostate from duty and God. Thoughtfully regarded, all exaggerations and contending theories apart, it is as if they were showing us the original dignity of man, from the magnificence of the ruin in which he lies. How sublime a creature must that be, call him either man or demon, who is able to confront the Almighty and tear himself away from his throne. And, as if to forbid our taking his deep misery and shame as tokens of contempt, imagining that a creature so humiliated is inherently weak and low, the first men are shown us living out a thousand years of lustful energy, and braving the Almighty in strong defiance to the last. "The earth also is corrupt before God, and the carth is filled with violence." We look, as it were, upon a race of Titans, broken loose from order