Then what becomes of the soil? It begins a new life. The roots of the plants take it up; the salts which they find in it—the staple, as we call them—go to make leaves and seed; the very sand has its use, it feeds the stalks of corn and grass, and makes them stiff. The corn-stalks would never stand upright if they could not get sand from the soil. So what a thousand years ago made part of a mountain, now makes part of a wheat-plant; and in a year more the wheat grain will have been eaten, and the wheat straw perhaps eaten too, and they will have _died_—decayed in the bodies of the animals who have eaten them, and then they will begin a third new life—they will be turned into parts of the animal’s body—of a man’s body. So that what is now your bone and flesh, may have been once a rock on some hillside a hundred miles away. Strange, but true! all learned men know that it is true. You, if you think over my words, may see that they are at least reasonable. But still most wonderful! This world works right well, surely. It obeys God’s Spirit. Oh, my friends, if we fulfilled our life and our duty as well as the clay which we tread on does,—if we obeyed God’s Spirit as surely as the flint does, we should have many a heartache spared us, and many a headache too! To be what God wants us!—to be _men_, to be _women_, and therefore to live as children of God, members of Christ, fulfilling our duty in that state to which God has called us, that would be our bliss and glory. Nothing can live in a state in which God did not intend it to live. Suppose a tree could move itself about like an animal, and chose to do so, the tree would wither and die; it would be trying to act contrary to the law which God has given it. Suppose the ox chose to eat meat like the lion, it would fall sick and die; for it would be acting contrary to the law which God’s Spirit had made for it—going out of the calling to which God’s Word has called it, to eat grass and not flesh, and live thereby. And so with us: if we will do wickedly, when the will of God, as the Scripture tells us, is our sanctification, our holiness; if we will speak lies, when God’s law for us is that we should speak truth; if we will bear hatred and ill-will, when God’s law for us is, Love as brothers,—you all sprang from one father, Adam,—you were all redeemed by one brother, Jesus Christ; if we will try to live as if there was no God, when God’s law for us is, that a man can live like a man only by faith and trust in God;—then we shall _die_, if we break God’s laws according to which he intended man to live. Thus it was with Adam; God intended him to obey God, to learn every thing from God. He chose to disobey God, to try and know something of himself, by getting the knowledge of good and evil; and so death passed on him. He became an unnatural man, a _bad_ man, more or less, and so he became a dead man; and death came into the world, that time at least, by sin, by breaking