epted it as such on the authority of
inspiration. With all his reverence for the Old Testament, Paul accepted
nothing from it that did not speak to his conscience, and waken echoes
there; and what so spoke to him from the third chapter of Genesis was not
a mythical story of how death invaded Paradise, but the profound
experience of the human race expressed in the story, an experience in
which sin and death inter-penetrate, interpret, and in a sense constitute
each other. To us they are what they are only in relation to each other,
and when we deny the relation we see the reality of neither. This is the
truth, as I apprehend it, of all we are taught either in the Old
Testament or in the New about the relation of sin and death. It is part
of the greater truth that what we call the physical and spiritual worlds
are ultimately one, being constituted with a view to each other; and most
of the objections which are raised against it are special cases of the
objections which are raised against the recognition of this ultimate
unity. So far as they are such, it is not necessary to discuss them
further; and so far as the ultimate unity of the natural and the
spiritual is a truth rather to be experienced than demonstrated, it is
not probable that much can be done by argument to gain acceptance for the
idea that sin and death have essential relations to each other. But
there are particular objections to this idea to which it may be worth
while to refer.

There is, to begin with, the undoubted fact that many people live and die
without, consciously at least, recognising this relation. The thought of
death may have had a very small place in their lives, and when death
itself comes it may, for various reasons, be a very insignificant
experience to them. It may come in a moment, suddenly, and give no time
for feeling; or it may come as the last step in a natural process of
decay, and arrest life almost unconsciously; or it may come through a
weakness in which the mind wanders to familiar scenes of the past, living
these over again, and in a manner escaping by so doing the awful
experience of death itself; or it may come in childhood before the moral
consciousness is fully awakened, and moral reflection and experience
possible. This last case, properly speaking, does not concern us; we do
not know how to define sin in relation to those in whom the moral
consciousness is as yet undeveloped: we only know that somehow or other
the