I. The Apostle declares that the imagination of our sinlessness is an inward lie. The particular causes of this delusion will vary with every variety of individual character. Every temptation that occupies, and by occupying excludes all other occupants, may claim its share in the perpetuation of this melancholy illusion. The whole host of Satan are engaged to drug this opiate. All their enchantments are accessory to this, and result in this. It would be vain, therefore, to think of specifying the particular causes of this evil; we can only speak of some of the general principles on which it rests.
II. (1) The first and darkest of Satan's works on earth is also the first and deepest fountain of the misfortune we are now lamenting the original and inherited corruption of the human soul itself. It is ignorant of sin, just because it is naturally sinful. There is a sense in which it may be said that the heart knoweth notits own bitterness. One chief object of the Gospel history, as applied by the Spirit of God, is to humble and yet animate us by a portraiture of moral excellence which, as observation cannot furnish, so assuredly nature will never spontaneously imagine. We cannot know our degradation, we cannot struggle, or even wish to rise, if we have never been led to conceive the possibility of a state higher than our own. (2) So far, then, it appears that Nature, herself prone to sin, may be expected, in virtue of that very tendency, to tell us we have no sin, and that therefore her evidence is to be received with suspicion; but it must next be remembered that, properly speaking, no human being can be seen in this state of nature alone. Man is far advanced upon his way before his steps are arrested. Repeated acts are become principles of action, and every man is the creature of his own past life. If Nature alone, treacherous and degraded Nature, is silent in denouncing sin, if she has no instinctive power to arouse herself, what shall she be when doubly and trebly indurated by habit? (3) No man arrests that evil in himself which his eyes have never ceased to contemplate in others. Even follies that at first are odious lose their oppressiveness when we are surrounded with nothing else, as the enormous weight of the air becomes imperceptible from its pressure being universal. (4) How the power of this universality of sin around us to paralyse the sensibility of conscience is augmented by the influence of fashion and rank, I need not assert. "Who can understand his errors?" Let us urge the humble petition of the Psalmist, "Cleanse Thou me from secret faults."
W. Archer Butler, Sermons Doctrinal and Practical,p. 140.
Reference: 1 John 1:8. W. Landels, Christian World Pulpit,vol. vii., p. 344.