0CSB LIBRARY
 
 ANTHROPOLOGY.
 
 Atonement and Law Reviewed. 12mo. 240 pages. 
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 discussion divided into (I) Intellect, (II) Sensibility, 
 (III) Will. Adopted by several schools. 
 
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 Anthropology. Price $1.25. Edited by R. W. Bink- 
 ley. 
 
 To be published at early day : CHKIWTOLOGY AND MEDI- 
 ATION, and DOCTRINES OF GRACE.
 
 ANTHROPOLOGY. 
 
 A DISCUSSION CHIEFLY OF THE PROBLEM OF EVIL J OF MAN AS A 
 
 SINNER ; THE RELATION* OF THE FIRST MAN AND HIS 
 
 POSTERITY ; SIN AND PHYSICAL EVIL, ETC. 
 
 BY S. G. BURNEY, D.D., LL.D., 
 
 Late Professor \ Systematic- Theology in Cumberland University. 
 
 NASHVILLE, TENN.: 
 n PRESBYTERIAN PUBLISHING Horss. 
 1894.
 
 EDITOR'S PREFACE. 
 
 The name of S. G. Burney upon the title-page of this hook is 
 a sufficient guarantee of its merit. The work is given to the 
 public because the author's candid and scholarly discussion 
 of the subjects treated cannot fail to be helpful to every stu- 
 dent who seeks clear, rational and scriptural views upon 
 Anthropology. This volume is published in the discharge 
 of a trust committed to me by the author and in response 
 to the demand of those who were students of Theology under 
 him, as well as of others who appreciate his ability and value 
 his teachings. 
 
 The editor acknowledges gratefully the valuable assistance 
 rendered by Rev. C. H. Bell, D.D., and Rev. B. G. Mitchell, A.M. 
 
 R. \V.
 
 CONTENTS. 
 
 CHAPTER I. Origin of the Mind or Soul, ... - 1 
 
 Section 1. Pre-existentism - 2 
 
 Section 2. Creationism, 4 
 
 Section 3. Traducianism, 8 
 
 CHAPTER II. Imputation, 16 
 
 CHAPTER III. Sin, 27 
 
 Section 1. The terms used to give us the idea of sin, - 28 
 
 Section 2. Sin considered as lawlessness, - 34 
 
 Section 3. The ground of sovereignty, - 37 
 
 CHAPTER IV. Sin (continued), 53 
 
 CHAPTER V. Sin (continued), - - 
 
 Section 1. Sin as an act, 
 
 Section 2. Sin as a state, - - - - . - (iS 
 
 Section 3. Sin as a state subjects us to punishment, - 74 
 
 Section 4. The relation of sin and its punishment, - 75 
 
 Section 5. Sin and its pardon, 7S 
 
 CHAPTER VI. The Relation of Sin to Natural or Physi- 
 cal Evil, - 83 
 
 Section 1. Does sin sustain a casual relation to all 
 
 evil, physical as well as moral ? - - - - S3 
 
 Section 2. Are death and all human sutt'erings penal? - SS 
 
 CHAPTER VII. The Relation of Sin to Natural or Physi- 
 cal Evil (continued), 103 
 
 CHAPTER VIII. Sin, Transgression and Iniquity, - - 122 
 
 CHAPTER IX. Life and Death, 134 
 
 CHAPTER X. Necessitated Virtue; or, Holiness and 
 
 Probation, 154 
 
 CHAPTER XI. General Conclusions, .... 170
 
 PREFATORY NOTE. 
 
 One learned and greatly beloved author, who lately passed 
 to the spirit-land where all mysteries are unfolded to his 
 inquiring mind, left in the form of lectures to the Theologi- 
 cal classes of Cumberland University, the contents of the 
 following pages, wherein the essential facts relating to the 
 perplexing problem of sin, especially the moral relation of 
 the first man and his children, seem to be more fully harmon- 
 ized than in any discussion hitherto published. With char- 
 acteristic modesty, he does not claim to have obviated all 
 difficulties, but he has certainly thrown a flood of light there- 
 on, and in a scholarly and masterly manner vindicated the 
 ways of God, presenting a theory free from absurdities. The 
 reader will be interested and instructed as the author tersely 
 and successfully supports his positions by scripture proofs 
 and by inductive logic. C. H.
 
 INTRODUCTORY. 
 
 Anthropology is literally the doctrine of man. Man is a 
 complex being of numerous relationships. Anthropology, in 
 its most comprehensive sense, treats of man in all the essen- 
 tial and accidental characteristics of his being, and in his di- 
 versified relationships. 
 
 I. It treats of him as an animal and sensuous being, and of 
 his relations as such to the lower animals, to his own species , 
 and to his Creator and Supreme Benefactor. 
 
 II. It treats of him as a rational being, possessing intellect, 
 reason, judgment, understanding ; also sensibilities, affect- 
 tions, desires, and emotions; also freedom and volitional 
 powers. 
 
 III. It treats of him as an aesthetical being, capable of a sense 
 of the beautiful, of enjoying pleasure from the contemplation 
 of the works of nature and art ; also of apprehending and en- 
 joying the grand or sublime in the realms of matter, mind, and 
 morals. 
 
 IV. It treats of him as a moral being, capable of a sense of 
 moral distinctions of right and wrong, of a sense of obligation 
 to his Maker and his neighbor ; also capable of moral retribu- 
 tion through the consciousness of right and wrong doing. 
 
 V. It treats of him as a religious being, capable of a knowl- 
 edge of God as the Supreme Object of reverence, love, and 
 obedience ; also capable of knowing himself as a devout, rev- 
 erent, and obedient child and worshiper of God ; also capable 
 of knowing himself as a sinner, a willful rebel against God, 
 with a heart sensual and devilish, not subordinate to God nor
 
 Vlli. INTRODUCTORY. 
 
 able to give himself a uew and better nature, or to deliver him- 
 self from his opposition to God, or from the fearful conse- 
 quences of his moral corruption and guilt. 
 
