Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: CHAPTER IV. The Double Need and the Double Cure THE reason why many do not apprehend the true nature of the salvation of Jesus Christ is because they do not understand the true nature of sin. Defective views of sin lead to incorrect views of privilege. What we think of the Atonement depends greatly upon our view of the evil which made it necessary.
Without the fullest information about sin, no man can have the fullest information about himself; or, what is still more important, without understanding sin no man can ever understand God and His dealings with us. The man who has felt his guilt most deeply always appreciates most the value of Christ’s redeeming work. Sin has many aspects, but there are two primary forms in which it exists. We can form no adequate conception of its nature, nor of the remedy God has provided, unless we look at it from these two points of view. We must discriminate between guilt and depravity. 1 Sin is wrong-doing, but a state of sinfulness existedbefore we began to do. Wrong-doing involves guilt, and needs forgiveness, but a state of sinfulness cannot be forgiven. Pardon refers to actions, but a sinful condition is not action. Sin in the sense of guilt is a voluntary violation of the Divine law, an actual transgression in thought, word, or deed; but depravity is an involuntary state of the heart which we have inherited from our first parents in the fall, hence it is often described as inbred or inborn sin. Depravity is not actual sin, it is the inward fountain from which actual sin originates; that inward cause of which sins are the effect It is deeper down and farther back in our nature than wrong-doing. It is sin in embryo?that state of the heart out of which acts of sin are born.
A man is not a sinner, says a late writer,
because he do…