T| Amiel is a classical instance of the man in whom culture or knowledge has weakened certain elementary powers, faiths, instincts, in the absence of which, nevertheless, a man ceases to be himself. He will not commit himself in any particular case — he sees so much on the other side and on all sides. He will not apply himself to one thing — there are in this world so many things. Now, if in any urgent matter, either of duty or of faith, a man refuses to act, to make a personal choice, simply because there are so many facts and circumstances in the world which if he only knew them all might lead him to act differently, or refr.'n from acting altogether, that man is going against the ordinary practice of life in every region. . . . Just as by an act of your will, if need be, and in order to read this page, you must for the moment neglect the entire world, and confine yourself to the type and to the play of ideas and associations which it awakens in your mind ; and by so doing — so far as this present moment is concerned — you live and assert yourself. So, in all personal matters which involve choice, judgment, decision, in matters of life or of faith, what you shall do, how you shall believe, it is necessary, when face to face with your question, to put away things which are obviously extraneous, and, with what wisdom you have, deal with the issue within narrower limits.2
1 A. C. Benson, Where No Fear Was (1914), 229, 232.
2 J. A. Hutton, Pilgrims in the Region of Faith, 47.
EZEKIEL xxxiii. n 207
III.
A Divine Expostulation. "Why will ye die?"
1. The text concludes with an expostulation. Man as a sinner is in danger of eternal death. To the first man that ever lived the warning was given, " In the day that thou eatest thereof thou shalt surely die," or, " dying thou shalt die " ; that is, the act of disobedience in eating of the forbidden fruit would plant within him the seed of death, and he would become a dying man. Sin and death are cause and effect. As the seed contains the germ of the future flower, sin contains the germ of spiritual death. When once a person has been bitten by a venomous serpent he is a dying man. The surface wound may be very slight, and no danger may be apprehended, but the poison has got into the blood, and it will quickly search its way to the very centre and fountain of life. It is therefore no mere figure of speech to say that any one who is harbouring sin in his soul is a dying man. If the poison of sin is not neutralized it will surely work his eternal ruin. " The soul that sinneth, it shall die." It dies by sinning. God has so made it that the wages of its sin are its death. This terrible law permits of no break. It may be met, counter- acted, forestalled, arrested ; its accumulated curse, gathered through the increasing guilt of the crowded past, may be diverted, transmuted, absorbed, transcended, but the thing that can never be is that it should be denied, abolished, prohibited, suspended. Man has deeply sinned, and, as deeply sinning, he must be subject to the inevitable law which God cannot repudiate without re- pudiating the reason, and the will, and the love with which He created him.
2. The death here spoken of is not the death of the body, for that is something which is inevitable. " It is appointed unto men once to die." To the law of death there is no exception. Nothing can keep the earthly house of this tabernacle from breaking up. But there is something more terrible than the death of the body, and that is the death of the soul — the death
208 GOD AND THE SINNER
of goodness, the death of hope, the death of noble aspiration, the death of all desire for a better life. Whittier says :
When faith is lost, when honour dies, The man is dead.
Now the death of the soul, which the Bible calls the second death, is not inevitable like the death of the body. No man has control over the death of the body, but every man has control over the death of the soul. Sinners die because they will to die; not because God wills their death. Not that they deliberately choose death as an end, but they choose the way that leads to it. " There is a way which seemeth right unto a man, but the end thereof are the ways of death."
Tf Human nature is corrupt — too sorrowfully and deeply so. What you have first to perceive concerning it is exactly that — namely, that all the evil of it is its corruption, not itself ! That our sin is our Death ; not our Nature, but the destruction of our Nature. And that through and within all such horror of infected plague, the living soul, holy and strong, yet exists, strong enough with its Maker's help to purge and burn itself free, to all prac- tical need, from the body of that death, and rise up in its ancient noblesse, overflowing in strength and zealous of good works.1