Such is a faint outline of the picture on which I would have you look—the picture of man as he was in the beginning. Does not the sight justify the assertion that we are a fallen race? Does it not confirm the teaching of our text, that “God hath made man upright, but they have sought out many inventions?” I need not delay to prove that this picture is not a representation of our present condition. Think of these frail physical existences, begun with a cry, continued in pain and weakness, and extended with difficulty to their three score years and ten. Think of the ages through which the intellect of the most favored portion of the world has been struggling to its present attainments. Think particularly of the moral and spiritual condition of the race, in comparison with that heavenly vision of Godlikeness which stands at the beginning of our history. I need not delay then to prove that mankind has fallen. I will, however, ask you to remember when you reflect upon the sad disorders of the present state, upon the sorrows and weaknesses and wickednesses of men to-day, that God did not thus create the progenitors of the race. If we see ruins about us and within us, let us remember that the temple as it was fashioned by the supreme architect was perfect. Let us remember also the real and only cause of this terrible catastrophe. It was sin—sin that always has ruined and always will destroy the beautiful, the pure, the true. Men did indeed go from that height of exaltation into the depths of barbarism; it is true enough that the pages of remote history show us men living in caves, and almost reduced to the level of the brutes—and sin led them there! Men did lose the moral beauty of our first parent; they did lose much of the intellectual and physical strength which lingered for a season in his immediate descendants—and sin was the despoiler that remorselessly stripped from them those glorious robes! You and I might have been as Adam—ignorant of sorrow and of suffering, and the world still an Eden about us, but sin has cast us down.