death by sin, and so death hath passed upon All MEN, for that ALL have sinned. As sin was in the world before the Jewish law, so, therefore OBJECTOR. Pause. Sin is not imputed where there is no law. How can there be transgression where there is no command to be transgressed? PAUL. - By the admission of your own Rabbins, death is the effect of sin. But does nobody die but Jews? Were men immortal till the Jewish law was given? Death did reign from Adam to Moses, even over those who had not, like Adam, transgressed any positive command. And this Adam represents the Messiah in a most important particular, that the universality of the evil brought in by the one corresponds to the universality of the blessing offered by the other. Yea, the blessing transcends the evil, and in that respect they are unlike. For if through the offence of one the many be dead, much more the grace of God and the gift which is through the grace of one man, Jesus Christ, have abounded to the many. The grace not only remedies the evil, but gives a surplus of blessing beside. And in another respect the gift is not like the bane. For the judgment came through one offence to condemnation, but the free gift is of many offences to justification. The pardon is offered, not only to that one sin of Adam, but to all the sins that followed after. For if by the offence of one, death reigned by one, much more they who receive the abounding grace and gift of justification shall reign in life by one, Jesus Christ. Therefore, as I was first saying, as by the offence of one, judgment came upon all men unto condemnation, so, since the remedy is coextensive with it, the free-given gospel comes to all men unto justification of life. For as by one man's disobedience the many were made sinners, so by the obedience of one shall the many be made righteous. OBJECTOR. Admitting all you say, what need of the gospel? Make the law universal, for that makes men right eous. PAUL. Just the contrary! The effect of the law was that sin abounded more, for it revealed a perfect rule, but did not supply the grace to bring men up to its requirements. Not so of the gospel, for under that, where sin abounds, grace doth superabound; that as sin hath reigned unto death, even so might grace reign, through righteousness, unto eternal life, through Jesus Christ our Lord. 1. In what way physical death entered the world by sin, will be quite evident from the way that Christianity proposes to abolish it. The evil will be apparent from the nature of the remedy; the state from which man fell, from the state to which he is to be restored. Christianity does not propose to do away the fact of man's transition from the natural to the spiritual world, but rather to do away with all the death-like environments which it now has. Those being removed, death is growth; the growth of man into the angel, amid the falling away of the hindrances and clogs of the inmost, the immortal life. It proposes to restore his nature to its primal order, to bring a fair and goodly creation out of its chaos, and then the inclosed immortal will break away from its integuments, not by the agencies of disease, but of superabundant life unfolding from within outward, casting off the natural body and assuming the spiritual, just as the covering of the worm falls away that the insect may rise with spangled wings into the air. This is not death, but health and life for ever enlarging. So that the death which Adam introduced was not the fact of human mortality, but the dismal drapery thrown about it. 2. It is obvious to observe, on a careful analysis of the Pauline philosophy, how much more than his proper share of the evil brought upon the world, our common ancestor has been made to bear. Was ever the memory of man so wronged and abused by his children! So far from laying off upon him the whole business of man's fall, Paul does no more than designate how the work began, and how sin was first introduced. His successors kept adding to the work which he only commenced, and death passed upon all men, not because Adam sinned for them vicariously, but in that ALL have sinned. He sinned, and there, alas! began the work of the degradation of his species; the balance between good and evil began to dip the wrong way, his successors kept adding to the weight, sin became more facile with every generation, till the scale came heavily down. And this is THE FALL OF MAN. * 3. Hence the Adam of St. Paul is not merely an historical person. He is only so treated in the foregoing extract, in order to keep up the antithesis between him and Christ. Not so when he applies his doctrine and appeals to individual experience! There it is the Adam of consciousness. It is the "old man," which is to be "crucified" within us, or which is to be put off as corrupt, in contrast with the new man, which is the ingenerated and indwelling Christ. So then the Adam of St. Paul in this connection is a corrupt past, which has become immanent in the present. It is an inherited, disordered nature, impersonated in each individual. With primitive man began the descending series, and it kept on till the time of Christ. Then the ascending series began, and it will keep on till it comes up to the level of that height where began the march of humanity. Or to seek an image which perhaps will give us at once the Apostle's unclouded meaning: He regards the race in its totality, as an organic whole, as making one orb of being. With the first *Rom. vi. 6; Eph. iv. 22; Col. iii. 9. |