nceived in sin and shapen in iniquity. And experience tells him
that he will shape himself into further sin and ever deepening iniquity
without the smallest effort, without in the least intending it, and in
the most natural way in the world if he simply let his life run. It is
on this principle that, completing the conception, the wicked are said
further in the Bible to be lost. They are not really lost as yet, but
they are on the sure way to it. The bias of their lives is in full
action. There is no drag on anywhere. The natural tendencies are having
it all their own way; and although the victims may be quite unconscious
that all this is going on, it is patent to every one who considers even
the natural bearings of the case that "the end of these things is
Death." When we see a man fall from the top of a five-story house, we
say the man is lost. We say that before he has fallen a foot; for the
same principle that made him fall the one foot will undoubtedly make him
complete the descent by falling another eighty or ninety feet. So that
he is a dead man, or a lost man from the very first. The gravitation of
sin in a human soul acts precisely in the same way. Gradually, with
gathering momentum it sinks a man further and further from God and
righteousness, and lands him, by the sheer action of a natural law, in
the hell of a neglected life.

But the lesson is not less clear from analogy. Apart even from the law
of Degeneration, apart from Reversion to Type, there is in every living
organism a law of Death. We are wont to imagine that Nature is full of
Life. In reality it is full of Death. One cannot say it is natural for a
plant to live. Examine its nature fully, and you have to admit that its
natural tendency is to die. It is kept from dying by a mere temporary
endowment which gives it an ephemeral dominion over the elements--gives
it power to utilize for a brief span the rain, the sunshine, and the
air. Withdraw this temporary endowment for a moment and its true nature
is revealed. Instead of overcoming Nature it is overcome. The very
things which appeared to minister to its growth and beauty now turn
against it and make it decay and die. The sun which warmed it, withers
it; the air and rain which nourished it, rot it. It is the very forces
which we associate with life which, when their true nature appears, are
discovered to be really the ministers of death.

This law, which is true for the whole plant-world, is also val