etributions, however delayed or disguised,
will come where they are deserved, and will not fail. Do a wrong
deed from a bad motive, and, though you fled on the pinions of the
inconceivable lightning from one end of infinite space to the
other, the fated penalty would chase you through eternity but that
you should pay its debt; or, rather, the penalty is grappling with
you from within on the instant, is a part of you.

Thirdly, if, by the searing of his conscience and absorption in
the world, a sinner escapes for a season the penal consequences
threatened in the law, and does not know how miserable he is, and
thinks he is happy, yet let him remember that the remedial,
restorative process through which he must pass, either in this
life or in the next, involves a concentrated experience of
expiatory pangs, as is shown both by the reason of the thing and
by all relevant analogies. When the bad man awakes as some time or
other he will awake to the infinite perfections and unalterable
love of the Father whose holy commands he has trampled and whose
kind invitations he has spurned, he will suffer agonies of
remorseful sorrow but faintly shadowed in the bitterness of
Peter's tears when his forgiving Master looked on him. Such is the
common deadness of our consciences that the vices of our corrupt
characters are far from appearing to us as the terrific things
they really are. Angels, looking under the fleshly garment we
wear, and seeing a falsehood or a sin assimilated as a portion of
our being, turn away with such feeling as we should experience at
beholding a leprous sore beneath the lifted ermine of a king. A
well taught Christian will not fail to contemplate physical death
as a stupendous, awakening crisis, one of whose chief effects will
be the opening to personal consciousness, in the most vivid
manner, of all the realities of character, with their relations
towards things above and things below himself.

This thought leads us to a fourth and final consideration, more
important than the previous. The tremendous fact that all the
inwrought elements and workings of our being are self retributive,
their own exceeding great and sufficient good or evil, independent
of external circumstances and sequences, is rarely appreciated.
Men overlook it in their superficial search after associations,
accompaniments, and effects. When all tangible punishments and
rewards are wanting, all outward penalties and prizes fail, if we
go a l