Self-Justification Is Heathenism
THE man who will not confess that he is a sinner is putting himself against God. God has said that all men have sinned; and it is certain that there is not a man who is not out of harmony with God. The characters of men are by nature unlike that of God. If therefore men be right, if any man on earth be not a sinner, then it must follow that11God is in the wrong. Everybody, therefore, who claims that he has not done wrong in any particular wherein God says that he is a sinner, affirms that God is not the true God, but that he himself is. He is making a god of the works of his own hands. The one who maintains that his course is right, and who is therefore willing to rest his hope on what he himself has done, is in reality just as surely a heathen as is the one who makes images of wood and stone or gold and silver, and worships them. — Selected.