The object immediately sought by any wrong act may be attained. In
sins of sense, the appetite is gratified; in other sins, the desire
that urged to them attains its end. But what then? The temptation lay
in the imagination that, the wrong thing being done, an inward good
would result, and it does not; for even if the immediate object be
secured, other results, all unforeseen, force themselves on us which
spoil the hoped for good. The sickle cuts down tares as well as wheat,
and the reaper's hands are filled with poisonous growths as well as
with corn. There is a revulsion of feeling from the thing that before
the sin was done attracted. The hideous story of the sin of David's
son, Amnon, puts in ugliest shape the universal experience of men who
are tempted to sin and are victims of the revulsion that follows--He
'hated her exceedingly, so that the hatred wherewith he hated her was
greater than the love wherewith he had loved her.' Conscience, which
was overpowered and unheard amid the loud cries of desire, speaks. We
find out the narrow limits of satisfaction. The satisfied appetite has
no further driving power, but lies down to sleep off its debauch, and
ceases to be a factor for the time. Inward discord, the schism between
duty and inclination, sets up strife in the very sanctuary of the
soul. We are dimly conscious of the evil done as robbing us of power
to do right. We cannot pray, and would be glad to forget God. And a
self thus racked, impoverished, and weakened, is what a man gains by
the sin that promised him so much and hid so much from him.
Or if these consequences are in any measure silenced and stifled, a
still more melancholy mockery betrays him, in the continuance of the
illusion that he is happy and all is well, when all the while he is
driving headlong to destruction. Many a man orders his life so that it
is like a ship that sails with huzzas and bedizened with flags while a
favouring breeze fills its sails, but comes back to port battered and
all but waterlogged, with its canvas 'lean, rent, and beggared by the
strumpet wind.' It is always a mistake to try to buy happiness by
doing wrong. The price is rigorously demanded, but the _quid pro
quo_ is not given, or if it seems to be so, there is something else
given too, which takes all the savour out of the composite whole. The
'Folly' of the earlier half of this book woos men by her sweet
invitations, and promises the sweetness of stolen waters and the
pleasantness of bread eaten in secret, but she hides the fact, which
the listener to her seducing voice has to find out for himself after
he has drunk of the stolen waters and tasted the maddening
pleasantness of her bread eaten in secret, that 'her guests are in the
depths of Sheol.' The temptations that seek to win us to do wrong and
dazzle us by fair visions are but 'juggling fiends that keep the word
of promise to the ear, and break it to the hope.'