takes (as much as lies in him) honour from God and his neighbour deserves to lose his own honour. For this the high-priest Eli and his sons lost the honour of priesthood with their life, Almighty God saying unto them " Qui contemnunt me, erunt ignobiles [1] " They that despise me shall be despised." Sin destroys sceptres and kingdoms. For disobedience God took from Saul the kingdom that He had given him. [2] And Nabuchodonosor, with vain-glorious boasting, lost his also, living seven years like a beast; [3] God cutting down that sightly tree because his sins deserved not that it should stand upright. And it is a just chastisement that he should neither have dignity nor command on earth that subjects not himself to the King of earth and of heaven, and that he should have no pre-eminence over men who by sin makes himself like to beasts.
2. Besides this, sin destroys the health; Almighty God chastising sinners with manifold and various infirmities and sores from " head" to " foot." [4] For he deserves not to have health that employs it to offend Him that gave it him; and whosoever keeps his soul sick, being able to heal it, is worthy to have his body sick, and not to be able to cure it; as the lame man that in eight and thirty years could not be healed in the Probatio pond, where, notwithstanding, others were healed. [5]
3. Sin takes away content and cheerfulness, causing a mortal sadness, which dries the bones, gives a life worse than death itself. Like to the city that said, " God has filled me with bitterness and inebriated me with wormwood;" [6] or, as the miserable Antiochus, that said, " In how much tribulation am I come, and into what floods of sorrow
