e weakening of my will, the dulling of my conscience, the
loss of spiritual vision. Hereafter, it may be, all this will be
recognised by me as being death indeed, when I see how much I have
missed, by my own fault, of the life and happiness which might have been
mine in virtue of that unbroken communion with God, for which I was made.

These two results may be regarded as the penalties of sinning; more
truly, they are aspects of sin itself. We can hardly be reminded too
often that the worst punishment of sin is sin itself. The external
results of sin, where such occur, are not evil, but good; for the object
for which they are sent is the cure of sin. "To me no harder hell was
shown than sin." If hell is this separation from God, this veritable and
only real death, then hell is not an external penalty inflicted upon sin,
but is involved in the very nature of sin itself. Or, it would be still
more accurate to say, the constitution of the universe (including
ourselves) being what it is, and the nature of sin being what it is,
these results necessarily follow.

Now, the universe is not something which God has created and then, as it
were, flung off from Himself, standing for ever outside it, as it is for
ever outside Him. The universe, at each moment of its existence, is the
expression, in time and space, of the Divine Mind. What we call its
"laws," whether in the physical or the spiritual sphere, are the thoughts
of the Mind of God: its "forces" are the operations of the Will of God,
acting in accordance with His thoughts: material "things" are His
thoughts embodied, that is, Divine thoughts rendered, by an act of the
Divine Will, accessible to our senses.

Now we are in a position to understand both what is meant by the Wrath of
God, and the manner in which it acts.

By the expression, "the Wrath of God," we are to understand the hostility
of the Divine Mind to moral evil: the eternal antagonism of the Divine
righteousness to its opposite. We are not now dealing with the question
of the real or substantive existence of evil. But revelation amply
confirms and enforces the conviction of our moral consciousness that,
with a hatred beyond all human measures of hatred, God hates sin. It is
hardly necessary to add, that that eternal and immeasurable hatred and
hostility of the Divine Mind towards sin is compatible with infinite love
towards His children, in whose minds and lives sin is elaborated and
manifested.