Now the Scriptures, from the third chapter of Genesis to the last chapter of Revelation, exhibit God as employing suffering as a remedy for unrighteousness or sin. It is a punishment, but it is also a cure. It may be such suffering as is involved in the condemnation of man to eat his bread by the sweat of his brow, instead of being able to “put forth his hand” and seize whatever he craved without effort. It may be the severer remedy of the punishment of death, or the bitter surgery of war. But what the Scriptures reveal is that all the suffering of life, slight or severe, is instituted by God, and employed by Him, to promote and uphold that righteousness in man which can alone qualify him for that harmony with God, which is the happiness for which he was intended. The free will, whatever its degree, with which man has been endowed, must be educated by the suffering which follows its misuse, as well as by the satisfaction which is conferred by its right use. Accordingly it appears to be the cardinal fact of man’s constitution that unrighteousness throws his nature into disorder, and brings a similar disorder into his whole social condition. Families, societies, and nations can only realize their true purposes, they can only exhibit a true order, when the individuals of whom they are composed are righteous, and are thus qualified for their true functions. Let the individuals or component parts become disordered, and the whole society must be disordered, and involved in confusion and perhaps ruin. I have sometimes imagined the case of a visitor introduced to some vast machine, working under immense pressure, and being told by his guide that unfortunately every part of the machine was more or less imperfect, and some of the parts almost rotten. Would the visitor care to expose himself long to the risks of the inevitable explosion? But that is exactly the case of every human society, small or great. All the individuals of which it is composed are grievously imperfect, and some of them are positively vicious. Is it any wonder that it develops antagonistic forces within itself, and that sooner or later it bursts into a great conflagration--the conflagration of a revolution or a war? God, in fact, by this constitution of mankind, has provided that unrighteousness shall punish itself. He does not intervene, as a rule, to inflict a special punishment. He leaves men to work out their own punishment, and to realize from it that there was some corruption at work in their lives.