Now if this be, as I believe, the doctrine of the commination service; if this be, as I believe, the message of Ash-Wednesday, it is one which is quite free from superstition or cruelty:  but it is a message more disagreeable, and more terrible too, than any magical imprecations of harm to the sinner could bring.  More disagreeable.  For which is more galling to human pride, to be told,—­Sin is certainly a clever, and politic, and successful trade, as far as this world is concerned.  It is only in the next world, or in the case of rare and peculiar visitations and judgments in this world, that it will harm you?  Or to be told,—­Sin is no more clever, politic, or successful here, than hereafter.  The wrong-doing which looks to you so prudent is folly.  You, man of the world as you may think yourself, are simply, as often as you do wrong, blind, ignorant, suicidal.  You are your own curse; your acts are their own curse.  The injury to your own character and spirit, the injury to your fellow-creatures, which will again re-act on you,—­these are the curses of God, which you will feel some day too heavy to be borne.  And which is more terrible?  To tell a man, that God will judge and curse him by unexpected afflictions, or at least by casting him into Gehenna in the world to come:  or to tell him, ’You are judged already.  The curse is on you already?’

The first threat he may get rid of, by denying the fact; by saying that God does not generally interfere to punish bad men in this life; that he does not strike them dead, swallow them up; and he may even quote Scripture on his side, and call on Solomon to bear witness how as dieth the fool, so dieth wise man; and that there is one event to the righteous and the wicked.

As for the fear of Gehenna, again, after he dies:  that is too dim and distant; too unlike anything which he has seen in this life (now that the tortures and Autos da fe of the middle age have disappeared) to frighten him very severely, except in rare moments, when his imagination is highly excited.  And even then, he can—­in practice he does—­look forward to ‘making his peace with God’ as it is called, at last, and fulfilling Baalam’s wish of dying the death of the righteous, after living the life of the wicked.  He knows well, too, that when that day comes, he can find—­alas! that it should be so—­priests and preachers in plenty, of some communion or other, who will give him his viaticum, and bid him depart in peace to that God, who has said that there is no peace to the wicked.

But terrible, truly terrible and heart searching for the wrongdoer is the message—­God does not curse thee:  thou hast cursed thyself.  God will not go out of his way to punish thee:  thou hast gone out of his way, and thereby thou art punishing thyself, just as, by abusing thy body, thou bringest a curse upon it; so by abusing thy soul.  God does not break his laws to punish drunkenness or gluttony.  The laws themselves, the laws of nature, the beneficent