+I. The solemnity of the apostle's warning.+--He seems to intimate
that such is the audacious wickedness of the human heart, that it has
within it so many latent mazes of iniquity, that they might be
self-deceived either as to their apprehensions of that which was
right before God, or as to their own actual condition in His sight;
and he tells them God is not mocked by this pretended service, that
to Him all hearts are open, and that in impartial and discriminating
arbitration He will render to every man according to his deeds. It is
sad to be deceived in a friend, in our estimate of health, in our
computation of property; but a mistake about the state of the soul--a
veil folded about the heart so that it cannot see its own
helplessness and peril--this is a state of which thought shudders to
conceive, and to describe whose portentousness language has no words
that are sufficiently appalling. There can be no peril more imminent
than yours. The headlong rider through the darkness before whom the
dizzy precipice yawns; the heedless traveller for whom in the bosky
woodland the bandits lie in ambush, or upon whom from the jungle's
density the tiger waits to spring; the man who, gazing faintly
upward, meets the cruel eye and lifted hand and flashing steel of his
remorseless enemy; they of whose condition you can only poorly image,
who in far dungeons and beneath the torture of a tyrant's cruelty
groan for a sight of friend or glimpse of day; all around whom perils
thicken hopelessly, and to whom, with feet laden with the tidings of
evil, the messengers of disaster come,--how they move your sympathy,
how you shudder as you dwell upon their danger, how you would fain
stir yourselves into brave efforts for their rescue or their warning!
Brethren, your own danger is more nearly encompassing and is more
infinitely terrible.
+II. The import of the apostle's statement.+--We have largely the
making or the marring of our own future--that in the thoughts we
harbour, in the words we speak and in the silent deeds, which, beaded
on Time's string, are told by some recording angel as the story of
our lives from year to year, we shape our character and therefore our
destiny for ever. There are three special sowers to the flesh--the
_proud,_ the _covetous,_ the _ungodly._ They are all spiritual
sins--sins of which human law takes no cognisance, and to which codes
of earthly jurisprudence affix no scathing penalty. There is the
greater need, therefore, that these spiritual sins should be
disclosed in all their enormity and shown in their exceeding
sinfulness and in their disastrous wages, in order that men may be
left without excuse if they persist wilfully to believe a
lie.--_W. M. Punshon._