Him at His heart! Man's hand is perfect, his eye, his foot—the nervous system is complete and perfect as the solar system; but his "nature," his "heart," is evil, and only evil, and that continually!
III. Of the false idea of the relation between God and man.—There is an antagonism between the two, total and eternal—their "natures" irreconcilably conflicting; depraved man at variance with imperfect God! History is chiefly the record of this mutual hostility and conflict, the story of man's rebellion and God's vengeance therefore! Nay, the earth is a monument of the never-ending battle; the earthquakes and whirlwinds of its great elements, the thorns and thistles of vegetation, the strife of beasts of prey, and the "minor note" of the birds, all are alike the consequence and the memorial of this primeval but perpetual falling out between man and God. Eternity will repeat the antagonism—for as God once swept off procreant mankind by a transient flood of water, sparing but eight from a world of men, so at last He will ruin the majority of the whole human race in a permanent deluge of fire, wherein the million generations of men, each millions of millions strong, shall "perish everlastingly," in never-ending fiery rot, while He and the Devil alone shall take delight in this flaming massacre, this funeral pile of humanity, where the worm of agony dieth not in the fire of his wrath, which is not quenched for ever and ever. So perishable earth and ever-enduring hell are alike mementoes of this antagonistic relation; and God and His enemy, the Creator and the destroyer, are made one in their delight over the torment of the human race,—the devil gladdened that they fall and are "lost" from heaven, God rejoicing that they are damned and "found" in hell!
All the rest of man's history is but an exception; sin, misery, damnation are instantial—the general rule. A golden thread of divine grace runs through the human web, whereon are strung a few pearls of great price-patriarchs and prophets, saints and the elect—a fleck of white in a whole field of sackcloth, which "poor human nature" continually weaves up, and dyes Egyptian black in the gall of inherited sin, the colour fast set and bitten in by the necessitated guilt of the individual.
