Stolen waters.
A fatal fascination, arising out of its very lawlessness, attaches itself to sin. Illicit pleasures are doubly attractive just because they are illicit. Let us consider the secret of these evil charms.
I. THE PROVOCATION OF RESTRAINTS. There are many things which we do not care to have so long as they are within our reach, but which are clothed with a sudden attractiveness directly they are shut out from us. If we see a notice, "Trespassers will be prosecuted," we feel an irritating restraint, although we have had no previous desire to enter the path that it blocks. Innumerable fruits grew in Eden, but the one forbidden fruit excited the greatest longing of appetite. Advertisers sometimes head their placards with the words, "Don't read this!"—judging that to be the best way to call attention to them. If you say, "Don't look!" everybody is most anxious to look. To put a book in an index expurgatorius is the surest means of advertising it.
II. THE VALUE GIVEN BY DIFFICULTY OF ACQUISITION. We value little what we can buy cheaply. Rarity raises prices. If we have been to great labour and have run heavy risks in obtaining anything, we are inclined to measure the worth of it by what it has cost us. Many designs of sin are only achieved with great difficulty. They involve terrible dangers. When once accomplished, they are the more valued for this. The pleasures of adventure, the Englishman's peculiar delights of the chase, are enlisted in the cause of wickedness.
"All things that are,
Are with more spirit chased than enjoyed."
III. THE SENSE OF POWER AND LIBERTY. If you have gained your end in spite of law and authority, there is a natural elation of triumph about it. When you have succeeded in breaking bounds, you taste the sweets of an illicit liberty.
IV. THE ENJOYMENT OF SECRECY. To some minds there is a peculiar charm about this. To them especially "bread eaten in secret is pleasant." Let it be all open and above board, let it he of such a nature that one would have no objection to the world knowing it, and the pleasure loses its most pungent element. The air of mystery, the sense of superiority in doing what those about one little suspect, become elements in the pleasures of sin. But surely the highest natures must be too simple and frank to feel the force of such inducements to sin!
V. THE FASCINATION OF WICKEDNESS. Pure, naked evil will attract on its own account. There is a charm in absolute ugliness. Some men really seem to love sin for its own sake. A wild intoxication, a mad passion of conscious guilt, instils a fatal sweetness into stolen waters. But it is the sweetness of a deadly poison, the euthanasia of crime.
All these horrible charms of sin need to be guarded against. We must not trust to our own integrity; it is not proof against the fatal fascinations of temptation. To resist them we must be fortified with the love of higher joys, fed with the wholesome food of the banquet of wisdom (see Proverbs 9:1-5), attracted by the beauty of holiness, and above all, led to the pure and nourishing delights of the gospel feast by faith in the Lord Jesus Christ.
HOMILIES BY E. JOHNSON