Spirit in that society
which He has established to be His body. It stands to reason that if
real fellowship in the life of Christ is the privilege of the
Christian, this must be a greater thing by far than any preparatory
gift of acquittal or justification, which indeed has its value simply
in virtue of that to which it admits us. St. Paul then loves to
contrast the new {186} manhood of believers in Christ, the life in
Christ, in all its moral characteristics, with the old manhood,
enslaved to sin, as it existed substantially identical in its bondage
under the outwardly differing conditions of Gentile and Jewish society.
And as that old life of our race had a unity which St. Paul believed
was due to a common origin in the first man Adam, so he thought of
Christ as a second Adam--the 'last Adam'--a spiritual progenitor from
whom was to be derived another human race by spiritual generation with
a better unity of its own; or rather a new spiritual progenitor from
whom the whole of the old race might gradually derive, by spiritual
regeneration, a new life, which should penetrate and spread, and oust
the corruption of the old manhood, till the whole was redeemed and
ushered into the glory for which it had been originally destined.

And here, in the passage we are now to read, St. Paul develops the
thought of the influence of Adam and his sin upon the human race, and
draws from it an argument for the deeper and greater influence of the
New Man upon the same race, reconstituted under a new head.

Adam's sin--the disobedience of the one man--had a disastrous effect
upon his race as a {187} whole. It introduced sin, and through sin its
penalty, death; and it passed to all mankind--the penalty, because also
the sin. All men sinned in fact, and all died. This can be stated
without exception. It is quite true that where there is no special law
to instruct men, they may sin ignorantly, and therefore without its
being imputed to them as guilt; yet the sin is there all the same, and
its presence, before the Mosaic law was given to enlighten men, was
marked by the reign of death, even in the case of persons innocent of
any actual sin like Adam's. Sin then, as marked by death, exists
universally, apart from any knowledge of it or even any actual offence,
as the effect of Adam's transgression upon his whole race. But to Adam
corresponds in the divine purpose Christ. He is the new head of the
race--to transmit the free gift of l