Universal Depravity by W. M. Punshon

Seventh-day Adventist Missionary Society · Oakland, California · Feb 2, 1882

Universal Depravity.

By W. M. Punshon

THEY talk of the dignity of human nature. Alas, there is no such thing! There once was, when the nature was stainless; but they forget that the blight has marred its beauty, and has stricken its strength, and that the only moral dignity it can boast of now is the dignity of the criminal saved, by the monarch's clemency, from the doom of the headsman or the gallows. You may try the experiment in its varied aspects for yourselves.

You may take a child in what you call its innocence and its sensibility, and deeming, with some among us, that all children are born good, you assiduously instruct it in the principles of morals, and you may carefully seclude it from the contagion of evil example, and you may write upon its fresh young heart the benevolent affections, and the holy name of God; and, then, you may watch gradually for the development of the nature that you have thus started and trained. Ah! but you were too late in the field.

You deemed that your inscription was the first that was written there, but the enemy had been at work before you; the heart had been overwritten before you got to it. Let the passions play upon the opening mind, hold it up to the lamp of opportunity, and, in hell's dark cipher, you can trace the blurred and misshapen characters of crime; in the failure of your cherished experiment you discover that even prime ministers, how cleverly they may wield the destinies of empires, are but clumsy theologians, and that there is another attestation to the truth of the declaration of the Bible, that man goeth astray even from the womb, and that every imagination of the heart is only evil continually.

There are times, I know, when the evil nature will, as the chemist says, precipitate. You may look upon a lake as it sleeps beneath the summer's sun, and sparkles its beams where its blue depths are clear and calm, and you would never imagine that it could be lashed into a thing of storm; but let the blast of winter come, and there shall be a darkness, a swelling upon the turbid waters, and they shall foam out their own rage.

The gospel proceeds upon the basis of universal depravity, the gospel assimilates all varieties of human nature into one common experience of guilt, and need, and helplessness, and this is just that which you do not like about it. I know that full well; it is just this part of the gospel against which the man of graceful generosity feels the most disposed to fret and to rebel. He cannot brook it that he should be put with publicans and harlots, with the skum and offscouring of mankind upon one common platform; he cannot brook it, that it should require just as much to redeem him as is required to redeem the foulest and the most abandoned of the race. And there is no help for it.—Rev. W. M. Punshon.