life on our globe, Christian teachers
both in East and in West--St. Augustine as well as St. Athanasius--had
taught that death is the law of physical nature, that it had been in
the world before man, and that 'man was by nature mortal,' because, as
being animal, he was subject to death. How, then, do they interpret
the language of Scripture? In this way: They hold that if man had been
true to his spiritual nature, the supernatural life, the life in God,
would have blunted the forces of corruption, and lifted him into a
higher and immortal state.

Certainly, in some sense, death, as we know it, for man, is regarded,
especially in the New Testament, as the penalty of sin. But then what
do we mean by death? If sin is said to have introduced human death,
Christ is constantly said to have abolished it. 'This is the bread
that cometh down from heaven, that a man may eat thereof and not die.'
'Whosoever believeth on me shall never die.' 'Christ Jesus abolished
death.' Sin, then, we may suppose, only introduced death in some sense
such as that in which Christ abolished it. Christ has not abolished
the physical transition from this world to the invisible world, but He
has robbed it of its terror, its sting, its misery. Apart from sin we
may suppose man would not have died; that is, he would never have had
that horrible experience which he has called death. There would have
been only some transition full of a glorious hope from one state of
being to another.

We are again in the region of conjecture. All that I am here
interested in asserting is that Christianity never has held to the
position that human sin first introduced death _into the world_. What
it has taught is that _human_ death, as men have known it, with its
horror and its misery, has represented not God's intention for man, but
the curse of sin.

{234}

VII.--Now I have endeavoured to face and meet the points which are
urged in the name of science against the Christian doctrine of the
Fall. I have endeavoured to point out that what is essential to
Christianity is to believe in the reality of moral freedom, and the
consequent reality of sin, as something which need not have been in the
individual, or in the race considered as a unity. This is all that
Christianity is really pledged to maintain. In maintaining this we are
maintaining what is absolutely essential to the moral well-being of the
race, and, moreover, what has the deepest roots in man's