 Of the first, second, third and fourth of these several aspects 
 or departments of Anthropology, I have previously treated in 
 a brief and somewhat informal way in Psychology and Ethics. 
 To the fifth Division, particularly the last part of it, viz., man 
 as a sinner, and to the doctrine of salvation by grace, the fol- 
 lowing pages are devoted. 
 
 Before proceeding with the discussion proposed, it may be 
 both interesting and instructive to bring under review certain 
 theories presented by Christian writers in regard to the ori- 
 gin of the mind or soul.
 
 CHAPTER I. 
 
 ORIGIN OF THE MIND OR SOUL. 
 
 MAN is called a rational animal. What distin- 
 tinguishes him from all other animals and el- 
 evates him immensely above them is the posses- 
 sion of a rational and an immortal spirit or soul- 
 Of the origin of the genus homo we have a very 
 brief account in Genesis. "And God said, Let us 
 make man in our image after our likeness. So 
 God created man in his own image, in the image 
 of God created he him ; male and female created 
 he them. And the Lord formed man of the dust of 
 the ground, and breathed into his nostrils the breath 
 of life, and man became a living soul." 
 
 This is by far the most reasonable and satisfactory 
 account that we have of the origin of our bodies. 
 It leaves us no ground for doubt. It, however, gives 
 us no decisive information as to the origin of the 
 spirit, soul or mind, except it was given by God. 
 It does not tell us whether the mind had existence 
 prior to the body, and was breathed into it upon its 
 formation ; or whether it was newly created and 
 united to the body when the body was formed ; or 
 whether it was strictly a concreation of the body. 
 The exact meaning of the words, "breathed into 
 his nostrils the breath of life," is not quite certain.
 
 2 ANTHROPOLOGY. 
 
 What life is meant? The life of the body or that 
 of the spirit, or both? The words, "he became a 
 living sonl," are alike ambiguous. Does soul here 
 mean animal life, as it often does, or does it mean 
 the immortal spirit? These texts do not definitely 
 settle the question of the origin of the soul, except 
 that it comes from God. No other texts throw any 
 material light on the subject. Ecc. iii. 21, xii. 7, 
 Job xii. 10, Isaiah xlii. 5, are sometimes appealed to 
 by disputants, but it is generally conceded that they 
 give no clue to a satisfactory solution of the diffi- 
 culty. (^The question is manifestly a philosophical 
 rather than a biblical one?) It is generally discussed, 
 however, by writers on Systematic Theology. This 
 is done chiefly because of its supposed bearing on 
 the hotly contested doctrine of Original Sin. Dif- 
 ferent persons, however, holding the same theologi- 
 cal creed disagree as to the origin of the soul. 
 
 The principal hypotheses that have been sup- 
 ported by Christian writers are Pre-existentism, 
 Creationism, and Traducianism. 
 
 SEC. I. Pre-extstentism. Pythagoras, Plato 
 with some of his followers, and some of the Cabal- 
 ists among the Jews taught that God, in the be- 
 ginning of the world, created all souls that have 
 been or may be connected with human bodies, 
 one of which unites with a human body when 
 it is formed. Those holding to pre-existence, 
 however, differed as to whether these souls were 
 created specifically for human bodies with which 
 they voluntarily united ; or whether they were
 
 ORIGIN OF THE MIND OR SOUL. 3 
 
 originally designed for a more exalted sphere of 
 activity and enjoyment, and were, as a punish- 
 ment for their apostasy from God, forced into hu- 
 man bodies as into a prison. Plato and others seem 
 to have held the latter opinion. Platonic philoso- 
 phy had no inconsiderable influence upon the 
 Christian church in various respects. Some of its 
 brightest ornaments and ablest defenders believed 
 with Plato that the soul was a part of the divine 
 nature a spark of the Deity. This belief, how- 
 ever, was not universal. Origin believed in pre- 
 existence, but rejetced the idea that the human 
 soul is a part of the Deity. He held with the Pla- 
 tonists in saying that souls sinned before they were 
 united with a body, in which they were inprisoned 
 as a punishment for their sins. 
 
 Some of the Jews, it seems, in the time of Christ 
 were affected with this doctrine of the metempsy- 
 chosis transmigration of souls. This is doubted 
 by many able writers, but John ix. I, 2., and Matt, 
 xvi. 14. seem to admit of no intelligible explana- 
 tion on any other hypothesis. 
 
 The pre-existence of human souls was clearly 
 taught by Justin Martyr (Diat. cum Tryphone Ind.). 
 This has been the common opinion of Christian 
 mystics of ancient and modern times. They usu- 
 ally adhere to the Platonic theory, and regard the 
 soul as a part of the divine nature, from which it 
 proceeds and to which it will again return. The 
 doctrine is now generally abandoned by Christian 
 writers. (See McClintock & Strong, Soul, Origin 
 of.) (His Ch. Doctrine, Shedd.)
 
 4 ANTHROPOLOGY. 
 
 SEC. II. Creationist*. "The advocates of this 
 theory called Creationists believed that the soul is 
 immediately created by God whenever the body is 
 begotten . . . Cyril of Alexandria and Theo- 
 doret among the Fathers in the Greek church, 
 were of this opinion, and Ambrose, Hilary and 
 Jerome in the Latin church. The schoolmen al- 
 most universally professed this doctrine, and gener- 
 ally the followers of Pelagius, with whom the 
 schoolmen, for the most part, agreed in their views 
 in regard to the native character of man ; for these 
 views derived a very plausible vindication from the 
 hypothesis that the soul was immediately created 
 by God when it was connected with the body. The 
 argument was this : If God created the souls of 
 men, he must have made them either pure and 
 holy, or impure and sinful. The latter supposition 
 is inconsistent with the holiness of God, and con- 
 sequently the doctrine of the native depravity of 
 the heart must be rejected. To affirm that God 
 made the heart depraved would be to avow the 
 blasphemous doctrine that God is the author of 
 sin. The theory of the Creationists was at first 
 favored by Augustine, but he rejected it as soon as 
 he saw how it was employed by the Pelagians. It 
 has continued, however, to the present, the doctrine 
 of the theologians of the Romish church, who in 
 this follow after the schoolmen, and like them mak- 
 ing little of native depravity, and much of the 
 freedom of man in spiritual things. Among the 
 Protestant teachers Melancthon was inclined to 
 the hypothesis of the Creationists, although, after
 
