untimely end;
that he will ruin his own health; or that he will get himself
hanged, though that is likely enough--common enough. I think St.
Paul means something even worse than that. The man himself will
die. Not his body merely: but his soul, his character, will die.
All in him that God made, all that God intended him to be, will die.
All that his father and mother loved in him, all that they watched
over, and hoped and prayed that it might grow up into life, in order
that he might become the man God meant him to be, all that will die.
His soul and character will become one mass of disease. He will
think wrong, feel wrong, about everything of which he does think and
feel: while, about the higher matters, of which every man ought to
know something, he will not think or feel at all. Love to his
country, love to his own kinsfolk even; above all, love to God, will
die in him, and he will care for nothing but himself, and how to get
a little more foul pleasure before he goes out of this world, he
dare not think whither. All power of being useful will die in him.
Honour and justice will die in him. He will be shut up in himself,
in the ugly prison-house of his own lusts and passions, parted from
his fellow-men, caring nothing for them, knowing that they care
nothing for him. He will have no faith in man or God. He will
believe no good, he will have no hope, either for himself or for the
world.

This, this is death, indeed; the death of sin; the death in which
human beings may go on for years, walking, eating, and drinking;
worse than those who walk in their sleep, and see nothing, though
their eyes are staring wide.

Oh pitiable sight! The most pitiable sight in the whole world, a
human soul dead and rotten in sin! It is a pitiable sight enough,
to see a human body decayed by disease, to see a poor creature
dying, even quietly and without pain. Pitiable, but not half so
pitiable as the death of a human soul by sin. For the death of the
body is not a man's own fault. But that death in life of sin, is a
man's own fault. In a Christian country, at least, it is a man's
own fault, if he goes about the world, as I have seen many a one go,
having a name to live, and yet dead in trespasses and sins, while
his soul only serves to keep his body alive and moving. How shall
we escape this death in life? St. Paul tells us, 'If ye through the
Spirit do mortify the deeds of the body, ye shall live.'

Through the Sp