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Updated: June 29, 2025
As soon as the load of Scriptural authority was thus taken off from me, I had a vivid discernment of intolerable moral difficulties inseparable from the doctrine. First, that every sin is infinite in ill-desert and in result, because it is committed against an infinite Being. Thus the fretfulness of a child is an infinite evil! I was aghast that I could have believed it.
Whenever, therefore, this sensation of ill-desert is elicited, and the soul feels consciously criminal before the Everlasting Judge, the difficulties that beset the doctrine of the Cross all vanish in the craving, in the appetency, of the conscience, for acquittal through the substituted sufferings of the Son of God.
The feeling of ill-desert, of which we have spoken, requires an expiation, in order to its extinction, precisely as the burning sensation of thirst needs the cup of cold water, in order that it may be allayed, the sense of guilt is awakened in its pure and genuine form, by the Holy Spirit's operation, the soul craves the atonement, it wants the dying Lamb of God.
The imposition of this evil is justified, not by any antecedent guilt, but by the divine constitution, according to which Adam is the federal head and representative of the human race. Thus, after all, Dr. Dick has found some principle or ground on which to justify the infliction of evil, beside the principle of guilt or ill-desert.
It is a thing by itself, like the Platonic idea of Beauty. It is sin stripped of its accompaniments, the restlessness, the dissatisfaction, and the unhappiness which it produces, and perceived in its pure odiousness and ill-desert. And when thus seen, it does not permit the mind to think of any thing but the righteous law, and the Divine character.
We cannot, therefore, assent to the opinion held by many, that popularity is an evidence of shallowness or ill-desert.
If this were the hired class, the prodigal was a sorry specimen of humility. Would our Lord have put such language upon the lips of one held up by himself, as a model of gospel humility, to illustrate its deep sense of all ill-desert? If this is humility, put it on stilts, and set it a strutting, while pride takes lessons, and blunders in aping it.
For this sense of ill-desert, this fearful looking-for of judgment and fiery indignation, with which he is wrestling, is organic to the conscience, and the human will has no more power over it than it has over the sympathetic nerve.
Still, I am like father next to God's favor the respect of those I esteem does most to sustain and reassure me. But, oh! Mr. Van Berg, you can't know what an honest sense of ill-desert I have. It is so hard just to do right, no matter what the consequences may be." "The trouble with me is that I am not trying as you are.
In the opening of the most logical and systematic treatise in the New Testament, the Epistle to the Romans, the apostle Paul enters upon a line of argument to demonstrate the ill-desert of every human creature without exception. In order to this, he shows that no excuse can be urged upon the ground of moral ignorance.
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