“The hearing ear, and the seeing eye, the Lord hath even made both of them.”—Prov. xx. 12.
“The hearing ear, and the seeing eye, the Lord hath even made both of them.” This testimony of the Holy Spirit contains the whole mystery of regeneration.
An unregenerate person is deaf and blind; not only as a stock or block, but *worse.*For neither stock nor block is corrupt or ruined, but an unregenerate person is wholly dead and a prey to the most fearful dissolution.
This rigid, uncompromising, and absolute confession must be our starting-point in this discussion, else we shall fail to understand the claims of regeneration. This is the reason why every heresy that has conceded in one way or other that man has a share, most generally a lion’s share, in the work of redemption, has always begun by calling in question the nature of sin. “Undoubtedly,” they said, “sin is very bad—a terrible and abominable evil; but there is surely some remnant of good in man. That noble, virtuous, and amiable being, man, can not be dead in trespasses and sin. That may be true of some scoundrel or knave behind the bars, or of robbers and unscrupulous murderers; but really, it can not be applied to our honorable ladies and gentlemen, to our lovely girls, roguish boys, and attractive children. These are not prone to hate God and their neighbors, but disposed, with all their heart, to love all men, and render unto God the reverence due unto Him.”
Therefore away with all ambiguity in this matter! This method of smoothing over unpalatable truths, now so much in vogue among the affable people, we can not indorse. Our confession is, and ever shall be, that by nature man is dead in trespasses and sin, lying under the curse, ripe for the just judgment of God, and still ripening for an eternal condemnation. Surely his *being,*as man, is unimpaired; wherefore we protest against the presentation that
the sinner is in this respect as a stock or block. No; as man he is unimpaired, his being is intact; but his natureis corrupt, and in that corrupt nature he is dead.
We compare him to the body of a person who has died of an ordinary disease. Such a body retains all the members of the human organism *intact.*There is the eye with its muscles, and the ear with its organs of hearing; in the post-mortem examination heart, spleen, liver, and kidneys appear to be perfectly normal. A dead body may sometimes appear so natural that one is tempted to say: “He is notdead, but sleeping.” And yet, however perfect and natural, its natureis corrupt with the corruption of death. And the same is true of the sinner. His beingremains intact and whole, containing all that which constitutes a man; but his natureis corrupt, yea, so corrupt that he is dead; not only apparently, but actually dead; dead in all the variations which can be played upon the term “dead.”
Hence without regeneration the sinner is utterly unprofitable. What is the use of an ear except it hear, or of an eye except it see? Therefore the Holy Ghost testifies: “The hearing ear and the seeing eye, the Lord has made even both of them.”1 And since in the world of spiritual things deaf ears and blind eyes do not avail anything, the Church of Christ confesses that every operation of saving grace must be preceded by a quickening of the sinner, by an opening of blind eyes, an unstopping of deaf ears—in short, by the implanting of the faculty of faith.
And as the man that sat in darkness can see as soon as his eyes are opened, so we, without moving a hair’s breadth, are translated from the kingdom of darkness into the kingdom of light. “Translated” does not denote here an actual going, nor does “to be translated” denote an actual change of place, but simply life entering into the dead, so that he that was blind can now see.
This wonderful act of regeneration may be examined in two classes of persons: in the infantand in the adult.
It is the safest way to examine it in the infant: not because this work of grace is different in an infant from what it is in an adult, for it is the same in all persons thus favored; but to the conscious observation of an adult the workings of regeneration are so mingled with those of conversion that it is difficult to distinguish the two.
But this difficulty does not exist in the case of an unconscious
child, as, *e.g.,*in John the son of Zacharias and Elizabeth. Such infant has no consciousness to create confusion. The matter appears in a pure and unmixed form. And thus we are enabled to distinguish between regeneration and conversion in an adult. It is evident that in the case of an infant which, like John, is still unborn, there can be nothing but mere passivity—i.e., the child underwent something, but himself did *nothing;*something was done to him, and in him, but not byhim; and every idea of cooperation is absolutely excluded.