odour, the effect. Punishment is as certainly connected with vice, and flows from it, as happiness is with virtue, the one grows out of the other, the one being the essence, and the other the form. It is one of the laws of Divine providence seen to pervade all creation, that, in the vegetable world, each seed produces its like; in the animal kingdom each animal its own kind: so, mentally, vice produces its own progeny of agonies, fears, and torments; while virtue, grounded in true religion, sends forth peace, pleasures, and joys, and because this is the law that God, in His mercy, has established throughout all creation, therefore to express this, it is said that "God visits the iniquities of the fathers upon the children" (Exod. xx. 5), and that he will smite with the plague those that fight against Jerusalem. How awful is the condition of those who fight against the church, and its truths, and doctrines—who oppose, by evils of life, and false deceptive reasonings of the carnal mind, those spiritual precepts that would open their minds to a perception of all that is noble, true, and god-like. Such fighting against, or opposition to, the Truth of God's revealed word, keeps man in utter ignorance of himself, and of that everlasting heaven of peace—the goodly land of promise—for which he was created. By such wicked opposition to Jerusalem, the church of God, all spiritual goodness of life, man's only beauty and comeliness of spirit, will fade away, leaving nothing but a bony skeleton of humanity, without its soft and beautiful appearance of living flesh and skin—"their flesh shall consume away while they stand upon their feet." When all goodness of heart is consumed, the understanding loses all sight or knowledge of Truth, and
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