id for the
animal and for man. Air is not life, but corruption--so literally
corruption that the only way to keep out corruption, when life has
ebbed, is to keep out air. Life is merely a temporary suspension of
these destructive powers; and this is truly one of the most accurate
definitions of life we have yet received--"the sum total of the
functions which resist death."

Spiritual life, in like manner, is the sum total of the functions which
resist sin. The soul's atmosphere is the daily trial, circumstance, and
temptation of the world. And as it is life alone which gives the plant
power to utilize the elements, and as, without it, they utilize it, so
it is the spiritual life alone which gives the soul power to utilize
temptation and trial; and without it they destroy the soul. How shall we
escape if we refuse to exercise these functions--in other words, if we
neglect?

This destroying process, observe, goes on quite independently of God's
judgment on sin. God's judgment on sin is another and a more awful fact
of which this may be a part. But it is a distinct fact by itself, which
we can hold and examine separately, that on purely natural principles
the soul that is left to itself unwatched, uncultivated, unredeemed,
must fall away into death by its own nature. The soul that sinneth "it
shall die." It shall die, not necessarily because God passes sentence of
death upon it, but because it cannot help dying. It has neglected "the
functions which resist death" and has always been dying. The punishment
is in its very nature, and the sentence is being gradually carried out
all along the path of life by ordinary processes which enforce the
verdict with the appalling faithfulness of law.

There is an affectation that religious truths lie beyond the sphere of
the comprehension which serves men in ordinary things. This question at
least must be an exception. It lies as near the natural as the
spiritual. If it makes no impression on a man to know that God will
visit his iniquities upon him, he cannot blind himself to the fact that
Nature will. Do we not all know what it is to be punished by Nature for
disobeying her? We have looked round the wards of a hospital, a prison,
or a madhouse, and seen there Nature at work squaring her accounts with
sin. And we knew as we looked that if no Judge sat on the throne of
heaven at all there was a Judgment there, where an inexorable Nature was
crying aloud for justice, and carrying out