 ORIGIN OF THE MIND OR SOUL. 5 
 
 the time of Luther another hypothesis was received 
 with much approbation by Protestants. Still many 
 distinguished Lutheran teachers of the seventeenth 
 century followed Melancthon in his views concern- 
 ing this doctrine, i.e., G. Calixtus. In the Reformed 
 church, the hypothesis, which we are now consid- 
 ering, has far more advocates than any other, 
 though even they have not agreed in the manner 
 of exhibiting it. Dr. Shedd (His. chr. Doct. Vol. 
 II, pages n, 12) says: " Creationism . . . is a 
 mixed theory. As respects the human soul it 
 teaches that there are as many repeated and suc- 
 cessive feats of creation as there are individuals in 
 the series of human beings ; while so far as the 
 human body is concerned, there is but a single 
 creative fiat. In the instance of each and every 
 individual soul after Adam there is creation but no 
 procreation or propagation. In the instance of 
 each and every individual body after Adam, there 
 is procreation or propagation but not creation. 
 The physical part of every man considered as a 
 creatiori dc niliilo, dates back of birth and individual 
 existence to the creation act mentioned in Gen. 
 1.27; but this spiritual part, as a creation de nihilo, 
 dates back only to birth, or to the commencement of 
 individual existence, in whatever generation or 
 year of the world it happens to be. Reckoning 
 from the strict and absolute creation of each, the 
 body of a man of this generation, upon the theory 
 of Creationism, would be six thousand years older 
 than his soul ; for there is this interval of time 
 between the creative fiat that originated the former
 
 6 ANTHROPOLOGY. 
 
 and the creative fiat that originated the latter. 
 The theory, therefore, is a composite one." 
 
 REMARKS. I. Creationism refers both bodj and 
 soul to God as cause, regarding the first as a direct 
 creation and the second as a procreation. But it 
 does not follow that my body, on this assumption, 
 is six thousand years older than my soul. Such 
 cannot be the case unless it is indeed true that in 
 creating the body of Adam God actually created 
 the bodies of all men, which I suppose none but 
 realists would admit. Dr. Shedd conceives that 
 God created all men in a mass and that procreation 
 is no more than the division of this mass into indi- 
 viduals, hence that the child of to-day is as old as 
 Adam. 
 
 2. This view confounds potentiality with actual- 
 ity. If this is true, Adam is as old as God, or the 
 same reasoning that proves the child to be as old as 
 Adam, proves Adam and all created things to be 
 eternal. 
 
 3. It assumes human nature to be divisible ; that 
 it existed in its entirety in Adam, but not in 
 Cain or any one individual of his descendants. (This 
 will be more fully noticed subsequently.) Adam 
 " begat a son in his own likeness after his image." 
 If his entire human nature was not imparted to 
 Seth, then it is not true that the son was in the im- 
 age of his father. Human nature in its essential 
 attributes admits of no division and the realistic 
 conception of humanity cannot be true. Adam, as 
 to his body, was created or formed of the dust of the 
 ground ; but his creation was not identical with that
 
 ORIGIN OF THE MIND OR SOUL. 7 
 
 of the ground ; nor was the creation of Cain iden- 
 tical with that of Adam. The creation of organic 
 beings is the origination or beginning of a species of 
 beings of like characteristics. Procreation is the 
 perpetuation of the original type, not by division, 
 but by the actual origination of another being iden- 
 tical in kind with the progenitor, but a different 
 and independent individuality. The creation of an 
 organic being is the origination de novo independ- 
 ently of a prior like organism. Procreation is the 
 origination de novo of an organism through a prior 
 like organism. The difference relates simply to 
 modes of creation and not to the fact of creation. 
 The act creating Adam did not create Abraham or 
 any of his posterity. 
 
 According to Dr. Shedd's views, he being both 
 realist and traducianist, the child of to-day is as old 
 both as to soul and body as is Adam. Only recently 
 individualized, where has it existed in its unindi- 
 vidualized state? Has God a special depository for 
 humanity in an unindividualized mass? Or, as 
 abstract human nature cannot exist independently 
 of the individualized man, shall we assume that the 
 child of to-day has existed for ages as an integral 
 part of Adam and all its ancestors until its own in- 
 dividualization, really taking part in all their acts, 
 partaker of all their joys, sins and sorrows? Un- 
 reasonable as all this may be, it is the necessary 
 outcome of realistic traducianism as we shall see. 
 
 Creationism, I think, is not true, and though it 
 is a composite theory in that it refers the creation 
 of the soul and body to different modes of origina-
 
 8 ANTHROPOLOGY. 
 
 tion the soul to direct creation, and the body to 
 indirect creation. Still it is not so abhorrent to 
 reason as Dr. Shedd's argument represents it. In 
 fact, it seems less unreasonable that the body should 
 be six thousand years older than the soul (which 
 the creationist does not admit), than that both soul 
 and body should exist as an active and responsible 
 participant in the doings of all its ancestors from 
 Adam down to its own- individualization. 
 
