Chapter 26

SERMON XXVI. SINS OF PARENTS VISITED

Eversley. 19th Sunday after Trinity, 1868.

Ezekiel xviii. 1-4. "The word of the Lord came unto me again, saying, What mean ye, that ye use this proverb concerning the land of Israel, saying, The fathers have eaten sour grapes, and the children's teeth are set on edge? As I live, saith the Lord God, ye shall not have occasion any more to use this proverb in Israel. Behold, all souls are mine; as the soul of the father, so also the soul of the son is mine: the soul that sinneth, it shall die."

This is a precious chapter, and a comfortable chapter likewise, for it helps us to clear up a puzzle which has tormented the minds of men in all ages whenever they have thought of God, and of whether God meant them well, or meant them ill.

For all men have been tempted. We are tempted at times to say,--The fathers have eaten sour grapes, and the children's teeth are set on edge. That is, we are punished not for what we have done wrong, but for what our fathers did wrong. One man says,--My forefathers squandered their money, and I am punished by being poor. Or, my forefathers ruined their constitutions, and, therefore, I am weakly and sickly. My forefathers were ignorant and reckless, and, therefore, I was brought up ignorant, and in all sorts of temptation. And so men complain of their ill-luck and bad chance, as they call it, till they complain of God, and say, as the Jews said in Ezekiel's time, God's ways are unequal--partial--unfair. He is a respecter of persons. He has not the same rule for all men. He starts men unequally in the race of life--some heavily weighted with their father's sins and misfortunes, some helped in every way by their father's virtue and good fortune--and then He expects them all to run alike. God is not just and equal. And then some go on,--men who think themselves philosophers, but are none--to say things concerning God of which I shall say nothing here, lest I put into your minds foolish thoughts, which had best be kept out of them.

But, some of you may say, Is it not so after all? Is it not true? Is not God harder on some than on others? Does not God punish men every day for their father's sins? Does He not say in the Second Commandment that He will do so, and visit the sins of the fathers upon the children to the third and fourth generation; and how can you make that agree with what Ezekiel says,--"The son shall not bear the iniquity of the father." My dear friends, I know that this is a puzzle, and always has been one. Like the old puzzle of God's foreknowledge and our free will, which seem to contradict each other. Like the puzzle that we must help ourselves, and yet that God must help us, which seem to contradict each other. So with this. I believe of it, as of the two others I just mentioned, that there is no real contradiction between the two cases; and that some-when, somehow, somewhere, in the world to come,