ng of all the earth has ever lived but that it died, or will die.
Not a tree has ever grown, not a plant has ever opened its leaves,
blades or petals to the sun; not a seed has ever germinated, nor a
flower ever bloomed that was not doomed to die. Did all this come upon
all nature because Adam ate an apple? Would all the beasts of the
field and the birds of the air, paraded before Adam that he might name
them, be still living with him in the Garden of Eden, if he had not
sinned? Would all the plants and trees and flowers that grew and
bloomed in the Garden of Eden in the days of Adam and Eve's innocence
be still there, with the same leaves and blooms, just as they were, if
man had not sinned?

These questions I know look silly. But if we are forced to accept the
premise, we must be prepared to accept the natural conclusion to which
it leads. And if death--physical death--as orthodoxy has always
taught, entered the world only because of Adam's sin, it naturally and
inevitably leads to the conclusions I have indicated.

Another question presents itself. Can perfection, or that which is
perfect, fall? If either man or angels were created pure, perfect,
holy, and in the image and likeness of God, how can such a being fall?
It seems to me that it would be just as possible for God himself to
fall. The very fact of the fall,--if such a fact exists or ever
existed,--of either man or angel, is in itself conclusive proof of some
moral imperfection or weakness somewhere. That man is morally
imperfect is freely conceded. In plain words, he is a sinner. But was
he ever otherwise? The farther back we trace him the worse he appears
on the general average. All the Bible outside of this one story in
Genesis, as well as all history attests this fact. Then may it not be
a fact, that while man is a sinner, he always has been so; that he
never fell, for he had been nowhere (morally) to fall from but always
has been and still is morally imperfect and incomplete, but ever
striving onward and upward?

But supposing this story of the fall to be true, what was the penalty
for it,--physical death, as we have seen, or eternal spiritual death,
or both? After all the preaching and writing about eternal death,
damnation, hell-fire and brimstone as a result of Adam's sin, I could
not find any such doctrine taught in the story of the fall, nor
anywhere else in the Old Testament, and but very vaguely, if at all, in
the New.

The stor