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Breathing an atmosphere tainted with moral evil, seeing and hearing sin in our daily walks, we are in no small danger of overlooking its malignity. The word "sin" is to many obscure. It is seldom used in common life. It belongs to theology and the pulpit. According to Scripture there is nothing so evil, so deformed, so ruinous, as sin. To do wrong is more pernicious than to incur all the calamities which nature or the evil the heart, this is human malice can heap upon us. Sin, violated duty, the evil of the heart, this is the only evil of which Scripture takes account. It was from this that Christ came to redeem us. Scripture leads us to connect with sin or wrong-doing the ideas of evil, wretchedness, and debasement, more strongly than with anything else.

I. OUR NATURES TESTIFY THAT SIN IS THE CHIEF OF EVILS. Evil has various forms, these set in two divisions, natural and moral; pain or suffering springing from outward conduct and events, independent of our will: and evil related to character and conduct, and inspired by the will. Vice is manifestly more to be dreaded than pain. All will agree that excellence of character is the supreme good, and that baseness of soul and of action involves something worse than suffering. Our very nature teaches the doctrine of Christianity, that sin or moral evil ought of all evils to inspire most abhorrence and fear.

II. EXPERIENCE TESTIFIES THAT SIN IS THE CHIEF OF EVILS. Though sin sometimes prospers, and never meets its full retribution on earth, yet, on the whole, it produces more present suffering than all things else; so that experience warns us against sin or wrong-doing as the chief evil we can incur. To do wrong is to inflict the surest injury on our own peace.

III. THE MISERIES OF DISOBEDIENCE TO CONSCIENCE AND GOD ARE NOT EXHAUSTED IN THIS LIFE. Sin deserves, calls for, and will bring down, future, greater misery. This Christianity, and this nature, teaches. Some, indeed, assert that punishment is confined to the present state; that in changing worlds we shall change our characters, and that moral evil is to be buried with the body in the grave. But to suppose no connection to exist between the present and the future character is to take away the use of the present state. It is even plainly implied in Scripture, that we shall suffer much more from sin, evil tempers, irreligion, in the future world, than we suffer here. I have spoken of the pains and penalties of moral evil or of wrongdoing, in the world to come. How long they will endure I know not.

(W. E. Channing, D.D.)

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KJV: Fools make a mock at sin: but among the righteous there is favour.

WEB: Fools mock at making atonement for sins, but among the upright there is good will.