PROVERBS XX. 9

"Who can say, I have made my heart clean, I am pure from my sin?"

THE remarks made above upon Eccies. vii. 20 have a direct and special bearing upon the passage before us. In looking over the world, as it lay out before him, and in contemplating his own life, and that of the mass of professed saints around him, one appalling fact impressed the writer's mind, and burdened his heart, to wit, the omnipresence of sin in the world, and even among those who professed to be pure and upright before God and man. Hence the sorrowful exclamation, Where, and upon whom, is not sin to be found? an exclamation as applicable now as it was then. Where is the basis here for the dogma, that no one saint ever was, and no one believer ever will be, free from conscious sin? The words employed imply no such dogma as that, and no idea could have been more distant from the author's mind than any such dogma.