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Experience proves that the punishments visited upon an iniquity are often greater than the advantages or pleasures which that iniquity could possibly have secured. A man gains £50 by forgery, and his whole life becomes an utter wreck. A youth rejoices for a moment in the indulgence of his appetites, and consequences of a lifelong duration are entailed on him. Sometimes, also, the punishments are delayed until long after the actions occasioning them are forgotten. This is not infrequently the case. Years roll away, and the transgressor settles down quietly and respectably in life. The calm joys of home, the lapse of time, the eagerness for new pursuits, have obliterated from his memory the recollection of the long-gone, sin, when suddenly up rises, from the dark background and abysm of the past, the grim spectre of an unavoidable retribution. A doctor once asked a man dying of cancer, whether he could recollect ever having done an injury to the breast in which the cancer had formed. "Yes," he replied; "some thirty years ago I had a heavy fall, which sorely bruised this breast." "That fall of thirty years ago," said the doctor, "is the occasioning cause of your cancer now." So is it with the cancerous consequences caused by sin. They repose silently for many years, and then, long after the occasioning iniquity is forgotten, they break forth in fatal, calamitous, irrepressible malignity. Terrible, slow, subtle, long-delayed, are the punishments accorded to sin in this present life; and no transgressor can ever be quite sure that the remote, perhaps forgotten, iniquity of long ago will not, ere life is over, be punished by exposure, shame, and ruin. And these long-delayed punishments often come, not by degrees and after many warnings, but suddenly and with violence. At the meridian of the brightest summer day the avalanches come down irresistibly, overwhelmingly. Moreover, it is not active and heinous misdoings alone whose footsteps are thus dogged by the pursuing Nemesis. Extravagance, rashness, folly, negligence, procrastination, are often attended by terrible consequences. Most people have their opportunity in life, and every man his day. But if the day is unused, it cannot be recalled. And daily experience teaches that there is a certain bound and limit to imprudence and misbehaviour and negligence which, being transgressed, there remains no place of repentance in the natural course of things. Every life, like every year, has its cycle of seasons, and when the season is passed it is for ever and irrecoverably gone. Moreover (and the consideration is of serious moment), the punishment for neglecting opportunity or for committing iniquity is final. Considered in their temporal duration, the punishments visited upon vice and negligence are everlasting. Nor does it make the smallest difference to the fact and the certainty of these consequences whether we believe in them or not. Men may ignore consequences, but consequences come all the same. Considerations such as these appear to shed some light upon the vexed question of punishments after death. By thoughtfully reflecting upon the method of God's dealings here and now, men may fairly conjecture what will be the method of God's dealings with them hereafter, seeing that the same Unchangeable God presides over the destinies both of the embodied and the disembodied man. And, in this present world, we find that mere folly, wilfulness, feebleness of will, want of exertion, entail consequences almost as pernicious as those which attend upon actual transgression. We find, moreover, that the plea of ignorance or inexperience does not avert the retributions which await the transgressor. So, to this extent at least, the misdoings and the negligences of man's mortal state may be punished everlastingly, in that eternity may prove too short for the full undoing of the ravages inflicted on the soul, by wrongs committed or duties omitted, during the temporary period of its habitation in the body. And if this be so — if the same principles which permeate natural punishments in this world extend to the punishments of the world to come — then it follows not only that the disbelieving or the ignoring of these punishments will neither moderate nor avert them, but also that habits of disbelief may induce practical neglect of laws, resulting in heavy retribution. Pain and suffering are facts which doubters may discuss or condemn, but can neither prevent nor divert. The belief in future punishments has an evident and direct tendency to diminish those punishments, and even to lead to an escape from them altogether, inasmuch as it assists in prevailing upon men to avoid the causes of evil upon which the tread of punishment follows ; whereas doubt of, or disbelief in, future punishment tends toward a recklessness of living calculated to make hell in life here, even if hereafter there were no life in hell.

(J. W. Diggle, M. A.)

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KJV: But if ye will not do so, behold, ye have sinned against the LORD: and be sure your sin will find you out.

WEB: "But if you will not do so, behold, you have sinned against Yahweh; and be sure your sin will find you out.