hands;"--"That EVIL"--the evil which we do of its own self--"shall
slay the wicked?" What says the whole noble 37th Psalm of David,
but that same awful truth of God, that sin is its own punishment?

Why should I go on quoting texts? Look for yourselves, you who
fancy that it is only on the other side of the grave that God will
trouble Himself about you and your meanness, your profligacy, your
falsehood. Look for yourselves in the book of God, and see if there
be any writer there,--lawgiver, prophet, psalmist, apostle, up to
Christ the Lord Himself,--who does not warn men again and again,
that here, on earth, their sins will find them out. Our Saviour,
indeed, when on earth, said less about this subject than any of the
prophets before Him, or the apostles after Him, and for the best of
reasons. The Jews had got rooted in their minds a superstitious
notion, that all disease, all sorrow, was the punishment in each
case of some particular sin; and thus, instead of looking with pity
and loving awe upon the sick and the afflicted, they were
accustomed, too often, to turn from them as sinners, smitten of God,
bearing in their distress the token of His anger. The blessed One,--
He who came to heal the sick and save the lost,--reproved that
error more than once. When the disciples fancied a certain poor
man's blindness to be a judgment from God, "Neither did he sin,"
said the Lord, "nor his parents, but that the glory of God might be
made manifest in him." And yet, on the other hand, when He healed a
certain man of an old infirmity at the pool of Bethesda, what were
His words to him? "Go thy way, sin no more, lest a worse thing come
unto thee;"--a clear and weighty warning that all his long misery of
eight-and-thirty years had been the punishment of some sin of his,
and that the sin repeated would bring on him a still severer
judgment.