s a future
waiting for each of us beyond the grave, of which the most certain
characteristic, certified by our own forebodings, required by the
reasonableness of creation, and made plain by the revelation of
Scripture, is that it is a future of retribution, where we shall have to
carry our works; and as we have brewed so shall we drink; and the beds
that we have made we shall have to lie upon. 'God shut up all under
sin.'

Note, again, the universality of the imprisonment.

Now I am not going to exaggerate, I hope. I want to keep well within the
limits of fact, and to say nothing that is not endorsed by your own
consciences, if you will be honest with yourselves. And I say that the
Bible does not charge men universally with gross transgressions. It does
not talk about the virtues that grow in the open as if they were
splendid vices; but it does say, and I ask you if our own hearts do not
tell us that it says truly, that no man is, or has been, does, or has
done, that which his own conscience tells him he should have been and
done. We are all ready to admit faults, in a general way, and to confess
that we have come short of what our own consciousness tells us we ought
to be. But I want you to take the other step, and to remember that since
we each stand in a personal relation to God, therefore all
imperfections, faults, negligences, shortcomings, and, still more,
transgressions of morality, or of the higher aspirations of our lives,
are sins. Because sin--to use fine words--is the correlative of God. Or,
to put it into plainer language, the deeds which in regard to law may be
crimes, or those which in regard to morality may be vices, or in regard
to our own convictions of duty may be shortcomings, seeing they all have
some reference to Him, assume a very much graver character, and they are
all sins.

Oh, brethren, if we realise how intimately and inseparably we are knit
to God, and how everything that we do, and do not do, but should have
done, has an aspect in reference to Him, I think we should be less
unwilling to admit, and less tinged with levity and carelessness in
admitting, that all our faults are transgressions of His law, and we
should find ourselves more frequently on our knees before Him, with the
penitent words on our lips and in our hearts, 'Against Thee, Thee only
have I sinned, and done this evil in Thy sight.'

That was the prayer of a man who had done a foul evil in other people's
sight; who had ma