CHAPTER IV.

PENAL RESULTS (CERTAINTY).

Being guilty, polluted, condemned, you then must face the question of punishment. Your spiritual character and state being and remaining what it is there is no possibility of avoiding the retributions of the future. "The soul that sinneth it shall die." "Though hand join in hand the wicked shall not go unpunished."

Leaving other phases of this question to be considered in the chapters that follow, let us inquire at present concerning its certainty.

As to the possibility of your avoiding it, the same considerations which were suggested in the last chapter for that purpose, regarding your guilt and condemnation, will also apply here. You will remember that such possibilities as hiding, or fleeing, or the effective intervention of others. through social, financial, or political influence, were considered, and had to be set aside as utterly. futile before God. There being absolutely no well-grounded hope in that direction, so far as your being found guilty and condemned, so also

is there none from these so far as the averting of future punishment is concerned. While this might be sufficient to reveal the hopelessness and pitiable helplessness of your spiritual plight, yet there are one or two additional possibilities, which may be taken into account. But they only help to deepen the dark shadows of despair which exclude the vision of any possible avenue of escape. They are adduced here because apparently they have a more especial bearing on the possible avoidance of punishment than upon that of a legally pronounced guilt or condemnation.

Some have, for example, sought to avert or forestall the suffering of the penalty pronounced by the state by the commission of suicide. A very futile subterfuge it is true, but one by which they imagine to cheat the state or defeat justice as to the letter and conserve, in their own estimation, the question of their honor. But whatever was or was not gained or averted by self-destruction, in such a case, the fact still remained that life had to be given up to satisfy the offended majesty of law. The escape was more imaginary than real. What did it boot that the exit from life was by some self-applied agency rather than by that of the halter of the state, so long as the forced exit which the law demanded had to be endured? But

even that poor consolation will be denied you as to the penalty for your sins. That which has been declared will surely come to pass in God's time and after the divine method, without any power of yours to delay or change. You may cheat the state as to the method of your exit, or the time thereof, or both. But you cannot annihilate your spirit. You must abide the sentence of the Almighty.

Then again, you may, so far as earthly offenses and their results are concerned, be living in a community where, for capital offenses, capital punishment is not inflicted. You do not in this case, escape the visitation of penalty, but what may be deemed a less severe form thereof is your portion.

Or, while capital punishment may be the law for the crime of which you are guilty, you may yet escape it by its being commuted to something else. In either case the death penalty is avoided. But not so in the realm of the spirit. "The soul that sinneth it shall die." The offense is capital and so also is the punishment. And there is no commutation. It is true that in the experience of the death penalty one may suffer more than another-both on account of the nature of his own mental and physical constitution, as well as from

the positive methods of its infliction. For these reasons the pain may be of the most excruciating character in one instance while comparatively mild in another. But, in either case, the death sentence is visited.

So also in the moral world. There is a revelation made of the fact that in the future world, while the death sentence has been passed and is visited upon all against whom it is declared, yet the realization of it by some is not what it is in the experience of others. Some are beaten with "many stripes" and others with only "few," because of the responsibilities of present life privileges or the absence of them. "To whomsoever much is given of him shall be much required." This gradation will hold as between the heathen world and the lands where the light of life has come. And within the latter, as between those surrounded with favoring conditions when compared with those whose surroundings are untoward. To go into the future unsaved from a land where the radiant light of the gospel is shed from many sources, and, perchance, with many aggravating elements in view of unimproved opportunities, is to go where, in number and severity, the stripes will be very many. In any event and under all considerations it is a fact of awful

solemnity and it certainly awaits the unsaved without any hope of being averted or commuted.

There are other reasons worthy of mention in view of which you might escape the infliction of the death penalty from man.

There might be something in your own antecedent character so worthy as to commend you to the mercy of the court. The special act because of which you were exposed to the utmost severity of the law was in such violent contradiction to your past record that it led to a modification of the sentence by the judge.

Or, in consideration of your youth, inexperience, and the absence of an appropriate appreciation on your part of the nature of the crime committed, you may be more leniently dealt with than might otherwise be.

Then there may be various extenuating elements entering into the case, as also considerations arising from your relation to those dependent upon you, all of which may tell on the issue.

The state itself may conclude to commute your sentence should you help it in securing the conviction of other offenders by confessing your own offenses and telling what you know of theirs.

All these may exist as to the deserved judgments of man but there is no room for them in the