bringeth forth death" (James i. 15); "By one man's offence death reigned" (Rom. v. 17); He "that had the power of death, that is, the devil" (Heb. ii. 14); "By man came death. . . . In Adam all die" (1 Cor. xv. 21, 22); "The creature was made subject to vanity.

The whole creation groaneth and travaileth in pain together until now (Rom. viii. 20, 22). There are many other passages bearing upon the nature and fruits of sin, which, however, may all be classed under those now quoted. With regard to them it must be at once admitted that, if they are looked at apart from the context in which they stand, they convey the popular impression on this subject. But many passages bearing on other matters might be adduced to show, that most erroneous views have been founded on the very words of Scripture, by their being interpreted without regard to the place which they occupy in the sacred volume. A glance at almost any extravagant position which has been taken up, in the history of heresy, on the alleged authority of Scripture, might illustrate this. As to the words now quoted we have—1, A definition of sin. It is "the transgression of the law"-the law of righteousness and of love, under which man was originally put, and which in its obligations continues ever and universally binding on the human race. 2, The curse was incurred when the law was transgressed. "In the day that thou eatest thereof thou shalt surely die;" ""The wages of sin is death;" "Dust thou art, and unto dust thou shalt return;" "Death passed upon all men, for that all have sinned;" "Sin, when it is finished, bringeth forth death." It is implied in such expressions that when man became sinful and guilty, when his whole spiritual life was defiled-the understanding darkened, the heart corrupted, the feeling deadened, the desires set loose from the loving restraint of law-all the elements of death were realized in him. He became dead to the claims of his Maker, liable to a multitude of mental and bodily diseases, to the death of the body, and the more awful death of the soul-its eternal guiltiness and consequent exclusion from everlasting life. 3, Two persons are specially associated with this death mentioned in the passages quoted. These are, Satan and Man. The former is said to have the power of death, and the latter is represented as having received the curse through him. He "who hath the power of death, that is, the devil." แ Hast thou eaten of the tree whereof I commanded thee that thou shouldest not eat? And the man said, The woman whom thou gavest to be with me, she gave me of the tree and I did eat. And the Lord said unto the woman, What is this that thou hast done? And the woman said, The serpent beguiled me and I did

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eat" (Gen. iii. 12, 13). 4, Death to man comes by man's sin. "By man came death. In Adam all die" are the words of the Holy Ghost spoken by Paul to the Church at Corinth (1 Cor. xv. 21, 22); but a little attention to the context sets them in an entirely different light than that in which they are seen when looked at as they are now quoted. They form part of an argument in which the resurrection of the dead is brought into the sphere of man's hope in virtue of the rising again of the Lord Jesus Christ. "Christ," says the apostle, "is risen from the dead, and become the first fruits of them that slept." As if he had said to the Christian Jews at Corinth, When your fathers presented the first fruits to the priesthood in tabernacle and temple, those ears of ripened grain told this tale above all others, that the harvest was near at hand, that in the valleys and on the sunny slopes in the lands of Israel and of Judah there were waving fields which must soon be reaped. So is it here: Jesus Christ is risen, and that rising again of Him who is the Prince of life is to you both the proof of the truth of the resurrection of the body, and to you the pledge that ye too shall rise again. There is hope for you then both as to soul and body-" This corruptible shall put on incorruption, this mortal shall put on immortality." "For since by man came death"-but to whom? even to man, not to angels, not to lower creatures, but to man, born immortal, and in the bright image even of the Holy One Himself" even so by man came also the resurrection of the dead." But by what man? By the man Christ Jesus, the eternal Son of the everlasting Father, who took on him our nature, became bone of our bone, and flesh of our flesh, by Him cometh this resurrection from the dead." Yes, "for as in Adam all die"-all who are in Adam, his seed then-"so in Christ shall all be made alive"all who are in Christ shall be raised up, all his seed shall have part in the resurrection unto eternal life. The contrast is between Christ and Adam, and between the fruits of the obedience of Christ and the fruits of the disobedience of Adam. The question of death in regard to the lower animals, and whether it came upon them for the first time in consequence of the sin of Adam, is not even in the remotest or the most indirect way alluded to.

The same line of remark may be applied to the yet more direct statements in Romans, chap. v. The apostle having referred to the sinner's justification by faith, traces its fruits, from peace with God up through a chain of Christian graces to that link of hope which binds the heart of the saved man, even while on the earth, to him who is on the throne grace in the heavens, says to the Roman Christians, The explanation

