him to be conscious of his own experience. A
harmonious, happy existence depends on the practice of pure morals
and communion with the love of God. This great idea that the
conscientious culture of the spiritual nature is the sole method
of Divine life is equally a fundamental principle of the gospel
and a conclusion of observation and reason: upon the devout
observance of it hinge the possibilities of true blessedness. The
pursuit of an opposite course necessitates the opposite
experience, makes its votary a restless, wretched slave, wishing
for freedom but unable to obtain it.

The thought just stated, we maintain, strikes the key note of the
Christian Scriptures; and the voices of truth and nature accord
with it. That Christianity declares sin to be the cause of
spiritual death, in all the deep and wide meaning of the term, has
been fully shown; that this is also a fact in the great order of
things has been partially illustrated, but in justice to the
subject should be urged, in a more precise and adequate form. In
the first place, there is a positive punishment flowing evidently
from sin, consisting both in outward inflictions of suffering and
disgrace through human laws and social customs, and in the private
endurance of bodily and mental pains and of strange misgivings
that load the soul with fear and anguish. Subjection to the animal
nature in the obedience of unrighteousness sensibly tends to bring
upon its victim a woeful mass of positive ills, public and
personal, to put him under the vile tyranny of devouring lusts, to
induce deathlike enervation and disease in his whole being, to
pervade his consciousness with the wretched gnawings of remorse
and shame, and with the timorous, tormenting sense of guilt,
discord, alienation, and condemnation.

In the second place, there is a negative punishment for impurity
and wrong doing, less gross and visible than the former, but
equally real and much more to be dreaded. Sin snatches from a man
the prerogatives of eternal life, by brutalizing and deadening his
nature, sinking the spirit with its delicate delights in the body
and its coarse satisfactions, making him insensible to his highest
good and glory, lowering him in the scale of being away from God,
shutting the gates of heaven against him, and leaving him to
wallow in the mire. The wages of sin is misery, and its gift is a
degradation which prevents any elevation to true happiness. These
positive and negative r