t's view, the superstitious atheist's
view. And if death be upon the whole normally a blessing, then
assuredly it cannot be a punishment brought upon man by sin. The
common hypothesis of our mortality namely, that sin, hereditarily
lodged in the centre of man's life, spreads its dynamic virus
thence until it appears as death in the periphery, expending its
final energy within the material sphere in the dissolution of the
physical frame is totally opposed to the spirit of philosophy and
to the most lucid results of science. Science announces death
universally as the initial point of new life.4

The New Testament does not teach that natural death, organic
separation, is the fruit of sin, that, if man had not sinned, he
would have lived forever on the earth. But it teaches that moral
death, misery, is the consequence of sin. The pains and
afflictions which sometimes come upon the good without fault of
theirs do yet spring from human faults somewhere, with those
exceptions alone that result from the necessary contingencies of
finite creatures, exposures outside the sphere of human
accountability. With this qualification, it would be easy to show
in detail that the sufferings of the private individual and of
mankind at large are, directly or indirectly, the products of
guilt, violated law. All the woes, for instance, of poverty are
the results of selfishness, pride, ignorance, and vice. And it is
the same with every other class of miseries.

"The world in Titanic immortality Writhes beneath the burning
mountain of its sins."

3 Herod. i. 31; Cic. Tusc. Quast. i. 47.

4 Klencke, Das Buch vom Tode. Entwurf einer Lehre vom Sterben in
der Natur und vom Tode des Mensehen insbesondere. Fur denkende
Freunde der Wissenschaft.

Had there been no sin, men's lives would have glided on like the
placid rivers that flow through the woodlands. They would have
lived without strife or sorrow, grown old without sadness or
satiety, and died without a pang or a sigh. But, alas! sin so
abounds in the world that "there is not a just man that lives and
sins not;" and it is a truth whose omnipresent jurisdiction can
neither be avoided nor resisted that every kind of sin, every
offence against Divine order, shall somewhere, at some time, be
judged as it deserves. He who denies this only betrays the
ignorance which conceals from him a pervading law of inevitable
application, only reveals the degradation and insensibility which
do not allow