dances in the sun. Is the Lord
rejoicing in you? I have said--Whither shall a man go from God's
presence? Are you forgetting or remembering God's presence? And--Whither
shall a man flee from God's Spirit? Are you, O man, fleeing from God's
Spirit, and forgetting His gracious inspirations; all pure and holy, and
noble, and just and lovely and truly human, thoughts, in the whirl of
pleasure, or covetousness, or ambition, or actual sin? If so, look at
the tiniest gnat which dances in the air, the meanest flower beneath your
feet; and be ashamed, and fear, and tremble before the Living God, and
before His Spirit. For the gnat and the flower are doing their duty, and
pleasing the Holy Spirit of God; and you are not doing your duty, and are
grieving the Holy Spirit of God. For simply: because that Spirit is the
Spirit of God, He is a Holy Spirit, who tries to make you--O man and not
animal--holy; a moral, and spiritual, and good being. Because you are a
moral and spiritual being, God's Spirit exercises over you a moral power
which He does not exercise over the plants and animals. He works not
merely on your body and your brain: but on your heart and immortal soul.
But if you choose to be immoral, when He is trying to keep you moral; if
you choose to be carnal like the brutes, while He is trying to make you
spiritual, like Jesus Christ, from whom He proceeds: then, oh then,
tremble, and beware, and be ashamed before the very flowers which grow in
your own garden-bed; for they fulfil the law which God has given them.
They are what they ought to be, each after its kind. But you are not
what you ought to be, after your kind; which is a good man, or a good
woman, or a good child.

Oh beware lest the Lord should fulfil in you the awful words of this
Psalm; lest He should hide His face from you, and you be troubled; and
lest when He takes away your breath you should die, and turn again to
your dust; and find, too late, that the wages of sin are death--death not
merely of the body, but of the soul. Rather repent, and amend, and
remember that most blessed, and yet most awful fact--that God's Spirit is
with you from your baptism until now, putting into your heart good
desires, and ready to enable you--if you will--to bring those good
desires to good effect: instead of leaving them only as good intentions,
with which, says the too true proverb, hell is paved.

So will be fulfilled in you the blessed words of the next verse-