"Our acts our angels are, for good or ill,
Our fatal shadows that walk with us still,"
these stern warnings which our Lenten services hold up before us are of
the greatest value.
Keeping before us this law that in every region of life it is the
tendency of everything to bear fruit after its kind, we shall feel that
we can hardly impress it too deeply upon our minds that there is no sin
which we commit but will assuredly return upon our own heads. The
Israelites in the Old Testament saw the hand of God thus visiting their
sins upon them in many ways. They thought of Him as smiting them for
their sins with consumption or with fever, with plague or mildew, or the
sword of the oppressor. These are not our expectations. We have learnt
that it is not with such visitations that God punishes us for our sinful
indulgence or neglect, but that He does it with a punishment which may be
less obvious but is often more ruinous than these.
Neglect the opportunities of good with which He strews your path in early
life, let some sin strike its roots in your heart and take possession of
it, and the curse of God for that neglect or that sin will overtake you,
no doubt of it; coming not perhaps as the Israelite on Mount Ebal
expected it to come for any sin of his, but coming, you hardly know how,
as the change for the worse, the sinking to lower levels of thought, and
taste, and aim, and practice, the reversion to lower types, which is the
end of neglect, coming as the creeping and insidious growth of the power
of sin working ever stronger in us as the natural fruit of indulgence. So
the curse of that ancient Jewish law turns out to be a terrible and
unchanging truth, written in a law which is never obsolete and grows not
old, a law which calls on us for our Amen! as it cries to us equally in
the language of Divine revelation and of the latest scientific discovery:
"Sow neglect," it says, "and you will reap deterioration; sow sin, and
you will reap corruption."
This vision of the ultimate results of evil is a very ugly one, put it in
whatever shape you will, and we are naturally somewhat loth to look it in
the face. We would rather not think of any sin of ours as entailing such
consequences. This conception of Divine justice or retribution embodied
in the action of unbending laws and declaring that death is the fruit of
sin, and that death must come of it, this is no doubt a conception which
inspires awe. We shrink from it; we hardly dare to say Amen! to its
dread utterances. We should like, it may be, to shut our eyes to the
fact and dwell rather on the thought that our God is long-suffering and
of great kindness and of tender mercy. It is more soothing to think of
love than of retribution, or of the arm that shelters or upholds us than
of the hand that smites; but the real question should be--"Is it true,
this declaration that as we sow we reap, that the wages of sin is death,
death of faculty, death of hope?" It is foolish to blink the sterner
aspects of life. The fruit of such blinking and turning aside is very
often the very thing we do not like to think of--indulgence and its
retribution. Divine love and goodness and long-suffering cannot occupy
too much of our thoughts and prayers; for it is through these that the
heart is touched, and the spirit is fostered in us, and we awake to the
new life in Christ.
But if we shrink from contemplating that law of Divine retribution, which
works in men's lives side by side with the law of mercy and love, it is
time for us to ask ourselves--"How is it that I thus shrink from the
thought of these penalties?"
There is indeed one sense in which we naturally shrink from the thought
that the wages of sin is death, even while we acknowledge that it is so.
It is inexpressibly sad to dwell on the infinite mass of sin which is
daily bearing its bitter and deadly fruit in the world, and propagating
itself after its kind; to think of the untold number of darkened or
misguided souls that have sown to the flesh, and are going in consequence
down to failure and death, blighted, corrupted, ruined. From this
thought we naturally turn to the thought of God's mercy, and pray that He
may yet sow the seeds of new hope in the dismal waste of such lives.
But it happens to us, I fear sometimes, that this thought of God's curse
on sin sends a chill through the heart, and we shrink away from it,
because of our own unregenerate life, because of the fascination which
sinful impulse or habit exercises over us.
If the warning voice of our Lenten Commination Service has convicted any
one of us of this motive for shrinking from its stern sentence, it has
come to us as a true messenger of the God who has no pleasure in the
death of him that dieth. We need the voice of these threatenings,
because the heart has such a great power of self-deception in it. Men
find it so easy to thrust away into the dim background of their thoughts
all the dark but sure consequences of present sins, treating them as a
debt which will come up no doubt for payment some day, but may be put
aside just now.
And one virtue of our stern plain-speaking Lenten services is this, that
they will not allow us to forget that fated reckoning day--they put us,
whether we like it or not, face to face with the sure consequences of
sin; and they compel us to listen to the question--"What is the choice of
thy life?"
For you will bear in mind that we read all these decrees of Divine law
with our eye fixed on our own life and not on our neighbour. They are
meant to help us to judge ourselves, and not some other person; they lead
us to penitence and not to criticism, so that our readiness or our
unwillingness to meet and to weigh them, and to respond to them with
definite prayer and penitence, may be taken as an index of our religious
sincerity, and of our readiness to consecrate our lives to the service of
our Saviour Christ.
And it is well for us that we should ask ourselves these questions; for
if indeed it is true that every transgression and disobedience shall
receive its just recompense and reward, how else shall we escape?