Israelite on Mount Ebal
expected it to come for any sin of his, but coming, you hardly know how,
as the change for the worse, the sinking to lower levels of thought, and
taste, and aim, and practice, the reversion to lower types, which is the
end of neglect, coming as the creeping and insidious growth of the power
of sin working ever stronger in us as the natural fruit of indulgence. So
the curse of that ancient Jewish law turns out to be a terrible and
unchanging truth, written in a law which is never obsolete and grows not
old, a law which calls on us for our Amen! as it cries to us equally in
the language of Divine revelation and of the latest scientific discovery:
"Sow neglect," it says, "and you will reap deterioration; sow sin, and
you will reap corruption."

This vision of the ultimate results of evil is a very ugly one, put it in
whatever shape you will, and we are naturally somewhat loth to look it in
the face. We would rather not think of any sin of ours as entailing such
consequences. This conception of Divine justice or retribution embodied
in the action of unbending laws and declaring that death is the fruit of
sin, and that death must come of it, this is no doubt a conception which
inspires awe. We shrink from it; we hardly dare to say Amen! to its
dread utterances. We should like, it may be, to shut our eyes to the
fact and dwell rather on the thought that our God is long-suffering and
of great kindness and of tender mercy. It is more soothing to think of
love than of retribution, or of the arm that shelters or upholds us than
of the hand that smites; but the real question should be--"Is it true,
this declaration that as we sow we reap, that the wages of sin is death,
death of faculty, death of hope?" It is foolish to blink the sterner
aspects of life. The fruit of such blinking and turning aside is very
often the very thing we do not like to think of--indulgence and its
retribution. Divine love and goodness and long-suffering cannot occupy
too much of our thoughts and prayers; for it is through these that the
heart is touched, and the spirit is fostered in us, and we awake to the
new life in Christ.

But if we shrink from contemplating that law of Divine retribution, which
works in men's lives side by side with the law of mercy and love, it is
time for us to ask ourselves--"How is it that I thus shrink from the
thought of these penalties?"

There is indeed one sense in which we naturally shri