Due regard to consequences.
"Neither didst remember the latter end of it." The experiences of mankind have brought the conviction that moral laws are always and uniformly working, as surely as physical laws. Wrong universally leads on to ruin. Whatsoever a man sows he reaps. "Sin, when it is finished, brings forth death." This is all so certain that, if any man proposes to take any particular course in life, he may duly consider the "latter end of it"—he may estimate it in the light of that "latter end." He is foolish indeed if he does not take into account final issues and results. And yet this is precisely what men usually fail to do. The thief takes no account of the prison; the forger of penal servitude; or the murderer of the gallows. The proud will not see the certainty of life-humblings, or the violent the evil which the bitterness of the crushed and insulted will bring upon them. If we asked ourselves, before entering on self-willed courses, Where shall we be, what shall we be, ten years hence? we should hesitate and step back. Babylon enjoyed pride, and refused to see any consequences resulting from high-handedness and defiance of God and cruelty to man. But if the Nemesis moves slowly, it moves surely; its tread is firm, its advance is certain. The "lady for ever," in her own vain imaginations, sits down at last a desolate captive, a humbled, childless widow, the most helpless and miserable creature that Eastern imagination can conceive (Isaiah 47:8, Isaiah 47:9). "The guilt of Babylon is intensified by her reckless arrogance. She presumed that the colossus of her power would never be broken, forgetting the danger of provoking the God of gods."
I. CONSEQUENCES HELP US TO UNDERSTAND THE CHARACTER OF THE COURSES WE CHOOSE. We may be hurried into acts and scenes of life by excitement and passions; we may be deluded by the mere appearances of things as they pass. We only know what things really are as we sit down quietly and count up their issues, see them working out their results. We know sensuality thus; for he that soweth to it reaps corruption. We know frivolity thus; for it works out into a wretched unfitness for all the solemn scenes and responsibilities that must come to us all. We know pride thus, when we see it driving from us all who could render us service of love, and leaving us to suffer and die in the hands of the hireling.
II. CONSEQUENCES SHOULD WARN US FROM EVIL COURSES. The drunkard should run from the cup, at the bottom of which lies the awful picture of the drunkard's body, the drunkard's mind, the drunkard's home, the drunkard's hell. And so of other deceitful sins and lusts. Alas! that men will not "consider their ways" in the light of their "latter end"!—R.T.