of sin either, but the fact that sin and death hang together. And just
because sin is sin, this is not a fact of natural history, or a fact
which natural history can discredit. Scripture has no interest in
natural history, nor does such an interest help us to understand it. It
is no doubt perfectly true that to the biologist death is part of the
indispensable machinery of nature; it is a piece of the mechanism without
which the movement of the whole would be arrested; to put it so, death to
the biologist is part of the same whole as life, or life and death are
for him aspects of one thing. One can admit this frankly without
compromising, because without touching, the other and deeper truth which
is so interesting and indeed so vital alike in the opening pages of
revelation and in its consummation in the Atonement. The biologist, when
he deals with man, and with his life and death, deliberately deals with
them in abstraction, as merely physical phenomena; to him man is a piece
of nature, and he is nothing more. But the Biblical writers deal with
man in the integrity of his being, and in his relations to God; they
transcend the distinction of natural and moral, because for God it is not
final: they are sensible of the unity in things which the everyday mind,
for practical purposes, finds it convenient to keep apart. It is one
great instance of this that they are sensible of the unity of sin and
death. We may call sin a spiritual thing, but the man who has never felt
the shadow of death fall upon it does not know what that spiritual thing
is: and we may call death a natural thing, but the man who has not felt
its natural pathos deepen into tragedy as he faced it with the sense of
sin upon him does not know what that natural thing is. We are here, in
short, at the vanishing point of this distinction--God is present, and
nature and spirit interpenetrate in His presence. We hear much in other
connections of the sacramental principle, and its importance for the
religious interpretation of nature. It is a sombre illustration of this
principle if we say that death is a kind of sacrament of sin. It is in
death, ultimately, that the whole meaning of sin comes home to the
sinner; he has not sounded it to its depths till he has discovered that
this comes into it at last. And we must not suppose that when Paul read
the third chapter of Genesis he read it as a mythological explanation of
the origin of physical death, and acc