Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: LECTURE II. HUMAN NA TURE. IN order to acquire any just conceptions of morality, and especially of the relations of morality to Christian redemption and grace, it will be necessary to understand the qualities of the human soul. The Christian religion is intended to restore man to the condition in which he was when God created him. It proposes to bring all the powers, capacities, and faculties of man into their right relations to each other, and to give to them the ability to produce the actions which are appropriate to man. Human nature is the sum of those capacities and faculties which make man the being that he is. We must, then, first analyze this nature, and see the parts of which it is composed, and the relations which they bear to each other, and the actions which they must produce. When we see what man is, we shall then see the course of life which his nature requires; and we shall see the life which it was originally intended that those parts — those powers, capacities, and faculties — should exhibit. It is only then thatwe shall see what morality is, and the influence that Christian redemption and grace can have on our moral actions. It is proposed, then, to inquire, What is man ? What are the powers and capacities of man ? What are the functions of the soul of man ? The knowledge of grace is relative : it is not absolute. We can only know what grace is, by knowing what grace does. And we can only know what it does, by studying the operations which it performs in man — on man's faculties, capacities, powers. We must, then, if we would know what Christian grace does for man, inquire what man is, and what human nature is. And, first, what is nature ? When we speak of the nature of any thing, what do we mean ? We should mean the qualities which go to make a being o...