We have visited the Garden of Eden, to view there the melancholy origin and fatal effects of sin. Let us now go to another garden, where we shall see this great evil still more conspicuously displayed. I mean the garden of Gethsemane. Behold! _who_ lies there prostrate on the ground! drowned in tears! and bathed in blood! What means that agony, which tortures his immaculate soul, and makes him “sorrowful even unto death?” What was the heavy load under which an angel is despatched from heaven to support him? Hark! how he entreats his Father, that, if possible, “the bitter cup might pass from him.” Follow him to Calvary. See him fainting under the load of his cross, as he ascends the hill. Now begins the tragical scene. Behold him extended on the accursed tree! Why, thou blessed Jesus, wert thou brought so low, and covered with such foul ignominy? Why didst thou suffer thy sacred head to be crowned, and lacerated with thorns? and thy hand to be disgraced with a symbol of mock royalty, when it might have been extended to the destruction of thine enemies? Was thy death, with all the circumstances of horror and shame that attended it, the just wages of any personal iniquity? No. Thy nature was immaculate, and thy life unblemished. But it was sin imputed, that constituted the bitter ingredient in thy cup of sorrow; and our guilt transferred, that brought thee down to the chamber of death. They were our transgressions that pointed the thorns, and sharpened the nails that pierced thy bleeding head, and hands, and feet, and opened the current that flowed from thy heart. Thou wast “wounded for _our_ transgressions, and bruised for _our_ iniquities.” Isa. liii. 5. O teach us to see the bitterness of sin in the depth of thy sufferings, and to stand amazed at the unexampled love that shines through them all! This will embitter sin to our hearts, and endear to us that blessed cross from whence the remedy for it flows, with the current of thy blood. There is but one leading point of view more, in which the evil of sin is discoverable by the melancholy effects which it produceth; and that is, by the consideration immediately suggested in the text; which is, That death is the wages of sin. This is a truth so obvious, that it hardly requires any argument, either to illustrate, or confirm it. The fact is, at least, incontrovertible. The notoriety of it hath been established by an intermitted series of mortality, through all the successive generations of men, from the beginning of the world to the present day. “The fathers, where are they? the prophets, do they live for ever?”