 SEC. III. Traducianism. The third general the- 
 ory concerning the soul is called Traducianism. 
 ' 'According to this theory the souls of children as 
 well as their bodies are propagated from their par- 
 ents. These two suppositions may be made : Either 
 the souls of children exist in their parents as real 
 beings (entia) like the seed in plants, and so have 
 been propagated from Adam through successive 
 generations, which is the opinion of Leib^nitz in his 
 Thodea(L, 91), or they exist in their parents merely 
 potentially and come from them perpropaganem or 
 traducem. . . . This hypothesis formerly prevailed 
 in the ancient Western Church. . . . This is the 
 hypothesis to which the opponents of the Pelagians 
 have been most generally inclined. . . . Since the 
 Reformation this theory has been more approved 
 than any other, not only by philosophers and natur- 
 alists, but also by the Lutheran Church. Luther 
 himself appeared much inclined toward it, though 
 he did not declare himself distinctly in its favor ; 
 but in the Formula Concordiae it was distinctly 
 taught that the soul as well as the body was prop-
 
 ORIGIN OF THE MIND OR SOUL. g 
 
 agated by parents in ordinary generation." (Mc- 
 Clintock & Strong. Soul, Origin of.) 
 
 u The theory of traducianism maintains that both 
 the soul and body of the individual man are propa- 
 gated. It refers the creative act mentioned in Gen- 
 esis i. 27, to the human nature or race, and not to a 
 single individual merely. (^It considers the work of 
 creating mankind de nihilo as entirely completed 
 upon the sixth day ; and since that sixth day the 
 Creator has, in this world, exerted no strictly crea- 
 tive energy^ He rested upon the seventh day, and 
 still rests. By this single act all mankind were 
 created, as to both their spiritual and sensual sub- 
 stance in and with the first human pair, and from 
 them have been individually procreated and born, 
 each in his day and generation. Creation relates to 
 the origination de nihilo of the total substance or 
 nature of mankind, considered as a new and hitherto 
 non-existent species of being. Birth is subsequent 
 to creation and refers only to the modifications 
 which this substance undergoes its individualiza- 
 tions in the series of generations." (Hist. Chris. 
 Doctrine. Vol. II., p. 13.) 
 
 (i) None except realists can accept this view of 
 traducianism. Strictly it is not traducianism or 
 procreation ism ; but is rather the metamorphosis of 
 an existent being from one form into another, as 
 the change of a tadpole into a frog. There is nei- 
 ther procreation nor traduction in the changing of 
 a tadpole into a frog, or of an egg into a bird. But 
 the egg has absolutely no existence prior to its 
 origination in the mother. Otherwise potential!-
 
 io ANTHROPOLOGY. 
 
 ties and actualities are the same, and all possibili- 
 ties are actualities. 
 
 According to Dr. Shedd all men soul and body, 
 were created with Adam, and have actual being 
 thousands of years before they have individual be- 
 ing, and what he calls their procreation is not pro- 
 creation or generation or traduction, but purely 
 metamorphosis from one actual state into another. 
 
 (2) Another objection to the theory in hand is in- 
 congruity in the use of the terms. 
 
 According to it, Adam was created only, not pro- 
 created. But Cain and all others are both created 
 and procreated. But creation and procreation are 
 mutually exclusive. Both originate being, and one 
 as truly as the other, but not by the same method. 
 Creation is direct without media. Procreation is 
 indirect through media, or through progenitors. 
 God is as truly the originator in the one case as the 
 other. Procreation produces the ancestral type, but 
 as really produces a new being as does creation. 
 God in creating Adam did not create Cain, but only 
 imparted to him the power of human parenthood, 
 which is only the power of reproducing as an in- 
 strument of creative energy his own likeness in a 
 new being. 
 
 According to the realistic view the deity exerts 
 no creative energy in the innumerable forms of an- 
 imal and vegetable life with which the earth in 
 successive generations is caused to abound. This 
 doctrine is, I think, contradicted by every science 
 that throws any lighten the subject; also by the 
 Bible, notably by Job xxxi. 15, Isaiah xliv. 2, 24;
 
 ORIGIN OF THE MIND OR SOUL. n 
 
 xlix. 5. Dr. Shedd in support of his theory refers 
 to Gen. ii. 2, and says, " God rested on the seventh 
 day and still rests. " The text certainly means that 
 God having created the progenitors of all the differ- 
 ent orders of organic beings, rested (ceased) from 
 that mode of creating. This surely does not mean 
 that he is not continually exerting his power 
 through ancestral organisms in the production of 
 new creatures. 
 
 FACTS THAT PROVE OR SEEM TO PROVE TRADUCIANISM. 
 
 i. Physiological science strongly favors this view ; 
 and its facts are hard to reconcile with any other 
 hypothesis. 
 
 "Adam begot a son in his own likeness after his 
 image" Gen. v. 3. If the soul and body were not 
 both begotten, then it could hardly be true that the 
 son was in his father's likeness, and after his image. 
 Seth would have been the son of Adam only as to 
 his body, but the son of God as to his soul, as was 
 Adam. 
 
 It is true that some use this text to prove crea- 
 tionism, urging that if souls are propagated, then 
 they cannot be in the likeness of that of Adam 
 which was not propagated but created. This argu- 
 ment assumes that two things cannot be alike un- 
 less they are both produced by the same process. 
 As well might it be said that two pictures cannot 
 resemble the same person unless they are made by 
 the same artist or by the same process. 
 
 Again, the argument, if it proves anything, 
 proves too much ; for if Seth's soul could not be
 
 1 2 ANTHROPOLOG Y. 
 
 like Adam's, unless he was directly created by God, 
 because Adam's was so created, neither could Seth's 
 body be like Adam's, which was directly so created. 
 This shows the fallacy of the argument. 
 
 2. The doctrine of traducianism seems to be fully 
 proved by the obvious fact that children resemble 
 their parentage not less in their mental character- 
 istics than in their physical. 
 
 (1) Peculiar bodily forms, sizes, complexions, ges- 
 tures, tones of voice and general manners often 
 characterize families for many generations. 
 
 (2) So of their intellects, brilliancy, acuteness, 
 accuracy, obtuseness. An adaptation to some partic- 
 ular intellectual pursuit or study or vocation often 
 adheres to the same family for generations. 
 
 (3) The same is true of the emotional nature, the 
 passions, affections, appetites and propensities. 
 
 (4) Lien, it is allowed, differ very much in the 
 character of their will power some have much, 
 some have little, some stubborn and some fickle 
 wills and these characteristics are evidently trans- 
 missible from parent to progeny. The fact that 
 they are characteristics of particular families can be 
 accounted for only on the ground of heredity. 
 
