As a result of his fall, man has become a degenerate, full of the germs of evil, "every imagination of the thoughts of the heart only evil continually"--an incurable self-corrupter. In him there is not one thing that commends him to a holy God; and even should he succeed in living a life of perfect morality, his best righteousness in the sight of God would be no better than a bundle of filthy and contagious rags. There is no power within him by which he can change the essential character and determined trend of his life. Men do not gather grapes of thorns, nor figs of thistles. All the effort that the most devoted and laborious of men might give to the culture of a hedgerow of thorns would not succeed in producing one grape. Though men spent life and fortune in cultivating a field of thistles, they would not gather a single fig. No sooner (says the Bible) can the natural man bring forth the fruit of righteousness unto God. The Ethiopian may change his skin, the leopard his spots, before a natural man can change himself into a spiritual man. "The carnal mind is enmity with God; for it is not subject to the law of God, _neither indeed can be_." "The natural man (the word 'natural' is psuchikos, soulical) receiveth not the things of the Spirit of God: for they are foolishness unto him: _neither can he know them_, because they are spiritually (pneumatikos, _pneumatically_) discerned." "The heart is deceitful above all things, and desperately wicked: who can know it?" meaning thereby that God alone can sound the depths of its measureless capacity for sin and iniquity; therefore, he says: "I the Lord search the heart, I try the reins." The end of man is to die. Such an end is not natural. It is unnatural. It is violent. It is penal. It is an appointed punishment: as it is written: "It is _appointed_ unto men once to die." "By _one_ man sin entered into the world, and death _by sin_; and _so_ death _passed_ (literally, passed _through, pierced_ man;" the seeds of death entered him for himself and all his posterity). When he dies, therefore, be he never so moral and upright, his death is judicial, his taking off is the execution of a criminal.