differently, to a child knowing nothing of the law, the law, or
its purposed violation, sin, does not exist, is dead: he therefore
enjoys peace of conscience; but when he becomes aware of the law
and its authority, if he then break it, sin is generated and
immediately stings, and spiritual happiness dies.

These passages are sufficient to show that Christianity uses the
words "death" and "life" in a spiritual sense, penetrating to the
hidden realities of the soul. To speak thus of the guilty,
unbelieving man as dead, and only of the virtuous, believing man
as truly alive, may seem at first a startling use of figurative
language. It will not appear so when we notice its appropriateness
to the case, or remember the imaginative nature of Oriental speech
and recollect how often we employ the same terms in the same way
at the present time. We will give a few examples of a similar use
of language outside of the Scriptures. That which threatens or
produces death is sometimes, by a figure, identified with death.
Orpheus, in the Argonautika, speaks of "a terrible serpent whose
yawning jaw is full of death." So Paul says he was "in deaths
oft." Ovid says, "The priests poured out a dog's hot life on the
altar of Hecate at the crossing of two roads." The Pythagoreans,
when one of their number became impious and abandoned, were
accustomed to consider him dead, and to erect a tomb to him, on
which his name and his age at the time of his moral decease were
engraved. The Roman law regarded an excommunicated citizen as
civilis mortuus, legally dead. Fenelon writes, "God has kindled a
flame at the bottom of every heart, which should always burn as a
lamp for him who hath lighted it; and all other life is as death."
Chaucer says, in one of his Canterbury Tales, referring to a man
enslaved by dissolute habits,

"But certes, he that haunteth swiche delices Is ded while that he
liveth in tho' vices."

And in a recent poem the following lines occur:

"From his great eyes The light has fled: When faith departs, when
honor dies, The man is dead."

To be subjected to the lower impulses of our nature by degraded
habits of vice and criminality is wretchedness and death. The true
life of man consists, the Great Teacher declared, "not in the
abundance of the things which he possesseth, but rather in his
being rich toward God," in conscious purity of heart, energy of
faith, and union with the Holy Spirit. "He that lives in sensual
pleasure is