 (5) The rule also holds in relation to our sesthet- 
 ical nature. Members of the same family generally 
 have strikingly similar tastes in relation to t^e 
 same objects. 
 
 (6) The moral and religious characteristics also 
 seem if possible to be more rigidly under the law 
 of heredity than any other human characteristic. 
 
 (7) That most terrible of mental afflictions, in-
 
 ORIGIN OF THE MIND OR SOUL. 13 
 
 sanity, leaves no reasonable doubt of the fact that 
 souls of the progeny are derived from the parentage. 
 
 3. The fact that the sacred scriptures represent 
 children as being born in a depraved state seems to 
 confirm the hypothesis that the soul is not directly 
 created by God, but is a derivation from the paren- 
 tage just as really and in the same manner as the 
 body. (Seelsa. xlviii. 8; Ps. Iviii. 3; li. 5;Eph. ii. 3.) 
 
 Certainly no one would admit that God would 
 create a soul with a corrupt or depraved nature ; 
 nor can we admit that a pure spirit can be morally 
 corrupted by contact with a sensuous body, for the 
 body apart from the soul is incapable of moral cor- 
 ruption. On the contrary, the soul subjects the 
 body to such corruption so far as it is capable of 
 defilement. 
 
 This array of facts might be much enlarged and 
 they admit of explanation on no hypothesis so sat- 
 isfactorily as upon that of the propagation of soul 
 as well as body. 
 
 It is sometimes objected to traducianism that it 
 favors the doctrine of materialism, or that the soul 
 like the body is material and must perish with the 
 body. 
 
 The objector seems to lose sight of the fact that 
 the first man was created as truly a rational and im- 
 mortal spirit as he was a mortal animal. This being 
 true, the divinely ordained law that like produces 
 like, would infallibly insure the rational and im- 
 mortal spirit to the progeny, otherwise like would 
 not produce like. But as the law confessedly holds 
 good in the whole realm of organic life, lower in
 
 14 ANTHROPOLOGY. 
 
 the scale of being than man, we certainly have no 
 right to make the human race an exception with- 
 out the most explicit authority. This is confessed- 
 ly wanting. The objection is therefore of no force. 
 
 If traducianism is true, then procreation or prop- 
 agation is simply creation ' de nihilo continued 
 through the instrumentalities of previously created 
 progenitors ; or God is continually creating new 
 organisms in the likeness of pre-existing types. 
 This view of creation favors the hypothesis that 
 providence is simply the act of creation, indefinitely 
 continued. Hence God's creative energy is as truly 
 exerted in procreation as in creation, in the creation 
 of the infant of to-day as in the creation of Adam. 
 Many scripture texts seem strongly to favor the 
 idea. (Gen. xxx. 2, Job xxxi. 15, Ps. cxxix. 13, 
 Isa. xliv. 2, 24, Isa. xlix. 5.) 
 
 Traducianism gives us a comparatively easy solu- 
 tion of the much debated problem of universal de- 
 pravity. We have only to accept the Bible fact 
 that our natural head did by voluntary trangression 
 corrupt his own heart or moral nature which was 
 by the law of heredity transmitted to his posterity 
 in accord with the invariable law that like pro- 
 duces like. 
 
 If it should be objected that this view seems to 
 make the progenitor not the medium but rather the 
 originator of the progeny, it seems sufficient to re- 
 ply that specific character of the progeny is always 
 determined by that of the medium or organism, and 
 not by the creative power. /We have a pretty fair 
 illustration in the ingrafting of one kind of fruit
 
 ORIGIN OF THE MIND OR SOUL. 15 
 
 upon another. The root or stock supplies the orig- 
 inating and life-giving power, but the engrafted 
 scion determines the quality of the fruit. So in 
 traducianisin the creative energy of God is the orig- 
 inating and life-giving power; the progenitor or 
 traducing medium determines the character of the 
 progeny. J)
 
 CHAPTER II. 
 
 IMPUTATION. 
 
 T)EFORE considering the subject of sin proper, 
 J3 let us first briefly bring under review certain 
 
 schemes of imputation. 
 
 i. The Augustinian scheme as revised and im- 
 proved by Anselm. 
 
 AUGUSTINE'S THEORY OF IMPUTATION. 
 
 I will first notice his explanation of how all men 
 sin in Adam. He assumes distinct origin for ' ' hu- 
 man nature " or humanity, and for the individual 
 man Adam. 
 
 He does not tell us, so far as I know, whether 
 these distinct origins are strictly synchronal or not 
 synchronal ; of course they are not synchronal as 
 to Adam's posterity. But in the order of nature, 
 humanity is prior to the individual, because the in- 
 dividual man is only the individualization of hu- 
 manity. This humanity was created intelligent, 
 free, and holy, and of course man, its individualiza- 
 tion, was likewise created intelligent, free and holy. 
 
 As the whole of humanity existed in the one man 
 Adam, the first sin was as truly the sin of humanity 
 as it was of the individual man. Hence by the one 
 sin of the individual, both the individual and the 
 whole of human nature became equal participants
 
 IMPUTATION. 17 
 
 in the same sin. But every human being is just as 
 truly an individualization of this common human 
 nature as was Adam, and consequently did volunta- 
 rily participate in the first sin, being only an indi- 
 vidualization of the common hu'man nature which 
 voluntarily sinned in Adam. 
 
 According to this theory the first individual cor- 
 rupted the whole of human nature, and then this 
 corrupted human nature corrupts all other individ- 
 uals. Such is the theory of the origin and univer- 
 sality of human depravity. 
 
 We may respect this logic as being ingenious, but 
 cannot, without closing our eyes, accept it as true. 
 
 Its whole force rests on the realistic element, 
 with which it is interwoven. Anselm shows him- 
 self a realist. In the language of Bauer, he main- 
 tains ' ' the actual existence of a universal (human- 
 ity) that is distinguished from the individual' 1 
 (Adam). 
 
