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The Fundamentals spiritual things. “The natural man receiveth not the th in g s of the Spirit of God, neither can he know them, because they are spiritually discerned” (1 Gor. 2 :1 4 ) ; and again, “The Gentiles walk in the vanity of their minds, having the under standing darkened, being alienated from the life of God through the ignorance that is in them, because of the blindness of their hearts” (Eph. 4:17, 18). It defiles the heart, so that if left to itself, it becomes deceitful above all things and desperately wicked” (Jer. 17:9), so “full of evil” (Eccl. 9 :3 ) and “only evil continually” (Gen. 6 :5 ) , that out of it proceed “evil thoughts, murders, adulteries, fornications and such like” (Matt. 15:19), thus proving it to be a veritable cage of un clean birds. I t paralyzes the will, if not wholly, at least par tially, in every case, so that even regenerated souls have often to complain like Paul that when-they would do good evil is present with them, that they are carnal sold under sin, that what they would they do not, and what they hate they do, that in their flesh, i. e., their sin-polluted natures, dwelleth no good thing, and that while to will is present with them, how to perform that which is good they know not (Rom. 7:14-25). I t dulls the conscience, that vicegerent of God in the soul, renders it less quick to detect the approach of evil, less prompt to sound a warning against it and sometimes so dead as to be past feeling about it (Eph. 4 :19 ). In short there is not a faculty of the soul that is not injured by it. “Sin when it is finished bringeth forth death”; (James 1 :5 ). III. THE ORIGIN OF SIN How a pure being, possessed of those intellectual capacities and moral intuitions which were needful to make him justly responsible to Divine law, could and did lapse from his primi tive innocence and fall into sin is one of those dark problems which philosophers and theologians have vainly endeavored to solve. No more reliable explanation of sin’s entrance into the universe in general and into this world in particular has
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