these stern warnings which our Lenten services hold up before us are of
the greatest value.

Keeping before us this law that in every region of life it is the
tendency of everything to bear fruit after its kind, we shall feel that
we can hardly impress it too deeply upon our minds that there is no sin
which we commit but will assuredly return upon our own heads. The
Israelites in the Old Testament saw the hand of God thus visiting their
sins upon them in many ways. They thought of Him as smiting them for
their sins with consumption or with fever, with plague or mildew, or the
sword of the oppressor. These are not our expectations. We have learnt
that it is not with such visitations that God punishes us for our sinful
indulgence or neglect, but that He does it with a punishment which may be
less obvious but is often more ruinous than these.

Neglect the opportunities of good with which He strews your path in early
life, let some sin strike its roots in your heart and take possession of
it, and the curse of God for that neglect or that sin will overtake you,
no doubt of it; coming not perhaps as the Israelite on Mount Ebal
expected it to come for any sin of his, but coming, you hardly know how,
as the change for the worse, the sinking to lower levels of thought, and
taste, and aim, and practice, the reversion to lower types, which is the
end of neglect, coming as the creeping and insidious growth of the power
of sin working ever stronger in us as the natural fruit of indulgence. So
the curse of that ancient Jewish law turns out to be a terrible and
unchanging truth, written in a law which is never obsolete and grows not
old, a law which calls on us for our Amen! as it cries to us equally in
the language of Divine revelation and of the latest scientific discovery:
"Sow neglect," it says, "and you will reap deterioration; sow sin, and
you will reap corruption."