1—Of Sin.

Under this head Scripture unquestionably teaches—" that all men, through disobedience to the will of God, in whatsoever way made known "—by the work of the law written on the heart (the heathen), by the Word of the Law, or Decalogue, inscribed on the Two Tables (the Hebrews), or by the Spirit of the Law recorded in the Gospel (Christians)—"are in a state of sin, and so are estranged from God, have come under just condemnation, are subject to the penalty of death and are unable to deliver themselves out of this condition." But Scripture likewise teaches that sin entered into the world by the fall of the first man, through temptation by the devil, that through falling into sin the first man's nature became prone to evil instead of good, that this proneness to evil, or moral degeneration, transmitted itself to his natural descendants, who all have been ushered into existence with an inborn tendency to sin, which in every individual has manifested itself in actual transgression. Scripture also teaches that as members of a fallen race, men are by nature objects of the divine displeasure, under condemnation, and children of wrath, and that the death to which they are subject in consequence of sin and from which they cannot deliver themselves is more than the dissolution of the body, is the perishing of the soul, by which is signified its coming short of everlasting life and its suffering all that is expressed by the phrase "the wrath to come." Whether this teaching is true or not, every fair mind must admit that it is the teaching of Scripture.