 He assumes human nature to be a real objective 
 entity, prior in the order of nature to the existence 
 of the indvidual man ; that men are only individu- 
 alizations of this prior humanity. 
 
 He thus educes the concrete from the abstract, or 
 real existence out of the ideal. But humanity or 
 human nature is in reality only an abstract term, 
 representative of the aggregated characteristics of 
 the individual a mere term of classification. The 
 things represented by such abstracts are not real 
 entities, but only conceptions of the mind. Ab- 
 stracts have no existence independent of the con- 
 crete entities which they generically describe.
 
 1 8 ANTHROPOLOG Y. 
 
 There can therefore be no physical nature indepen- 
 dent of physical entities ; no divine nature inde- 
 pendent of a divine Being. It was not human 
 nature that was created, for it has no existence ex- 
 cept in' the mind, but man was created. It was not 
 human nature that was created upright, but man. 
 It was not human nature that was corrupted, but 
 man ; and when we speak of corrupt human nature, 
 we simply mean that men, humankind, are corrupt 
 and not that something is corrupt which has been 
 metamorphosed into men. 
 
 When the realism of Anselm's argument is elim- 
 inated it falls to pieces. 
 
 By the same kind of logic Ansel m attempts to 
 show not only how all men become corrupt, but 
 actually guilty ; also how infants voluntarily sinned 
 in Adam. This he does to his own satisfaction un- 
 der the auspices of his realism. He invests abstract 
 humanity with all the attributes of a real moral 
 agent. He says these facts must be taken into ac- 
 count : 
 
 "First, there is a common human nature,; second- 
 ly, there is a particular individual ; thirdly, the 
 individual is a production from the humanity. But 
 this third fact, that all men are produced out of 
 human nature, explains how all are sinners at birth. 
 The individual Adam corrupted human nature and 
 human nature corrupted every individual. But 
 human nature voluntarily sinned, and as the infant 
 is a production from this human nature, therefore 
 the infant voluntarily sinned in Eden." 
 
 This is another phase of the Augustinian expla-
 
 IMPUTATION. 19 
 
 nation and involves the absurdity of predicating of 
 the germ or potentiality what is true of that in 
 which it exists, as noticed before and need not be 
 rediscussed. 
 
 Perhaps the most remarkable part of Anselm's 
 discussion of original sin is that in which he 
 attempts to prove that Adam's first sin, but none of 
 his other sins, and none of the sins of his other 
 progenitors, is imputed to his posterity. 
 
 The vital point in the argument is the fact that 
 the whole of the human nature was included in 
 Adam and Eve when this first sin was committed. 
 He says substantially, as stated by Prof. Shedd, 
 "The first act of transgression was unique. There 
 was never a second like it. The sins of Cain or 
 Abel or any other individual were not the trans- 
 gressions of an individual who included within 
 himself the entire humanity. Even the individual 
 transgressions subsequent to the first act of apostasy 
 were only manifestations in his particular person of 
 the generic (first) sin and sustained the same rela- 
 tion to it that the transgression of any other indi- 
 vidual does. There is therefore no imputation of 
 the subsequent individual sin of Adam to his pos- 
 terity. That is only imputed to all men which all 
 men have committed ; and the only sin which all 
 men have committed is that one sin which they all 
 committed when they all, ' tile unus homo,* 1 were 
 that human nature in the first human pair." 
 
 This doctrine, the imputation of Adam's first sin 
 and not of his other sins, nor the sins of other pro- 
 genitors to his posterity, is of vital importance to
 
 20 ANTHROPOLOGY. 
 
 the whole Augustinian and Calvinistic scheme. 
 For if this is not true then the whole theory of the 
 so-called Adainic covenant federal headship, 
 unique relationship, etc. falls to the ground as a 
 worthless speculation, and it would consequently 
 follow that there was only natural headship in 
 Adam, and that he sustained to his posterity only 
 such relations as do other parents. 
 
 Anselm stakes this whole theory upon the argu- 
 ment in the quotation given above. 
 
 i. My first adverse statement is that the whole of 
 this celebrated argument, like those previously 
 noticed, is vitiated by its realism, and might there- 
 fore be dismissed as unworthy of further comment, 
 but as great value is attached to it by some, I will 
 give it further consideration. 
 
 He, Adam, was derived from a common human- 
 ity. He did possess certain characteristics on ac- 
 count of which he was reckoned a human being. 
 He did actually possess a nature properly called 
 human. But this nature he propagated whole and 
 entire, whatever may be its essential characteristics. 
 We often speak of man's animal, intellectual and 
 moral natures. Perhaps we might regard these 
 several characteristics as the essential characteristics 
 of human nature. These, as we have seen, do not 
 exist as something objective, but only as qualities 
 in concrete forms are not entities from which 
 Adam was formed, but essential attributes of the 
 man. Now it will be allowed by all whose eyes 
 have not been put out by their logic, that Adam 
 propagated these qualities in their entirety, and
 
 IMPUTATION. 21 
 
 human nature, which is but the sum of these 
 qualities, to all his posterity. Hence it follows 
 that human nature exists to-day in every man in its 
 completeness as it did in Adam. If this is true the 
 entire humanity, or human nature, as truly existed 
 in Cain or Abel as it did in Adam. Hence it fol- 
 lows, despite the freaks of Anselm's logic, that if 
 Adam's first sin was imputed, because entire human 
 nature, rightly understood, existed in him at the 
 time of its commission, then Cain's sin was equally 
 imputable for the same reason, and so the sins of all 
 other parents. 
 
 In the argument I have used the term humanity 
 as the generic characteristic of men, while Anselm 
 uses it as an objective entity from which man was 
 derived. If I have correctly used the term my 
 argument shows the utter fallacy of his reasonings. 
 
 2. But granting for argument's sake Anselm's 
 conception of human nature, there seems to be some 
 flaw in his reasoning. If Adam's first sin was impu- 
 table only while all humanity was resident in him, 
 would not all his sins committed previous to the 
 derivation or distribution of that humanity be for 
 the same reason imputable ? If like causes under 
 the same conditions may be depended upon for like 
 results, this would certainly be true. Hence, if the 
 first sin vitiated the supposed mass of human nature 
 while it was all resident in one man, then without 
 a miraculous interference two or a dozen would 
 vitiate it still more, and hence all Adam's sins 
 before Cain's individualization are imputed. 
 
