wherein now I am: I that was pleasant and beloved in my power!" [1]
4. Sin takes away life, procuring death by a thousand disastrous means. For the sins of Pharoah and his kingdom an angel killed in one night all the first-begotten, and another day drowned his army of innumerable men. [2] And another angel, in the camp of Sennacherib, killed one hundred and eighty-five thousand men; [3] and many Israelites perished in the desert with divers strange kinds of deaths. [4]
5. Finally, sin causes those three terrible evils that were offered to David, to choose one of them in punishment of his offence, famine, war, and pestilence, [5] with the which innumerable men perish with exceeding great misery and rage. For sin likewise come earthquakes, tempests at sea, deluges, fires, lightnings, hail, storms, and other such chastisements; for, as sin is the injury of the universal Creator, all the creatures are instruments of His vengeance.
6. Then I will apply all this to myself, beholding my evils and miseries, which have all come upon me justly for my sins, that I may "know and see" by experience (as Jeremiah says) that it is an evil and a bitter thing for me " to have left the Lord my God, and that His fear is not with me." [6] And so, from the horror which I have of these punishments, I will extract a horror of my sins, saying to myself,
Colloquy. — Seeing thou art so much afraid of temporal misery, why art thou not afraid of sin, which is the cause of it? If thou tremblest at poverty and dishonour, why tremblest thou not at sin, from which they both proceed? And if thou fliest the sickness of the body, why fliest thou not the sickness of the
