physical sides, and so much the worse for him, though he has not
broken the law, but merely ignored its operation, as when one eats
what is unwholesome. Much more shall he suffer for having broken the
law, in the only possible way that it can be broken, by sin. This
peculiar violation draws after it a peculiar consequence of suffering,
penal and retributive. If a man gets typhoid fever in his house, we
sometimes say it is a _punishment_ on him for neglecting his drains,
even when the neglect was a mere piece of ignorance or inadvertence.
It is an evil consequence certainly,--the law, which he thought not
of, working itself out in the form of disease. But it is not properly
punishment: no natural law has been really broken: there has been no
guilt, and the suffering is not retributive and compensatory. It does
not go to restore the balance of the neglect. It is a lamentable
consequence, not a repayment. As, when man wrongs his fellow-man, he
makes with him an _involuntary contract_ (c. v., s. ix., n. 6, p.
106), to restore what he takes away: so in sinning against God, man
makes another involuntary contract, to pay back in suffering against
his will what he unduly takes in doing his own will against the will
of the Legislator. As St. Augustine says of Judas (Serm. 125, n. 5):
"He did what he liked, but he suffered what he liked not. In his doing
what he liked, his sin is found: in his suffering what he liked not,
God's ordinance is praised." Thus it is impossible for the Eternal
Law, which bears down all so irresistibly in irrational nature,
finally to fail of its effect even upon the most headstrong and
contumacious of rational creatures; but, as St. Thomas says (1a 2a, q.
93, art. 6, in corp.), "The defect of doing is made up by suffering,
inasmuch as they suffer what the Eternal Law prescribes for them to
the extent to which they fail to do what accords with the Eternal
Law." And St. Anselm (_Cur Deus homo_, nn. 14, 15): "God cannot
possibly lose His honour: for either the sinner spontaneously pays