 3. I am tempted to exclaim, What a calamity
 
 22 ANTHROPOLOGY. 
 
 to the world that Adam did not distribute this ob- 
 jective human nature to the world before he cor- 
 rupted it, then the world would never have known 
 sin ! Adam and Eve could not have sinned, and 
 no one, no one pair of their descendants could have 
 sinned because entire human nature would not 
 have been resident in one or one pair. 
 
 4. The assumption in Anselin's argument is 
 that this human nature is not propagable in its 
 entirety, but only in parts. "The sins of Cain 
 were not the transgressions of an individual who 
 included within himself the entire humanity, there- 
 fore his sins were not imputable." But according 
 to the logic, what was imputed to Cain was sub- 
 tracted from Adam; so with Abel; so with Seth. 
 We do not know how many children Adam had. 
 A loose tradition says fifty-six. If so, after the 
 fifty-sixth derivicatiou of humanity how much did 
 our first father have left? 
 
 The whole affair is as ridiculous as it is unrea- 
 sonable, and merits the lash of the satirist rather 
 than the respectful attention of the theologian. 
 
 5. In the quotation above given it is said: 
 "Even the individual transgression of Adam sub- 
 sequent to the first act of apostasy was only a man- 
 ifestation in his particular person of the generic 
 sin." 
 
 If this proposition is cautiously stated, as I sup- 
 pose it to be, it seems to teach that there is no sin 
 but this generic sin. The manifestation of a thing 
 and the thing itself are different things. If we are 
 allowed to make this just discrimination between a
 
 IMPUTATION. 23 
 
 thing and its manifestation in this case, then it fol- 
 lows that all Adam's subsequent sins so-called, as 
 all the so-called sins of all men, are only manifesta- 
 tions of the "generic sin." Anselmdoes not else- 
 where so teach, still the exigencies of the case 
 required him to maintain this position in order to 
 prove that none but Adam's first sin could be im- 
 puted. For if he had admitted that Adam's subse- 
 quent sin sprang from the action of his free will, 
 then no reason could be assigned while human na- 
 ture continued entire in him, why his subsequent 
 sins should not be imputable. 
 
 All attempts to illustrate the relation of Adam 
 and his posterity by human institutions are inade- 
 quate. 
 
 ZWINGLl'S THEORY OF IMPUTATION. 
 
 Zwingli thus seeks to illustrate imputation. He 
 says, "All men who are born from Adam can be 
 regarded as one man, just as all who are members 
 of one civil community may be regarded as one 
 body, and the whole community as one man." 
 
 OBJECTIONS. 
 
 i. A civil community may truly be regarded as 
 one man, and one man be made to suffer unjustly 
 for a whole community, and a whole community to 
 suffer on account of one man. But this is because 
 of the imperfections of human institutions, and of 
 ignorance or dishonesty or weakness of their ad- 
 ministrators. But still it is true that the acts of a 
 community are not the acts of an individual, nor 
 are the acts of an individual the acts of a commu-
 
 24 ANTHROPOLOGY. 
 
 i 
 
 nity. Our acts are not Adam's acts, nor his acts 
 our acts, though we may suffer on account of them. 
 
 Zwingli illustrates this relationship by the rela- 
 tion of a bondwoman to her children. She being 
 in a state of slavery her children are born slaves. 
 The illustration is inapt. Such slavery is civil 
 bondage and such children are slaves, not by nat- 
 ural or divine, but only by human or civil law. 
 Her acts are not her children's acts, her virtue not 
 their virtue, her guilt not their guilt. She trans- 
 mits to her children human nature and not her ad- 
 ventitious character. 
 
 No comparison drawn from human institutions 
 or from anything artificial or supernatural can ade- 
 quately illustrate the relation. Nature alone can 
 furnish the true illustration, the unerring analogy. 
 The requisite analogy or illustration is furnished 
 only in the immutable and unerring laws of hered- 
 ity established by the great Creator for the perpet- 
 uation and conservation of his works, especially of 
 human kind. 
 
 2. Another objection to the orthodox theory of 
 imputation is its artificial and extraordinary char- 
 acter or its unnaturalness. ( The physical world is 
 in many respects a sort of sensible adumbration, a 
 great, yet veritable symbolization of the moral and 
 the spiritual world. In fact the physical and the 
 moral largely overlap each other, or are in many 
 respects largely coincident, so that what is physical 
 in one aspect of it is moral in another. Both may 
 sometimes require the interposition of the super- 
 natural, but never when the end intended can be
 
 IMPUTATION. 25 
 
 accomplished by the natural. The law of parsi- 
 mony is strictly the law of means in the Divine ad- 
 ministration. If sufficiency of means for the ac- 
 complishment of the end is at hand a redundancy 
 is never employed. This is as true of the moral as 
 of the physical world. God is able to create as 
 many plants and animals or men as he may wish, 
 and whenever he may wish. This he could do in- 
 stantly by fiat or by evolution as he might choose. 
 But he chooses to make one or a pair of each 
 species of flora or fauna or men, and make each 
 self-perpetuative or procreative. His immutable 
 decree is, " Like produces like." This law rules su- 
 preme over all the self-perpetuating organisms of 
 the world, no less over the rational than over the 
 irrational organizations. This is the law of hered- 
 ity. That it does reign supreme and that it does 
 accomplish its functions in the vegetable world, 
 also in the irrational animal world, also in man's 
 physical nature, also in his intellectual nature, is 
 readily admitted by all that accept the doctrine of 
 traducianism in its full extent. Why then should 
 we at this point abjure the jurisdiction of the law of 
 heredity, and refuse to accept the idea that the 
 human progenitor does actually transmit to his 
 progeny his moral nature as literally and fully as 
 he does his physical, his intellectual, his emotional, 
 his volitional nature? On this hypothesis there 
 is an exact and full analogy in the operation of the 
 law of heredity in relation to both the physical and 
 moral aspect of humankind. On this plan man's 
 moral nature is just as readily accounted for as his
 
 26 AN7HROPOLOGY. 
 
 physical or intellectual nature. The only difficul- 
 ties in the case are in determining what that moral 
 nature is, and how his ancestry came in possession 
 of it. 
 
