But the black people in Australia, who are exactly of the same race as the African negroes, cannot take in the gospel. They seem to have become too stupid to understand it; they seem to have lost the sense of sin and of righteousness too completely to care about it. All attempts to bring them to a knowledge of the true God have as yet failed utterly. God’s grace is all-powerful; He is no respecter of persons; and He may yet, by some great act of His wisdom, quicken the dead souls of these poor brutes in human shape. But, as far as we can see, there is no hope for them: but, like the Canaanites of old, they must perish off the face of the earth, as brute beasts. I have said so much to show you that man is fallen; that there is original sin, an inclination to sin and fall, sink down lower and lower, in man. Now comes the question: What is this fall of man? I said that the Bible tells us rationally enough. And I have also made use several times of words, which may have hinted to some of you already what Adam’s fall was. I have spoken of the likeness of the beasts, and of men becoming like beasts by original sin. And this is why I said it. If you want to understand what Adam’s fall was, you must understand what he fell from, and what he fell to. That is plain. Now, the Bible tells us, that he fell from God’s grace to nature. What is nature? Nature means what is born, and lives, and dies, and is parted and broken up, that the parts of it may go into some new shape, and be born and live, and die again. So the plants, trees, beasts, are a part of nature. They are born, live, die; and then that which was them goes into the earth, or into the stomachs of other animals, and becomes in time part of that animal, or part of the tree or flower, which grows in the soil into which it has fallen. So the flesh of a dead animal may become a grain of wheat, and that grain of wheat again may become part of the body of an animal. You all see this every time you manure a field, or grow a crop. Nature is, then, that which lives to die, and dies to live again in some fresh shape. And, in the first chapter of Genesis, you read of God creating nature—earth, and water, and light, and the heavens, and the plants and animals each after their kind, born to die and change, made of dust, and returning to the dust again. But after that we read very different words; we read that when God created man, He said: “Let us make man in our image, after our likeness; and let them have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the air, and over the cattle, and over all the earth, and over every creeping thing that creepeth upon the earth.” He was made in God’s likeness; therefore he could only be right in as far as he was like God. And he could not be like God if he did not will what God willed, and wish what God wished. He was to live by faith in God; he was justified by faith in God, and by that only.