The moral, reputable, but impenitent man, may, by reading, by observation and reflection, become convinced that something is wrong about man—very wrong. He may see that unhesitating truth, and fearless honesty, and straight forward integrity are but seldom to be met with. He may know that pride, and vanity, and jealousy, and envy, and suspicion, and anger, weave a large portion of the web of human life. He may call falsehood contemptible, and intemperance beastly. He may acknowledge that laws are necessary to intimidate, that judges and courts are required to convict, and that prisons and penitentiaries are indispensable to confine the thief and the robber. All this presents to his mind a dark picture of human life and character. But then he contemplates another part of the picture, and finds some relief. He sees the kindlier sympathies of our nature discovering themselves in various forms. He sees conjugal, parental and filial affection warm and vigorous in many bosoms, and the sight is pleasing. But he does not see that the father and mother and child may all be supremely selfish, while exhibiting the generous natural affections. He does not see, at least he is not apt to see, that all these and similar principles of human conduct come under that description of which the Saviour said, ‘Verily I say unto you, they have their reward.’ There is no holiness in them. They do not spring from holiness; they do not produce holiness. Who thinks when he sees the red-breast bearing in its bill food for its young, that the bird is holy? Yet has it not affection for its young? Is not the sight pleasant? Others must have different feelings from mine, if it be not so. Often have I watched the efforts and parental solicitude of the warblers of the woods, and admired the wisdom of the God of nature, who feedeth the young ravens when they cry. Is the fond mother, rocking her sleeping infant, and smiling as it smiles, therefore holy? Is her love to her child necessarily connected with love to God, and with penitence for her sins? There are those that tell us that these natural and kindly affections, of which, (were we destitute,) we should be below the very brutes, are proof and exhibition of holiness! ‘Blind leaders of the blind!’ But here is a _new creature_. He sees, that the most amiable unrenewed men, in all their moral, accountable exercises, are sinful, only sinful, and sinful without any mixture of holiness. Once he did not believe this. It was a harsh and uncomfortable view of the human character and condition. Or if he did believe it, as a doctrine too plainly revealed to be doubted, still it was a bare intellectual assent to a repulsive dogma of revelation. But now it comes home to his bosom, as a truth of awful, personal import. ‘I have heard of thee by the hearing of the ear, but now mine eye seeth thee; wherefore _I abhor myself, and repent in dust and ashes_.