ii. Sin.
1. Sin is a word of wide import. We can all assent to the truth of the statement before us, if it be restricted to the case of great excesses of wrongdoing; to the case of the dishonest, the in- temperate, the grossly profligate, who reap the fruit of their evil deeds in bodily disease or in civil punishment. Great cause indeed have such persons to say to themselves, " In serving Sin, 1 have served a very just master." For each one of my dishonest acts, for each one of my sinful lusts, Sin, my master, has given me a definite and a very exact equivalent. I squandered my money in riotous living, and I have come to penury. I neglected my health, I despised the warning of the physician, I deemed myself exempted from the common conditions of the bodily frame ; and I am now a wreck of what I was, every organ disarranged, and my whole existence a burden and a curse.
1 C. E. Walters.
350 THE WAGES AND THE GIFT
2. But, though less obviously, it is not less really true, in reference to cases far short of criminal excess. We see it in the way in which Sin pays in kind. A man neglects prayer, neglects his Bible, neglects the Sunday, once : that is sin ; it is a contradic- tion of the known will of God. He supposes himself free to resume any of these intermitted habits when he will : he is his own master, he thinks, and what he has to-day willed one way, he may to-morrow will the other. But Sin is standing over him, and mocking his vain calculations. He has done a piece of work for Sin to-day, and Sin will pay him his wages in inclining him to do the same to-morrow. To-morrow the voice of inclination will be stronger and the voice of conscience weaker, and thus he will do again as he has done once, and find it far less difficult and at the time feel far less remorseful.
3. Paul does not say, the wages of great sins, or the wages of some sins, or the wages of certain sins ; he simply says : " The wages of sin," of any sin, of all sins, of the least sin, " is death" A single sin, however insignificant it may appear, brings guilt of death ; as St. James writes : " Whosoever shall keep the whole law, and yet offend in one point, he is guilty of all." The man who has broken one link in the chain of the commandments is guilty of breaking the chain.
Tf I was in the offices of the Southern Pacific Eailway in San Francisco, when the General Passenger Agent asked me if I had seen the big trees of California. I informed him that I had seen them as I looked from the car window the day before, and smiling he said, " Then you have not seen them, for they must be studied to be appreciated." Calling for his secretary, he stretched out before me a measuring line. On the one side was his affidavit in which he said, " I have measured one of the big trees of California. Its circumference is 105 feet, its diameter 35 feet, and the height was to me so amazing that I hesitate here even to suggest it." Then he said to me, " How large would you think the seed of a big tree might be ? " and when I suggested that it ought to be of enormous size, he poured out into the palm of his hand a number of these little seeds, and they were smaller than a lettuce seed. So it is with sin. An evil imagination encouraged, an impure thought harboured, an unholy ambition controlling us, and the work is begun, but the end no human tongue is able to describe.1
1 J. W. Chapman.
ROMANS vi. 23 351
iii. Death.
1. " The wages of Bin is death." This is true in every sense in which the word death is used in Scripture.
(1) It is true of natural death. Though not the wages of individual sin in all who undergo it, yet even natural death, the death of the body, is the consequence of sin. But for sin, there would not have been death, at any rate as we are acquainted with it. Every funeral which passes us in our streets, every loss which occurs in our families, should remind us of sin ; and, though it be not the punishment of the particular sin of him who dies, yet it should awaken in our hearts the remembrance of sin generally, and of our own individual participation in that universal defilement.
(2) But natural death is the least part of sin's wages. Natural death, if that were all, might be for us, as it has been, we believe, for countless thousands, the gate of life. It is otherwise with the second kind of death, spiritual death ; the death of the soul. If the life of the soul be union with God, the death of the soul is separation from God.
(3) The full payment is a third kind of death mentioned in Scripture; what is there called the second death (Eev. ii. 11, xx. 6, 14, xxi. 8). It would be presumptuous, as well as most painful, to dilate upon that which is thus described. But many hold that it is the consummation, the certain and inevitable consummation, of a life spent on earth either in sin or without God ; the state into which entrance is given by the reunion of a dead soul with its reanimated body; the state of one who would not have God for his Father, and died in that refusal, and whose day of grace has at last issued in darkness.