I think it proper, here, to subjoin a few passages of Scripture, out of many, which declare that mankind are corrupted and depraved--or that they have no principle within them, sufficient to enable them to attain to eternal life without the powerful operations of divine grace.--How full to this purpose are those words (Gen. vi. 5). _And God saw that the wickedness of man was great in the earth, and that every imagination of the thoughts of his heart is evil from his youth._--The Psalmist David fully testifies what man is when he puts himself forward as an example. _Who can understand his errors? cleanse thou me from secret faults.--Behold I was shapen in iniquity, and in sin did my Mother conceive me._--The prophet Jeremiah speaks of man's depraved state in very strong terms.--_The heart is deceitful above all things, and desperately wicked, who can know it?_ It follows, _I the Lord search the heart,_ to give to every man according to his works. _If the heart be deceitful above all things, and desperately wicked,_ is it, at the same time possessed of any degree of a holy principle--or has it any light to guide it to heaven, or to be a sufficient directory in matters of faith and practice?--How the Apostle Paul viewed man as he is in himself, appears from the long quotation above made from him, and also from the following words--_What then are we better than they? no, in no wise, for we have before proved both Jews and Gentiles, that they are all under sin. As it is written, there is none righteous, no not one._--And again, _Now we know that what things soever the law saith: it saith to them who are under the law, that every mouth may be stopped, and all the world may become guilty before God--for all have sinned and come short of the glory of God._ The same inspired teacher leads the mind to the source of all, the sin of the first man, who stood as a public head for all his posterity. _Wherefore as by one man sin entered into the world, and death by sin: and so death passed upon all men, for that all have sinned._--Again, _you hath he quickened, who were dead in trespasses and sins._--Our blessed Lord himself says, _he came to seek and save that which was lost._ If we be not lost we need no Saviour, or atonement, or help.--It appears, then, with an evidence exceedingly strong, that all have sinned and come short of the glory of God--and that man, in a natural state, _is wretched,_ and miserable, and poor, and blind, and naked. He has no principle in himself, by whatever name it may be called, which can, being duly exercised, form him for the service of God on earth, or his immediate presence in heaven.