laws of life, nutrition, growth, and health, they punish thee; and kill by the very same means by which they make alive.  And so with thy soul, thy character, thy humanity.  God does not break his laws to punish its sins.  The laws themselves punish; every fresh wrong deed, and wrong thought, and wrong desire of thine sets thee more and more out of tune with those immutable and eternal laws of the Moral Universe, which have their root in the absolute and necessary character of God himself.  All things that he has ordained; the laws of the human body, the laws of the human soul, the laws of society, the laws of all heaven and earth are arrayed against thee; for thou hast arrayed thyself against them.  They have not excommunicated thee:  thou hast, single-handed, excommunicated thyself.  In thine own self-will, thou hast set thyself to try thy strength against God and his whole universe.  Dost thou fancy that he needs to interfere with the working of that universe, to punish such a worm as thee?  No more than the great mill engine need stop, and the overseer of it interfere with the machinery, if the drunken or careless workman should entangle himself among the wheels.  The wheels move on, doing their duty, spinning cloth for the use of man:  but the workman who should have worked with them, is entangled among them.  He is out of his place; and slowly, but irresistibly, they are grinding him to powder, as the whole universe is grinding thee.  Heart-searching, indeed, is such a message; for it will come home, not merely to that very rare character, the absolutely wicked man, the ideal sinner, at whom the preacher too often aims ideal arrows, which vanish in the air:  not to him merely will it come home, but to ourselves, to us average human beings, inconsistent, half-formed, struggling lamely and confusedly between good and evil.  Oh let us take home with us to-day this belief, the only belief in this matter possible in an age of science, which is daily revealing more and more that God is a God, not of disorder, but of order.  Let us take home, I say, the awful belief, that every wrong act of ours does of itself sow the seeds of its own punishment; and that those seeds will assuredly bear fruit, now, here in this life.  Let us believe that God’s judgments, though they will culminate, no doubt, hereafter in one great day, and “one divine far-off event, to which the whole creation moves,” are yet about our path and about our bed, now, here, in this life.  Let us believe, that if we are to prepare to meet our God, we must do it now, here in this life, yea and all day long; for he is not far off from any one of us, seeing that in him we live, and move, and have our being; and can never go from his presence, never flee from his spirit.  Let us believe that God’s good laws, and God’s good order, are in themselves and of themselves, the curse and punishment of every sin of ours; and that Ash-Wednesday, returning year after year, whether we be glad or sorry, good or evil, bears witness to that most awful and yet most blessed fact.