Sin works by no set methods. It has a way of ruin for every man, that is original and proper only to himself. Suffice it to say that, as long as you are in and under its power, you can never tell what you are in danger of. This one thing you may have as a truth eternally fixed, that respectable sin is, in principle, the mother of all basest crime. Follow it on to the bitter end, and there is ignominy eternal.
To please ourselves with a notion of gospel liberty, while we have not a gospel principle of holiness within to free us from the power of sin, is nothing else but to gild over our bonds and fetters, and to fancy ourselves the inmates of a golden cage. There is a straitness, slavery, and narrowness in sin; sin crowds and crumples up our souls which, if they were freely spread abroad, would be as wide and as broad as the whole universe. No man is truly free, but he that has his will enlarged to the extent of God's own will, by loving whatever God loves, and nothing else.
Sin is a state of mind, not an outward act.
Sin, without strong restraints, would pull God from His throne, make the world the minion of its lusts, and all beings bow down and worship.
Sin murders the soul. Its withering, blasting curse is not exhausted in this life, but goes with us into eternity, to be perfected and perpetuated there. "The wages of sin is death"—death to all spiritual life now, and an immortality of pain and tears and despair. "The sting of death is sin;" the weeping and wailing of the judgment will be sin; and sin will be the ever-gnawing worm and the quenchless fire.
