More disagreeable.
For which is more galling to human pride, to be told,--Sin is
certainly a clever, and politic, and successful trade, as far as
this world is concerned. It is only in the next world, or in the
case of rare and peculiar visitations and judgments in this world,
that it will harm you? Or to be told,--Sin is no more clever,
politic, or successful here, than hereafter. The wrong-doing which
looks to you so prudent is folly. You, man of the world as you may
think yourself, are simply, as often as you do wrong, blind,
ignorant, suicidal. You are your own curse; your acts are their own
curse. The injury to your own character and spirit, the injury to
your fellow-creatures, which will again re-act on you,--these are
the curses of God, which you will feel some day too heavy to be
borne. And which is more terrible? To tell a man, that God will
judge and curse him by unexpected afflictions, or at least by
casting him into Gehenna in the world to come: or to tell him, 'You
are judged already. The curse is on you already?'
The first threat he may get rid of, by denying the fact; by saying
that God does not generally interfere to punish bad men in this
life; that he does not strike them dead, swallow them up; and he may
even quote Scripture on his side, and call on Solomon to bear
witness how as dieth the fool, so dieth wise man; and that there is
one event to the righteous and the wicked.
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