Nevertheless, they who restrain baser lusts, not by the power of the Holy Spirit obtained by the faith of piety, or by the love of intelligible beauty, but by the desire of human praise, or, at all events, restrain them better by the love of such praise, are not indeed yet holy, but only less base.#
Vice, too, is so contrary to nature, that it cannot but damage it. And therefore departure from God would be no vice, unless in a nature whose property it was to abide with God. So that even the wicked will is a strong proof of the goodness of the nature. But God, as he is the supremely good creator of good natures so he is of evil wills the most just ruler, so that while they make an ill use of good natures, he makes a good use even of evil wills.#
In scripture they are called God’s enemies who oppose his rule, not by nature, but by vice; having no power to hurt him, but only themselves. #
When the will abandons what is above itself, and turns to what is lower, it becomes evil – not because that is evil to which it turns, but because the turning itself is wicked.#
Wherefore it is not without meaning said that all sin is a lie. For no sin is committed save by that desire or will by which we desire that it be well with us, and shrink from it being ill with us. That, therefore, is a lie which we do in order that it may be well with us, but which makes us more miserable than we were.#
And indeed, this is already sin, to desire those things which the law of God forbids, and to abstain from them through fear of punishment, not through love of righteousness.#
It is true that wicked men do many things contrary to God’s will; but so great is his wisdom and power, that all things which seem adverse to his purpose do still tend toward those just and good ends and issues which he himself has foreknown. And consequently, when God is said to change his will, as when, for example, he becomes angry with those to whom he was gently, it is rather they than he who are changed, and they find him changed insofar as their experience of suffering at his hand is new, as the sun is changed to injured eyes, and becomes as it were fierce from being mild, and hurtful from being delightful, though in itself it remains the same as it was.#
Not only were these evil institutions God’s ordinances, but wicked men who directed them were recognized as his servants. They constituted the constituency or the subjects of these Divine institutions because God used them to accomplish his work of punishing sin, and destroying his enemies. In this sense, God ordained all the institutions of earth, and used the vilest sinners of earth as his servants. He used the rebellious and the wicked to punish his disobedient children, and to destroy others whose measure of wickedness was full; then in turn, he punished the wicked individuals and peoples that he had used, for doing the very work he had used them to accomplish, because they did it from a wicked, selfish, and cruel spirit.#
The real difficulty [with the doctrine of original sin] is not to reconcile the imputation of sin and guilt where there is no sin and guilt at all, (for that is not the case supposed,) but to vindicate the reasonableness of a constitution by which one being becomes depraved by his dependence on another who is so, or by which the moral condition of one being is remotely determined by the moral condition of another.#
Actions are denominated virtuous or vicious, from their motives, not from their tendencies; tendencies that are not perceived, or not felt at the time of action, never determine the moral character of the action. If such a rule of moral judgment were for an instant admitted, many an action would become virtuous which the world had never suspected of being as such; nay, for ought we can tell, all moral evil itself might be found in the end to be so.#
Let wretched men abjure that blasphemous perversity which would blame the darkness of their own hearts on the plain scriptures of God!#
This is what we come to when we seek to measure God and make excuses for him by human reason . . . we are overwhelmed by the glory . . . and instead of a single excuse we vomit out a thousand blasphemies.#
Instead of two ethics for two stages on life’s way or for two kinds of Christians, the immature and the mature, Paul’s two ethics refer to contradictory tendencies in life. The one is the ethics of regeneration and eternal life, the other is the ethics for the prevention of degeneration.#