This brief section reads out to us, after its own peculiar fashion, the double lesson of "man's ruin and God's remedy." But though the fashion is peculiar, the lesson is most distinct and impressive. It is, at once, deeply humbling and divinely comforting. The effect of all Scripture, when interpreted to one's own soul directly by the power of the Holy Ghost, is to lead us out of self to Christ. Wherever we see our fallen nature, at whatever stage of its history we contemplate it--whether in its conception, at its birth, or at any point along its whole career, from the womb to the coffin, it wears the double stamp of infirmity and defilement. This is sometimes forgotten amid the glitter and glare, the pomp and fashion, the wealth and splendor, of human life. The mind of man is fruitful in devices to cover his humiliation. In various ways he seeks to ornament and gild, and put on an appearance of strength and glory, but it is all vain. He has only to be seen as he enters this world, a poor helpless creature, or as he passes away from it, to take his place with the clod of the valley, in order to have a most convincing proof of the hollowness of all his pride, the vanity of all his glory. Those whose path through this world has been brightened by what man calls glory, have entered in nakedness and helplessness, and retreated amid disease and death. Nor is this all. It is not merely helplessness that belongs to man--that characterizes him as he enters this life: there is defilement also. "Behold," says the Psalmist, "I was shapen in iniquity, and in sin did my mother conceive me." (Ps. li. 5.) "How can he be clean that is born of a woman?" (Job xxv. 4.) In the chapter before us, we are taught that the conception and birth of "a man-child" involved "seven days" of ceremonial defilement to the mother, together with thirty-three days of separation from the sanctuary; and these periods were doubled in the case of "a maid-child." Has this no voice? Can we not read herein a humbling lesson? Does it not declare to us, in language not to be misunderstood, that man is "an unclean thing," and that he needs the blood of atonement to cleanse him? Truly so. Man may imagine that he can work out a righteousness of his own, he may vainly boast of the dignity of human nature, he may put on a lofty air and assume a haughty bearing as he moves across the stage of life; but if he would just retire for a few moments and ponder over the short section of our book which now lies open before us, his pride, pomp, dignity, and righteousness would speedily vanish, and instead thereof, he might find the solid basis of all true dignity, as well as the ground of divine righteousness, in the cross of our Lord Jesus Christ.