filled with the fruit of his own devices, and left to the
misery which he has earned; when the covetous and dishonest man
ruins himself past all recovery; when the profligate is left in a
shameful old age, with worn-out body and defiled mind, to rot into
an unhonoured grave; when the hypocrite who has tampered with his
conscience is left without any conscience at all.

They have chosen the curse, and the curse is come upon them to the
uttermost. So it is. Is the Commination service uncharitable, is
the preacher uncharitable, when they tell men so? No more so, than
the physician is uncharitable, when he says,--'If you go on misusing
thus your lungs, or your digestion, you will ruin them past all
cure.' Is God to be blamed because this is a fact? Why then
because the other is a fact likewise?

Now if this be, as I believe, the doctrine of the commination
service; if this be, as I believe, the message of Ash-Wednesday, it
is one which is quite free from superstition or cruelty: but it is
a message more disagreeable, and more terrible too, than any magical
imprecations of harm to the sinner could bring. More disagreeable.
For which is more galling to human pride, to be told,--Sin is
certainly a clever, and politic, and successful trade, as far as
this world is concerned. It is only in the next world, or in the
case of rare and peculiar visitations and judgments in this world,
that it will harm you? Or to be told,--Sin is no more clever,
politic, or successful here, than hereafter. The wrong-doing which
looks to you so prudent is folly. You, man of the world as you may
think yourself, are simply, as often as you do wrong, blind,
ignorant, suicidal. You are your own curse; your acts are their own
curse. The injury to your own character and spirit, the injury to
your fellow-creatures, which will again re-act on you,--these are
the curses of God, which you will feel some day too heavy to be
borne. And which is more terrible? To tell a man, that God will
judge and curse him by unexpected afflictions, or at least by
casting him into Gehenna in the world to come: or to tell him, 'You
are judged already. The curse is on you already?'

The first threat he may get rid of, by denying the fact; by saying
that God does not generally interfere to punish bad men in this
life; that he does not strike them dead, swallow them up; and he may
even quote Scripture on his side, and call on Solomon to bear
witness how as die