" Not God Himself can make undone."
For that which has been, still must live, And 'neath the shallow Present last.
Oh, who will sweet oblivion give, Who free us from the dreadful Past?*
(2) Sin finds out the sinner not only by bitter memories of the past but also by an unhappy and ineffective present. It cripples and incapacitates us for present duty and enjoyment. In our past our present is rooted, and from it we are wholly derived. Let no doctrine of regeneration delude us into the belief that at any moment we please we can leap into a wise, virtuous, refined, godly character. It is not so. If we give entertainment to evil thoughts now, they will not be forbidden entrance when we would exclude them. If we accustom ourselves to look at things from a worldly, frivolous, impure point of view, that attitude will continue when we would fain be heavenly-minded. The child is allowed to become self-willed, indolent, sensual, passionate, crafty. and all the spiritual strength of the man is consumed in repress- ing these pitiful vices.
^ When the drunken comrade mutters and the great guard- lantern gutters And the horror of our fail is written plain, Every secret, self-revealing on the aching whitewashed ceiling, Do you wonder that we drug ourselves from pain ? We have done with Hope and Honour, we are lost to Love
and Truth, We are dropping down the ladder rung by rung. And the measure of our torment is the measure of our youth, God help us, for we knew the worst too young.^
4 There are two lines along which sins follow us from the past. Their consequences appear in our Hfe or in our character. They bring misery or they bring moral degradation. Sins which involve transgression of the laws of bodily health bring visible retribution.
• Sir Lewis Morris, Poems, 102.
' Kipling, Barrack-Hoom Balla4$, 64.
442 SIN THE DETECTIVE
(1) /n our life. — If there are any who think lightly of sin and who are encouraged in sin by an implicit understanding that no great harm will come of it, let them be assured that their sin will find them out. Higher thoughts will one day visit them, higher aims will one day win their spirit, a nobler view of life will present itself to them ; and how are they to respond to those new and higher calls if their nature is debased by sin ? " You do yourself incredible wrong. There are duties in life, social, domestic, personal, which you will despise yourself if you cannot discharge, and you will not be able to discharge them if in youth you do not act your part well and keep yourself unsullied by the contamination of sin. There are enjoyments in life for which sin unfits you. I do not speak of the highest enjoyments, but of natural enjoyments, in the same kind as those you now crave, and which are possible only to those whose conscience is laden with no evil remembrances, whose nature is contracted and withered by no familiarity with sin, who can give themselves to enjoyment with the freedom, fearlessness, and abandonment which are reserved for the innocent only. In vain will you strive to leave your past behind you. If you sin, then no more at all can you have that fineness of feeling which only ignorance of evil can preserve, no more that high and great conscientiousness which once broken is never repaired, no more that courage and fyisdom which accompany an upright and steady career, no more that respect from other men which instinctively departs from those who have lost self-respect."^
^ One of the shortest and most telling sermons I ever heard, was by a friend who had charge of an hospital. Going round his wards with him one Sunday morning, we came to a young man, whose secret sins had found him out. As the young doctor laid bare his hideous sores, he said in a slow and solemn tone, " Be not deceived ; God is not mocked ; for whatsoever a man soweth, that shall he also reap." I felt as if I had been present at the last judgment.*
(2) In owr character. — Some men's sins, as St. Paul says, go before to judgment, and some follow after ; and these latter are the sins which we should dread, and which are the most baneful in their results. Such sins eat into the character. They necessitate duplicity. There is no real brightness in the life — no
J Marcus Dods. » J. Wellt.
NUMBERS XXXII. 23 443
openness, no straightforward look, no real manliness. " 0 what a tangled web we weave when first we practise to deceive." The incessant dread of detection falls like a pall over the life. The incessant necessity of concealment involves ever fresh deception, and makes the life a prolonged lie. The mind cannot be at ease ; the thoughts are never free and disengaged; and this makes secret sins so injurious intellectually. Men of mark in literature have led dissolute lives, have been intemperate and immoral. No doubt this has had a baneful effect upon their work. It has made, perhaps must make, the highest work beyond their reach. He that would write an heroic poem, says Milton, must live an heroic life ; but I question very much if any good intel- lectual work has ever been produced by the author of an un- detected crime or the perpetrator of an undiscovered fraud.^