I should answer such a man--My good friend, you come to church to hear about God as well as about what you call your soul. And any sound knowledge which you can learn about God, must be--believe me--of use to your immortal soul. For if you have wrong notions concerning God: how can you avoid having wrong notions concerning your soul, which lives and moves and has its being in God? But look at it thus. At least I have been speaking of the works of God. And are not you, too, a work of God? The Lord shall rejoice in His works, even to the tiniest gnat that dances in the sun. Is the Lord rejoicing in you? I have said--Whither shall a man go from God's presence? Are you forgetting or remembering God's presence? And--Whither shall a man flee from God's Spirit? Are you, O man, fleeing from God's Spirit, and forgetting His gracious inspirations; all pure and holy, and noble, and just and lovely and truly human, thoughts, in the whirl of pleasure, or covetousness, or ambition, or actual sin? If so, look at the tiniest gnat which dances in the air, the meanest flower beneath your feet; and be ashamed, and fear, and tremble before the Living God, and before His Spirit. For the gnat and the flower are doing their duty, and pleasing the Holy Spirit of God; and you are not doing your duty, and are grieving the Holy Spirit of God. For simply: because that Spirit is the Spirit of God, He is a Holy Spirit, who tries to make you--O man and not animal--holy; a moral, and spiritual, and good being. Because you are a moral and spiritual being, God's Spirit exercises over you a moral power which He does not exercise over the plants and animals. He works not merely on your body and your brain: but on your heart and immortal soul. But if you choose to be immoral, when He is trying to keep you moral; if you choose to be carnal like the brutes, while He is trying to make you spiritual, like Jesus Christ, from whom He proceeds: then, oh then, tremble, and beware, and be ashamed before the very flowers which grow in your own garden-bed; for they fulfil the law which God has given them. They are what they ought to be, each after its kind. But you are not what you ought to be, after your kind; which is a good man, or a good woman, or a good child. Oh beware lest the Lord should fulfil in you the awful words of this Psalm; lest He should hide His face from you, and you be troubled; and lest when He takes away your breath you should die, and turn again to your dust; and find, too late, that the wages of sin are death--death not merely of the body, but of the soul. Rather repent, and amend, and remember that most blessed, and yet most awful fact--that God's Spirit is with you from your baptism until now, putting into your heart good desires, and ready to enable you--if you will--to bring those good desires to good effect: instead of leaving them only as good intentions, with which, says the too true proverb, hell is paved.