ithin limits, but it is not
final; and what the New Testament teaches, or rather assumes, about the
relation of sin and death, is one of the ways in which we are made
sensible that it is not final. Sin and death do not belong to unrelated
worlds. As far as man is concerned, the two worlds, to use an inadequate
figure, intersect; and at one point in the line of their intersection sin
and death meet and interpenetrate. In the indivisible experience of man
he is conscious that they are parts or aspects of the same thing.

That this is what Scripture means when it assumes the connection of death
and sin is not to be refuted by pointing either to the third chapter of
Genesis or to the fifth of Romans. It does not, for example, do justice
either to Genesis or to St. Paul to say, as has been said, that according
to their representation, 'Death--not spiritual, but natural death--is the
direct consequence of sin and its specific penalty.' In such a dictum,
the distinctions again mislead. To read the third chapter of Genesis in
this sense would mean that what we had to find in it was a mythological
explanation of the origin of physical death. But does any one believe
that any Bible writer was ever curious about this question? or does any
one believe that a mythological solution of the problem, how death
originated--a solution which _ex hypothesi_ has not a particle of truth
or even of meaning in it--could have furnished the presupposition for the
fundamental doctrine of the Christian religion, that Christ died for our
sins, and that in Him we have our forgiveness through His blood? A truth
which has appealed so powerfully to man cannot be sustained on a
falsehood. That the third chapter of Genesis is mythological in form, no
one who knows what mythology is will deny; but even mythology is not made
out of nothing, and in this chapter every atom is 'stuff o' the
conscience.' What we see in it is conscience, projecting as it were in a
picture on a screen its own invincible, dear-bought, despairing
conviction that sin and death are indissolubly united--that from death
the sinful race can never get away--that it is part of the indivisible
reality of sin that the shadow of death darkens the path of the sinner,
and at last swallows him up. It is this also which is in the mind of St.
Paul when he says that by one man sin entered into the world and death by
sin. It is not the origin of death he is interested in, nor the origin