So, sinner, dream not of escaping punishment at the last.  You are being punished now, for you are punishing yourself; and you will continue to be punished for ever, for you will be punishing yourself for ever, as long as you go on doing wrong, and breaking the laws which God has appointed for body, mind and spirit.  You can see that a drunkard is killing himself, body and mind, by drink.  You see that he knows that, poor wretch, as well as you.  He knows that every time he gets drunk he is cutting so much off his life; and yet he cannot help it.  He knows that drink is poison, and yet he goes back to his poison.

Then know, habitual sinner, that you are like that drunkard.  That every bad habit in which you indulge is shortening the life of some of your faculties, and that God Himself cannot save you from the doom which you are earning, deserving, and working out for yourself every day and every hour.

Oh how men hate that message!—­the message that the true wrath of God, necessary, inevitable, is revealed from heaven against all unrighteousness of men.  How they writhe under it!  How they shut their ears to it, and cry to their preachers, ’No!  Tell us of any wrath of God but that!  Tell us rather of the torments of the damned, of a frowning God, of absolute decrees to destruction, of the reprobation of millions before they are born; any doctrine, however fearful and horrible:  because we don’t quite believe it, but only think that we ought to believe it.  Yes, tell us anything rather than that news, which cuts at the root of all our pride, of all our comfort, and all our superstition—­the news that we cannot escape the consequences of our own actions; that there are no back stairs up which we may be smuggled into heaven; that as we sow, so we shall reap; that we are filled with the fruits of our own devices; every man his own poisoner, every man his own executioner, every man his own suicide; that hell begins in this life, and death begins before we die:  —­do not say that:  because we cannot help believing it; for our own consciousness and our own experience tell us it is true.’  No wonder that the preacher who tells men that is hated, is called a Rationalist, a Pantheist, a heretic, and what not, just because he does set forth such a living God, such a justice of God, such a wrath of God as would make the sinner tremble, if he believed in it, not merely once in a way, when he hears a stirring sermon about the endless torments:  but all day long, going out and coming in, lying on his bed and walking by the way, always haunted by the shadow of himself, knowing that he is bearing about in him the perpetually growing death of sin.

And still more painful would this message be to the sinner, if he had any kindly feeling for others; and, thank God, there are few who have not that.  For St. Paul’s message to him is, that the wages of his sin is death, not merely to himself, but to others—­to his family and children above all.  So St. Paul declares in what he says of his doctrine of original or birth sin, by which, as the Article says, every man is very far gone from original righteousness, and is of his own nature inclined to evil, so that the flesh lusteth against the spirit.