neighbor
or not? Whatsoever a man soweth, that shall he reap, and reap it where
he sows it. Is it not perfectly plain? So in any department of human
life, I care not what, trace it out, and you will find that precisely
the same principle is involved, and that you get results, not arbitrary
bestowal's of reward or punishment.

Now I must come having, I hope, made this sufficiently clear, though
after this fragmentary fashion to deal a little more with some of the
ethical sides of this question. I have had no end of persons tell me,
first and last, that it seemed to them that the universe could not be a
moral universe, that it was not governed fairly, that reward and
punishment were not meted out evenly to people; and they based their
criticism on statements of fact similar to those with which I have been
dealing.

Now let us look into the matter a little deeply; and let us see if we
can find any hint of light and guidance. I have had a person within a
week say to me, "I do not feel at all sure that it means much that
people get the moral results of their moral action in a particular
department of life. If a person becomes a little bit callous and hard,
wisely selfish and prudent, and so prospers in the affairs of this
life, I am not sure that he is not as well off as anybody, perhaps a
little better off, perhaps a little better off than a person who is
sensitive, and worries because he does not reach his ideals; and it is
possible that he serves the world after all quite as well." This is a
kind of criticism, I say, that has been made to me in the last week.

Let us look at it for just a minute. People do not seem able as yet to
understand that a man is really "punished," in the popular sense of
that word, unless they can see him publicly whipped. It does not seem
to them to mean anything because a man deteriorates, because the
highest and finest qualities in him atrophy and threaten to die out. I
used an illustration in my sermon two weeks ago to which I shall have
to recur again, to see if I can make it mean more than it did then. It
is the story of Ulysses who fell into the hands of the famous
sorceress, and whose companions were turned into swine. Now would you
be willing to be turned into a pig, merely because, being a pig, you
would not know anything about it, and would not suffer? Would you be
willing to be reduced to the life of an oyster, merely because, being
an oyster, you would be haunted by no restless id