we sow in it grows
after its own kind.

In the region of animal or vegetable life you see and recognise this law
on every side. You trace it sometimes as the law of improvement by
culture, sometimes as the law of degeneration.

You cultivate and tend a garden or a field, sowing, planting,
eradicating, and the growths of flower or fruit improve in proportion to
your care; but leave it to itself and the weeds choke it, and the very
fruit degenerates; your rose becomes a dog-rose--it reverts, as men say,
to a lower type.

So exactly is it with your own life; so long as it is grafted into a life
higher than your own, so long as good purposes are being sown in it and
good habits cultivated, and the bad weeded out and the Spirit of God
breathes through it, it is growing nearer to the Divine type; but neglect
it, or follow sinful impulse or low taste, and it becomes like the garden
of weeds; degeneracy begins at once, it is changing to something worse,
it is reverting to a lower type.

This is a way of expressing it which is sufficiently familiar to you. But
this is only our modern way of looking at those facts of life which were
eloquent to men of earlier times as the curse of God.

As, then, it is undoubtedly true that--

"Our acts our angels are, for good or ill,
Our fatal shadows that walk with us still,"

these stern warnings which our Lenten services hold up before us are of
the greatest value.

Keeping before us this law that in every region of life it is the
tendency of everything to bear fruit after its kind, we shall feel that
we can hardly impress it too deeply upon our minds that there is no sin
which we commit but will assuredly return upon our own heads. The
Israelites in the Old Testament saw the hand of God thus visiting their
sins upon them in many ways. They thought of Him as smiting them for
their sins with consumption or with fever, with plague or mildew, or the
sword of the oppressor. These are not our expectations. We have learnt
that it is not with such visitations that God punishes us for our sinful
indulgence or neglect, but that He does it with a punishment which may be
less obvious but is often more ruinous than these.

Neglect the opportunities of good with which He strews your path in early
life, let some sin strike its roots in your heart and take possession of
it, and the curse of God for that neglect or that sin will overtake you,
no doubt of it; coming not perhaps as the