of

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of all this is to be found in the fact, on which we should ever fall back, even that "when we were yet without strength, in due time Christ died for the ungodly." The simple mention of this leads him to dwell on the rich blessings implied as being for them who believe. If, he argues, such gifts were bestowed upon us when we were weak, without strength, ungodly, enemies, what may we not count on now that we are friends of this blessing-bestowing, gracious God. Our Lord Jesus Christ, he continues, is here the centre of this system of blessing: by him we have now received the atonement. "Wherefore as by one man sin entered into the world"-that world, and no other in this place, which he came to redeem-" and death"-to this same world-"by sin; and so death passed upon all men, for that all have sinned." It passed on the sinning ones in the world; not upon the lower animals, for they have no standing here, but on man-Adam's seed again, the human This is most distinctly declared here, and nothing but this; and to make the whole subject yet even more clear, the apostle continues his argument into the heart of the blessings purchased for him by Christ, which he shows not only make up for what had been lost in Adam, but which actually triumph over the effects of his sin. "Grace," he says, 'reigns through righteousness unto eternal life by Jesus Christ our Lord." We thus conclude that, as in the other passages, so here there is not the slightest reference to any connection between man's sin and death to the lower animals. But had that sin no bearing on them? Is it not asserted in Romans viii. that such was the case, when we are told of the creature being made subject to vanity, and of the whole creation, or every creature, groaning and travailing in pain together until now? These words have suffered as much as the other from being isolated from the context, and made the subject of countless fanciful interpretations. Lying between the statements of the soul's full recognition of the fatherhood of God in verse 15, and of the sovereign foreknowledge of God in verse 29, we meet with direct references to that discipline which characterizes the Father's ways with his wilful children. Sufferings, sorrows, trials abound, but these are not in anger. They are only in love. And so the apostle hastens to bring out the blessed truth in verse 28-" We know that all things work together for good to them that love God." But before he reaches this, his view expands. The Spirit of God gives him a direct glimpse of a suffering world as well as of a suffering soul, and the fruits of this glimpse are a view of the influence of the carnal mind, in a sphere out of and beyond itself, on the one hand, and, on the other, the hope of blessing to that which

now suffers in a certain sense through the existence of the carnal mind in the world-" The creature itself also shall be delivered from the bondage of corruption into the glorious liberty of the sons of God." And this promise to the creature tallies with the whole scope of the Word of God when its future is referred to. But whence the "vanity" and the bondage? The answer must be, from the sin of man. The references here are not to death, but to suffering. The creature does suffer through man's sin. Instead of finding in man a friend, a protector, an unceasing benefactor, as they would have found had he not sinned, they meet with a tyrant master. Their suffering caught the eye and sympathy of Paul, as they will ever do of all generous natures. Their groans were heard in his heart, but entering fully into the prospects as to man, opened up to him by the Spirit of God, he anticipated blessing for the creature in the measure in which man was to be blessed. In part this is realized in the ministration of grace day by day. When a man gets good for himself, the very lower animals put under him come in for a share-" The righteous man regardeth the life of his beast." The Bible testimony on the subject now before us thus is :— Man's sin brought death to the whole human race into the world. The death of the lower animals is to be looked at from another point of view altogether. The key to the difficulty is, moreover, to be found in the Word of God.

Many vain attempts have been made to bring about a manifest harmony between science and Christianity on this subject, from the erroneous impression that they were directly antagonistic to each other. Some have broached the theory that man's sin had retrospective bearings; and have alleged that, because man was to sin, the creatures that lived before he appeared were made subject to death! Such an hypothesis, even when illustrated with all the ability of Dr. Hitchcock, does not meet the case, and thus need not be farther characterized. Others have given imagination full scope in devising a scheme of reconcilement, and have made the notable discovery that the lower animals were made subject to death, because of the sins of the angels that kept not their first estate. This is as little worthy of attention as the former. Some, with deeper penetration, have tried to make out that "death was ever a universal law, from the operation of which, in the present constitution of things, no organized being can be exempt;" but this does not solve the difficulty, because the Bible plainly declares, as has been seen, "that all death to man is the result of man's sin." If, however, you make death, such as the body is now subject to, a law of organized being in all its conditions

in all time, you do not accept the Bible testimony-you put the human organism, even of man unfallen, under a law which we know was co-extensive with the lower animals. Others, again, have sought for the solution in the hypothesis, that the death spoken of as the wages of sin was wholly spiritual. The drawback, if not the positive danger of this view, will appear when it is remembered that the atonement of Christ was made in the body, which had never suffered pollution from sin, but suffered as the body of Him who died to rescue body and soul ultimately from the power of sin. This is in part realized in our coming under the power of a higher life; and the resurrection of the just shall be the full triumph of it, while the resurrection of the unjust will be the separation of the raised body to the eternal consequences of sin. To limit the effects of sin to what is purely spiritual, is perilous in the extreme. Is there, then, a ground of harmony which will both grant all that the Scripture demands, and turn aside every weapon formed against it? I think so. There may have been a law of change of some kind associated with the unfallen man. We are not told what it was; but the strong statements of Scripture, on the accursed character of all death to man, leads us to believe that it could not have been that of the death which the lower animals died. But the Spirit of God recognizes death as a law under which the lower animals were. "They are the beasts that perish." We find man made in the image of God-man knowing not death as the beasts did, man with a body set aside to a higher destiny-degraded to the level of the beasts that perish, because of his sin. Here we have the degradation of the body of man because of man's sin; and this, we are confident, is all that is required in order to turn away the shafts of unbelief from the Bible narrative.

The views given above of the influence of Adam's sin on his own spiritual nature, and on that of his descendants, can, of course, be associated with its influence on his body, only as it is seen to be the cause of physical degradation to him whose body was better and higher than that of the beasts because of its connection with the divine inbreathed life whose destinies it was to follow. The unfallen soul secured the continued and unaltering dignity of the body in which it dwelt, in kingly way as in a palace; and even yet the power of the spiritual nature over the physical goes far to suggest how spirit might have exalted it and have given to matter its own permanency. Moses, when in direct communion with God, could fast forty days; Elijah was taken up in the body into heaven; so was it with Christ also.

Before we pass from the third chapter, there are three other topics to