^ It is strange, at first sight, that those texts which warn men that their sins will be punished in this life are just the most unpleasant texts in the whole Bible ; that men shrink from them more, and shut their eyes to them more than they do to those texts which threaten them with hell-fire and everlasting death. Strange ! that men should be more afraid of being punished in this life for a few years than in the life to come for ever and ever ; — and yet not strange if we consider ; for to worldly and sinful souls, that life after death and the flames of hell seem quite distant and dim — things of which they know little and believe less, while this world they do know, and are quite certain that its good things are pleasant and its bad things unpleasant, and they are thoroughly afraid of losing them*
The Detection of Sin.
Every sin brings its punishment. This is a matter of Divine law. It is inflexible. There has never been any deviation from it, and it was scepticism respecting this law that ruined the world. Satan circumvented our first parents — he caused Eve to doubt the reality of this fact : " Ye shall not surely die." He denied the inflexible law, that he who sins must suffer.
1. The text does not say when our sin will be detected. It does not say, " Be sure your sin will find you out at once." It says, " Be sure your sin will find you out " — if not in life, yet > J. H. Newman. * C. Eingsley.
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ultimately. It is only a question of time, nothing else. When travelling in Switzerland one is often interested in observing what a space of time frequently elapses between the shout you raise and the echo which comes back from the distant mountain- tops. You cry, " Ho ! " There is a dead silence, and you think your voice is lost in the space. Oh no. Those waves of sound are travelling, and, if you wait, the voice will come back again, and by and by the mountain-heads fling back, " Ho ! Ho ! " and you find that, after all, it was only a question of time. Your own voice was bound to return to you.
^ " My Lord Cardinal," said the unhappy French queen to Richelieu, " God does not pay at the end of every week ; but at the last He pays."
^ In 1693, Louis xiv. of France destroyed the tombs of the emperors at Spiers by the hand of an officer named Hentz ; and on the very same day in 1793 — exactly one hundred years after- wards— by one Hentz, the representative of the people, the tombs of the French kings at St. Denis were broken open, and the ashes of Louis XIV. were the first to be scattered to the winds.^
2. The text says that, whether late or soon, detection is sure. There is something about these words which we cannot get away from. We know, of course, that in highly civilized countries, with the most complete police machinery, a large amount of crime escapes detection. In less civilized earlier times, when communication was difficult, the amount of undetected crime must have been infinitely greater. If we leave our crimes and think of lesser sins and offences — such as thieving, untruth, sins of the flesh — there must be a large amount in every community which the eye of man fails to detect and his hand to punish. For one forgery which is discovered and punished there are thousands of cases of adulteration and trade deceptions which are not only unpunished but unsuspected. And indeed it is obvious, from a cursory glance at life, that God did not intend all our offences and shortcomings to be detected and punished by mankind. There would be no freedom of action, no freedom of development, no independence of character, if it were not so. But we cannot on that account escape from the consequences of sinning. Moses does not say that the sin of these tribes would
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be detected. There was no reason to say so. It would be clear and palpable enough. Men could not settle down in selfish comfort and refuse to fight their country's battles in secret. They must do it openly and before all eyes. But their conduct would not escape punishment, even if it were not revenged by their fellow-tribes. It would find them out, and work its consequences. It would cut them off from sympathy and union with their nation. They would cease to be Israelites and part of a great people.
^ The difference between the committal of a crime and the punishment which the community inflicts through its judges and its courts, and the committal of a sin and the punishment which follows, is both great and deep, A crime is not necessarily the same thing as a sin ; it often is, because God is revealing Himself in the progressive life of humanity; and accordingly the laws which govern the community and which are therefore expressions of its life, may also be partial expressions of the nature and the will of God ; but in committing a crime a man puts himself over against the community; in committing a sin, he puts himself over against God. A man may break the law of the community without breaking also the law of God. There is another difference. A crime may be undetected, and therefore unpunished ; all the vigilance and the machinery of the law may be unable to bring a criminal to justice. But even those of us who do not understand how it works out, have an unerring instinct of the truth that all sin is and must be punished, somehow, somewhere, and somewhen. Because we have thought that such punishment for sin does not follow in this life, we have got into the way of postulating a future hell in which those punishments shall be exacted, measure for measure, and from which none shall come forth until he has paid the last farthing.^