Perhaps there is no more awful thought than this, that sin is all around us and within us, and we know not what it is. We are beset by it on every side: it hangs over us, hovers about us, casts itself across our path, hides itself where our next footstep is to fall, searches us through and through, listens at our heart, floats through all our thoughts, draws our will under its sway and ourselves under its dominion, and we do not know what it is.
I. The entering in of sin proves the presence of an evil being. We talk of powers and qualities and principles and oppositions and the like; but we are only putting words for realities. They do not exist apart from being create or uncreate; they are the attributes and energies of living spirits. Sin entered in through and by the evil one that is, the devil.
II. Another truth to be learned is this, that by the entering in of sin a change passed upon the world itself. I am not now speaking of physical evil, such as dissolution and death and the wasting away of God's works, but only of moral evil. A change passed upon the condition of man. His will revolted and transferred its loyalty from God to the evil one. Thenceforward man was the representative of the alien and antagonist power which had broken the unity of God's kingdom; and his will was bent in a direct opposition to the will of God. Such, then, is sin.
III. This awful principle of sin has been ever multiplying itself from the beginning of the world. It so clave to the life of man that, as living souls were multiplied, sin in them was multiplied also. As sin has multiplied in its extent, so it would seem also to have become more intense in its character. The mystery of original sin is begun over and over again with each successive generation. Men grow up to a certain height of the moral stature, and are cut down and laid in the earth; their children rise up more or less to the same standard, within certain limits which are the conditions of our being and our probation. But it is no less true that there is a growth and accumulation of evil which in the life of the world is analogous to the deterioration of character in the individual man. The full unfolding of sin has ever been at the close of the dispensations of God; it has been at its worst when He was nighest. It shall at last stand forth in the earth, at the full stature of its hate and daring against heaven, and by the coming of the Son of man in glory shall be cast out for ever.
H. E. Manning, Sermons,vol. i., p. 1.
I. Note first how naturally and reasonably faith may link the mysterious record of the Fall with the plain facts of our present state. There is a clear and familiar analogy between the childhood of each one of us and the childhood of the race. It is from others that we learn the story of our earliest days; we trust others for all knowledge of the time of our birth and the first shelter of our life; others tell us to whom we owed the care and love in which self-knowledge woke; we must ask others how our place and lot were first marked out for us among our fellow-men. It is faith in others, the evidence of things not seen, which links our present and our past, which gives us the bare outline of our infancy, and shows us our own life continuous beyond the bounds of memory. Now, is it not exactly thus with the childhood of mankind? Natural reason tells us as little of the childhood of humanity as memory can tell us of our own. All the wondrous vision of man's infancy God offers to our faith. He bids us trust Him here. The facts of life force our thoughts to the recognition of the Fall, just as the attractions and repulsions of the heavenly bodies guide the astronomer to believe in the existence of an undiscovered star. "All hangs on that imperceptible point." And so, I believe, it has come to pass that the doctrine of the Fall, and of a flaw and fault inherent in our manhood, has been at once the most scornfully rejected and the most generally acknowledged truth in all the Christian faith.
II. Over against the great fact of the sin of the world there stands the great fact of the sinlessness of Christ. We realise the full import of one side of the contrast only as we enter into the reality of the other. Only in the light of His holiness can we see how far the world has fallen away from God; only as we represent to ourselves the range and subtlety and cruelty of sin can we recognise the arresting and controlling miracle of His perfect holiness. And as we realise what He, All-perfect and All-love, vouchsafed to bear for us within the misery of our loveless life, it will lead us to kneel with a new glow of gratitude and adoration at His feet, to cry with a new longing that we may never fall away from Him, fall back under the darkness of sin. "O Lord God, Lamb of God, Son of the Father, that takest away the sins of the world, have mercy upon us. For Thou only art Holy, Thou only art the Lord; Thou only, O Christ, with the Holy Ghost, art most high in the glory of God the Father."
F. Paget, Cambridge Review,March 3rd, 1886.
References: Romans 6:12. C. Kingsley, National Sermons,p. 228; C. J. Vaughan, Lessons of the Cross and Passion,p. 214; Homilist,3rd series, vol. vii., p. 149; W. Cunningham, Sermons,p. 72; Homiletic Quarterly,vol. iv., p. 157. Romans 5:15. Spurgeon, Sermons,vol. xxvii., No. 1591; E. de Pressensé, The Mystery of Suffering,p. 1; E. Bersier, Preacher's Lantern,vol. i., pp. 13, 94, 160.