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spiritual, there will be no difficulty in realizing and asserting that physical life and physical death are spiritually significant, prophetic, and interpretative. But the physical is only of subordinate significance. The essential characteristics of eternal life and eternal death are spiritual. And here religious thought is richly illustrated, and assuredly confirmed, by biological research. "We are learning constantly that the disuse or abuse of any organ results in its deterioration, and finally in its, if not total extinc- tion, yet reduction to impotent, rudimentary form; while the exercise of an organ is the condition of its development. Eternal death may then be regarded as the atrophy or abortion of man's spiritual faculties; while eternal life is their development in perfection by their normal exercise. Thus the thought of the Apostle is no rhetorical conclusion of an argument, but is a truth that is being proved, by the advance of man's knowledge and the growth of his thought, ever more significant and valid.
I.
The Wages of Sin is Death.
i. Wages.
1. The word here rendered " wages " is the same as is used in Scripture for a- soldier's pay. " Be content with your wages " (Luke iii. 14), was the charge of John the Baptist to the soldiers who asked of him their duty. " Who goeth a warfare at any time at his own wages ? " (1 Cor. ix. 7), that is, for pay furnished by himself, was St. Paul's question to those who would grudge to a minister of the Gospel his right to " live of the Gospel." But, whether in its application to the pay of a soldier or to the wages of a servant, the whole point of the expression lies in this, that certain work done has a right to certain remuneration.
Love wore a threadbare dress of grey And toiled upon the road all day.
Love wielded pick and carried pack And bent to heavy loads the back.
348 THE WAGES AND THE GIFT
Though meagre fed and sorely tasked, One only wage love ever asked —
A child's white face to kiss at night, A woman's smile by candlelight.
This is wages — the wages of love. The wages of sin, in like manner, will be the remuneration which sin gives for work done in its service.
2. Sin is an employer of labour — the most extensive employer which the world contains. He pays wages, is bound by strong law to pay wages, to every one who works for him. It is true he does not pay in full as the work goes on. He does not clear off the whole debt, as it stands, at the end of the week or month or year. The kind of wages is unfavourable to this. Nevertheless, employer and employed are strictly upon the wages system. Every hour of labour becomes a debt of the master, and is kept record of, and will be recompensed by him in due course if the system holds as between the worker and him. He means to be just ; he has no thought of evading the wages law. But he only pays enough, meanwhile, to assert the principle of connexion between his servants and him — small instalments, petty sums of earnest- money, which are of the nature of wages, and are part of the wages — till all the work is done. Done ? Well ; when the earthly phase of the bargain has passed, when the sun of mortal life has set and the night of the day of time has come, he then reckons with his workers.
TJ A certain tyrant sent for one of his subjects, and said to him, " What is your employment ? " He said, "lama black- smith." " Go home, and make me a chain of such a length." He went home : it occupied him several months ; and he had no wages all the time he was making it. Then he brought it to the monarch, who said, " Go and make it twice as long." He brought it up again ; and the monarch said, " Go and make it longer still." Each time he brought it, there was nothing but the command to make it longer still ; and, when he brought it back at last, the monarch said, " Take it, and bind him hand and foot with it, and cast him into the furnace of fire." These were the wages of making the chain.1
3. But the very instalments Sin pays even now — do these
1 P. L. Moody.
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convey no hint of the kind of recompense he engages to give in the end ? What is he openly paying at this hour ? When he is generous in his present payments, it is no winsome recompense that goes from his hand ; it is disorder, loss, calamity, disease, sorrow, fear, discontent, hatred, treachery, remorse, rapid running down of moral tone. Even when he is least profuse in his present payments, what are his workers receiving ? — uneasy forebodings of the future, unanswered achings of the soul, mockings of the spirit with the chaff of sense and time, the heart shut dark against the sunshine of God's fatherliness.
^| Shall I ever forget a visit which I paid to a drunkard's home, a man who had sunk from an honourable position in the State and the Church ? There he was, a wreck of his former self. In vain I pleaded with him to give up the drink. " No," he said, " not if it means hell." " I cannot," he added, " I have not the power. I am not my own master." As I entreated him to be manly, to put his trust in God, and seek to conquer his passion, his daughter entered the room — a beautiful girl. "Man," I said, " you are a coward. If you will not give up drink for your own sake, give it up for your child's." " I cannot," he answered, " I cannot." As I left him I realized the truth of the Apostle's words, " The wages of sin is death," and resolved, by God's grace, to speak without fear concerning the power and penalty of evil.1