Another step is here taken by the Psalmist. He looks shrinkingly and
shudderingly into a possible depth, and he sees, going down into the
abyss, a ladder with three rungs on it. The topmost one is wilful,
self-conscious transgression. But that is not the lowest stage; there is
another step. Presumptuous sin tends to become despotic sin. 'Let them
not _have dominion_ over me.' A man may do a very bad thing once, and
get so wholesomely frightened, and so keenly conscious of the disastrous
issues, that he will never go near it again. The prodigal would not be
in a hurry, you may depend upon it, to try the swine trough and the far
country, and the rags, and the fever, and the famine any more. David got
a lesson that he never forgot in that matter of Bathsheba. The bitter
fruit of his sin kept growing up all his life, and he had to eat it, and
that kept him right. They tell us that broken bones are stronger at the
point of fracture than they were before. And it is possible for a man's
sin--if I might use a paradox which you will not misunderstand--to
become the instrument of his salvation.

But there is another possibility quite as probable, and very often
recurring, and that is that the disease, like some other morbid states
of the human frame, shall leave a tendency to recurrence. A pin-point
hole in a dyke will be widened into a gap as big as a church-door in ten
minutes, by the pressure of the flood behind it. And so every act which
we do in contradiction of our standing as professing Christians, and in
the face of the protests, all unavailing, of that conscience which is
only a voice, and has no power to enforce its behests, will tend to
recurrence once and again. The single acts become habits, with awful
rapidity. Just as the separate gas jets from a multitude of minute
apertures coalesce into a continuous ring of light, so deeds become
habits, and get dominion over us. 'He sold himself to do evil.' He made
himself a bond-slave of iniquity. It is an awful and a miserable thing