g of His indignation
against sin.

It seems one of the most cunning and frequent of self-deceptions to turn
the heart away from this warning and refuse to acknowledge anything in
the fair scenes of the natural creation but beneficence. Men in general
lean towards the light, so far as they contemplate such things at all,
most of them passing "by on the other side," either in mere plodding
pursuit of their own work, irrespective of what good or evil is around
them, or else in selfish gloom, or selfish delight, resulting from their
own circumstances at the moment. Of those who give themselves to any
true contemplation, the plurality, being humble, gentle, and kindly
hearted, look only in nature for what is lovely and kind; partly, also,
God gives the disposition to every healthy human mind in some degree to
pass over or even harden itself against evil things, else the suffering
would be too great to be borne; and humble people, with a quiet trust
that everything is for the best, do not fairly represent the facts to
themselves, thinking them none of their business. So, what between
hard-hearted people, thoughtless people, busy people, humble people, and
cheerfully minded people,--giddiness of youth, and preoccupations of
age,--philosophies of faith, and cruelties of folly,--priest and Levite,
masquer and merchantman, all agreeing to keep their own side of the
way,--the evil that God sends to warn us gets to be forgotten, and the
evil that He sends to be mended by us gets left unmended. And then,
because people shut their eyes to the dark indisputableness of the facts
in front of them, their Faith, such as it is, is shaken or uprooted by
every darkness in what is revealed to them. In the present day it is not
easy to find a well-meaning man among our more earnest thinkers, who
will not take upon himself to dispute the whole system of redemption,
because he cannot unravel the mystery of the punishment of sin. But can
he unravel the mystery of the punishment of NO sin? Can he entirely
account for all that happens to a cab-horse? Has he ever looked fairly
at the fate of one of those beasts as it is dying,--measured the work it
has done, and the reward it has got,--put his hand upon the bloody
wounds through which its bones are piercing, and so looked up to Heaven
with an entire understanding of Heaven's ways about the horse? Yet the
horse is a fact--no dream--no revelation among the myrtle trees by
night; and the dust it dies u