Need of Humanity
C. S. Lewis, quoted in Against the Night, Charles Colson, p. 139
Charles Hodge points out the overwhelming need of humanity:
Our guilt is great because our sins are exceedingly numerous. It is not merely outward acts of unkindness and dishonesty with which we are chargeable; our habitual and characteristic state of mind is evil in the sight of God.
Our pride, vanity, and indifference to His will and to the welfare of others, our selfishness, our loving the creature more than the Creator, are continuous violations of His holy law.
We have never been or done what that law requires us to be and to do. We have never had that delight in the divine perfection, that sense of dependence and obligation, that fixed purpose to do the will and promote the glory of God, which constitute the love which is our fist and highest duty.
We are always sinners; we are at all times and under all circumstances in opposition to God, because we are never what His law requires us to be.
If we have never made it our purpose to do His will, if we have never made His glory the end of our actions, then our lives have been an unbroken series of transgressions. Our sins are not to be numbered by the conscious violations of duty; they are as numerous as the moments of our existence.
A world of nice people, content in their own niceness, looking no further, turned away from God, would be just as desperately in need of salvation as a miserable world&md;and might even be more difficult to save.
