THE UNIVERSAL SINFULNESS OF MAN
There never was yet discovered a nation or tribe of, holy or righteous men in any part of the world; nor is there a record that any such people was ever known.
All (mankind) is infirm; all is wretched, diseased, and helpless. This view of the wretchedness of mankind led one of the early church fathers to consider the whole human race as one great diseased man, lying helpless, stretched out over the whole inhabited globe, from east to west, from north to south...
From all the accounts we have of the most eminent, ancient and celebrated nations, such as the Egyptians, Chaldeans, Assyrians, Persians, Greeks, and Romans, we find them, from their own relations, to have been destitute of the knowledge of the true God, and although cultivating the various arts and sciences, yet fierce, barbarous, and cruel. Their history is a tissue of frauds, aggressions, broken truces, assassinations, revolts, insurrections, general disorder, and insecurity. Their laws despotic, and oppressive; their kings and governors tyrants; their statesmen time-servers, and oppressors of the common people; their soldiers licensed plunderers; their heroes human butchers; their conquests the blast of desolation and death on empires and nations; their religion superstitious, gross brutal and unclean; and their gods and general objects of their worship, worse in their character and acknowledged practices than the most villainous and execrable of men.
The highly cultivated Greeks, the learned and polite Romans were no exceptions. Read their own histories: those of the republics of Greece, and what do you find? -- treasons, insurrections, crimes and carnage of all descriptions. Consult also the Roman writers on their Republican, Consular-Tribunal, Regal and Imperial States: see the portraits which those master-painters have sketched; and what do you behold? ...Features fell and distorted, scowling through the deep and murky shades which serve to relieve and make them prominent.
What have we seen? Darkness covering every land, and gross darkness the hearts of the people: idolatry the most disgusting and superstition the most foolish and degrading, closely associated with the ridiculous ceremonies and cruel rites: religious suicide; abandonment of the aged to starvation when past labor, or left in the woods to be devoured by beasts when in hopeless disease; exposure of infants; burning of widows with the bodies of their deceased husbands, their own children lighting the funeral pyre; the most painful, unmeaning, and lengthened-out pilgrimages; religious fasts, by which health and strength are exhausted; and feasts where the man sinks into the beast: --all these, and more of a similar kind, equally degrading and destructive prevail among the millions of Asia, and especially among what are called the civilized, mind, and pacific inhabitants of Hindostan.
Look especially at men in a state of warfare; look at the nations of Europe...see what has taken place among them from 1792-1814; see what destruction of millions, and what misery of hundreds of millions have been the consequence of satanic excitement in fallen, ferocious passions!
(Mankind) is continually and confessedly running to his own ruin; he has of himself no power or influence by which he can correct, restrain or destroy the viciousness of his own nature; in short, he "lies in the wicked one," ...without any efficient power to rise.
...There is, therefore, no hope that man can raise himself from the fall, and replace himself in a state of moral rectitude; for the very principles by which he should rise are themselves equally fallen with all the rest. --Adam Clarke, Christian Theology, pp. 103, 104-106.
1, 1859 --England. John Angell James dies. Through the assistance of Robert Haldane, Mr. James has entered a theological academy.
It is said a copy of his Anxious Inquirer has entered an American frontier town with the result that 27 people there have given hopeful evidence of conversion.
Mr. James has introduced England to Mr. W. B. Sprague’s book Lectures on Revivals of Religion, but he has also introduced England to Mr. Charles Finney’s book Lectures on Revivals. In 1843 he wrote,
"...I think Finney’s books have done a little harm in this country and I regret I ever gave a recommendation to his lectures.... The sentiment here that has given uneasiness is a virtual denial of the Spirit’s work in conversion.
His successor will be Mr. R. W. Dale, who will surrender the doctrines of 1.) The verbal Inspiration of Scripture, 2.) The Eternal Punishment of the Wicked as he prefers the theory of Annihilation, and 3.) The Deity of Christ. Mr. Dale will stand "in the fore front of those who will throw off the fetters of the old Calvinist orthodoxy.
5, 565 --Turkey. The Emperor Valens has reversed the Edict of Julian, the previous emperor, who has recalled the exiled bishops to return to their churches. Today, the prefect Flavianus breaks into the church of St. Dionysius thus compelling Athanasius to flee at once.
7, 1776 --Virginia. The General Assembly of Virginia meets for the first time under its new constitution. The assembly is besieged by petitions from non-Anglicans urging the removal of all restrictions upon religious freedoms. The Anglicans have countered with petitions calling for the continuance of the Establishment, and the Methodists, still in communion with the Church of England, led their support for the same.
Thomas Jefferson writes, "The first Republican legislature which met in 1776 was crowded with petitions to abolish this spiritual tyranny. These brought on the severest contests in which I have ever been engaged. Our great opponents were Mr. (Edmund) Pendleton and Mr. Robert Carter Nicholas, honest men, but zealous churchmen. The petitions were referred to the committee of the whole house on the state of the country; and after desperate contests in that committee almost daily from October 11 to the 5th of December, we prevailed so far only as to repeal the laws which rendered criminal the maintenance of any religious opinions, the forbearance of repairing to church, or the exercise of any mode of worship; and further to exempt dissenters from contributions to the support of the established church and to suspend, only until the next session, levies on the members of that church for the salaries of their own incumbents. For although the majority of our citizens were dissenters... a majority of the legislature were churchmen."
9, 1635 --Massachusetts. At Newtown, later named Cambridge, the General Court of Massachusetts Bay exiles Mr. Roger Williams. It is pronounced under its Governor, Mr. John Haynes. Mr. Thomas Hooker has failed to convince
Mr. Williams of his errors, and Mr. John Cotton, minister here, and teacher in the Boston Church has played the major part in the prosecution.
As pastor of the Salem Church since September 1634, Mr. Williams has taught his people:
1.) Land patents of the King, awarding lands to English settlers are illegal because the true owners are the Indians, and that English subjects possessing such lands, ought to repent and make suitable restitution to the natives driven from the land. 2.) It is unlawful to call upon an unsaved person to swear an oath or pray to God. He even includes those who have refused to renounce their connections to the Church of England. 3.) It is unlawful to bear any of the ministers of the parish assemblies in England. 4.) Civil Magistrates’ power extends only to bodies and goods and inward states of men. He has said civil government has to power to enforce the first Table of the Law because the first four commandments deal with man’s relationship to God.
When friends rally to hear him preach, the magistrates will send a delegation to bring him to Boston for immediate exile on a ship already in harbor. He will escape before they arrive and will plunge into the wilderness where he will be saved from death by friendly Indians. When the powerful Pequod Indians sought to enlist the Mohicans and Narragansetts to unite with them in exterminating the Massachusetts colonists, Mr. Williams warned his former persecutors and successfully negotiated with the Narragansetts not to be a party in such a treaty. As a result, the Mohicans dropped out of the treaty leaving the Pequods alone to fight the English, thus preserving the lives of his persecutors.