I took my stand in the eternal world, and formed my estimate there,—­“then understood I their end.  Surely thou didst set them in slippery places:  thou castedst them down to destruction.  How are they brought into desolation as in a moment!  They are utterly consumed with terrors.”  Dives passes from his fine linen and sumptuous fare, from his excessive physical enjoyment, to everlasting perdition.

II.  In the second place, the worldly man derives more enjoyment from sin, and suffers less from it, in this life, than does the child of God.  The really renewed man cannot enjoy sin.  It is true that he does sin, owing to the strength of old habits, and the remainders of his corruption.  But he does not really delight in it; and he says with St. Paul:  “What I would, that do I not; but what I hate, that do I.”  His sin is a sorrow, a constant sorrow, to him.  He feels its pressure and burden all his days, and cries:  “O wretched man, who shall deliver me from the body of this death.”  If he falls into it, he cannot live in it; as a man may fall into water, but it is not his natural element.

Again, the good man not only takes no real delight in sin, but his reflections after transgression are very painful.  He has a tender conscience.  His senses have been trained and disciplined to discern good and evil.  Hence, the sins that are committed by a child of God are mourned over with a very deep sorrow.  The longer he lives, the more odious does sin become to him, and the more keen and bitter is his lamentation over it.  Now this, in itself, is an “evil thing.”  Man was not made for sorrow, and sorrow is not his natural condition.  This wearisome struggle with indwelling corruption, these reproaches of an impartial conscience, this sense of imperfection and of constant failure in the service of God,—­all this renders the believer’s life on earth a season of trial, and tribulation.  The thought of its lasting forever would be painful to him; and if he should be told that it is the will of God, that he should continue to be vexed and foiled through all eternity, with the motions of sin in his members, and that his love and obedience would forever be imperfect, though he would be thankful that even this was granted him, and that he was not utterly cast off, yet he would wear a shaded brow, at the prospect of an imperfect, though a sincere and a struggling eternity.

But the ungodly are not so.  The worldly man loves sin; loves pleasure; loves self.  And the love is so strong, and accompanied with so much enjoyment and zest, that it is lust, and is so denominated in the Bible.  And if you would only defend him from the wrath of God; if you would warrant him immunity in doing as he likes; if you could shelter him as in an inaccessible castle from the retributions of eternity; with what a delirium of pleasure would he plunge into the sin that he loves.  Tell the avaricious man, that his avarice shall never have any evil consequences