 The Almighty did npt create this law, then 
 create man and other things and then put them un- 
 der it, nor did he create man and other things and 
 then create this law to determine the relation be- 
 tween the parent and the progeny. But the law 
 and its subjects are pure concreations. Exactly 
 the same is true of the moral law. The law and 
 the subjects are concreations. If this is true there 
 is no need for the realistic or for the Federal 
 Headship theory of imputation. The Natural 
 Headship theory gives a more rational account of 
 the doctrine of human depravity, and is withal bet- 
 ter sustained by the sacred Scriptures.
 
 M 
 
 CHAPTER III. 
 
 SIN. 
 
 MAN CONSIDERED AS A SINNER. 
 AN as a sinner is pre-eminently the branch of 
 Anthropology with which theologists are ac- 
 customed to deal. 
 
 The supreme end of the gospel is to save men 
 from their sins. The supreme end of preaching 
 the gospel is to persuade men to forsake their sins 
 and to come to Christ. 
 
 The lawyer, in order to help his client, needs not 
 only to know the law, but also to know the exact 
 nature of the client's case. The physician in order 
 to relieve his patient needs to understand both the 
 disease and the remedy. 
 
 It is likewise a matter of the first importance that 
 the preacher in order to have efficiency in his call- 
 ing should know at least something of the nature 
 of sin know what it is, and what it is not. What 
 are its essential characteristics, and what are not 
 such characteristics. Also to know what is its 
 remedy and how that remedy becomes available. 
 A knowledge of these things, more or less thorough, 
 is also a prime necessity to all laymen who would be 
 effective co-laborers with the ministry in the work 
 of persuading and enabling sinners to forsake sin 
 and come to Christ.
 
 28 ANTHROPOLOGY. 
 
 Even the sinner himself that desires to be saved, 
 needs first of all to know something of the nature 
 of his sins, and of the remedy, of the conditions 
 through which it becomes available to his salvation. 
 Your closest attention is therefore invited to these 
 two great and vital questions. Sin and its only, 
 but all-sufficient, remedy. The logical order is sin 
 and its remedy. The whole need not a physician, 
 but they that are sick. 
 
 SEC. I. The terms used to give us the idea of sin. 
 The doctrines of the Bible are comprised in its 
 terminology. The doctrine of sin including its es- 
 sence and characteristics is of course comprised in 
 the words used by the oracles of revelation to define, 
 explain, and characterize sin. A brief reference to 
 these terms cannot fail to give us some proper idea 
 of what sin is, and as to how it effects the human 
 mind and conduct; also, how it affects our relations 
 to God and to our fellow men. 
 
 HEBREW OR OLD TESTAMENT TERMS. 
 
 I. Several different words are used in the Hebrew 
 scriptures to express the doctrine of sin. The 
 more prominent of these are as follows: 
 
 (1) Asham, defined by "guilt" and "guilt offer- 
 ing." 
 
 (2) Ashmah, defined by "guilt" and "guilt 
 offering." 
 
 (3) C^defined by "sin," "error," "failure." 
 
 (4) Chataah, defined by "sin." 
 
 (5) Chattaah, defined by "sin."
 
 SfN. 29 
 
 (6) Chattath, defined by "sin" and "sin offer- 
 ing." 
 
 This is the prevailing word for sin in the Old 
 Testament 
 
 (7) Chattai, defined "sin." 
 
 (8) Avon, defined by "iniquity." 
 
 (9) Pesha y defined by ' ' trespass ' ' and ' ' trangres- 
 sion." 
 
 All these Hebrew words are, in our English Bible, 
 translated by our word sin. Several of them are 
 also translated guilt or sin offering or offering for 
 sin; as Asham, Isa. liii. 10: "Thou shalt make his 
 soul an offering for sin;" Chataah, Ps. xl. 6: 
 " Burnt offering and sin offering hast thou not re- 
 quired." Chattah, Ezra vi. 17: "For a sin offer- 
 ing for all Israel." Chattah, Ez. xxx. 10: "With 
 the blood of the sin offering of atonement." 
 
 2. The principal Hebrew verbs for "to sin" are 
 as follows: 
 
 (1) Chata, defined "to sin" or "miss the mark." 
 
 (2) Asah, defined "to do," "to make" and 
 translated "sinneth," in Num. xv. 29. 
 
 (3) Shagag is defined "to err, to go astray," 
 translated "sin," in Num. xv. 28. 
 
 (4) Shagah is defined in the same way, and is 
 translated "sin" in Lev. iv. 13. 
 
 3. The corresponding nouns for sin in the New 
 Testament are the following : 
 
 (1) Hamartema, denned "sin," "transgression." 
 
 (2) Hamartia, defined "sin," "sin offering." 
 
 (3) Paraptoma, defined "fall, offense, trespass." 
 The first of these words is used but few times and
 
 30 ANTHROPOLOGY. 
 
 is invariably translated "sin." The second is the 
 current New Testament word for sin, and is gener- 
 ally so translated. In 2 Cor. xi. 7 it is rendered 
 offense, and in Heb. x. 6 it is rendered sacrifices 
 for sin. 
 
 The third is variously rendered, trespass, offense, 
 fault, fall, and is three times rendered sin. Eph. 
 i. 7, ii. 5, Col. ii. 13. 
 
 (The word Parabasis, and its corresponding verb 
 Parabaino^ have a kindred signification, and are 
 generally translated transgression and to transgress, 
 but never sin and to sin.) 
 
 4. The verb usually used in the New Testament 
 to express the doctrine in hand is hamartano. 
 This is variously defined, to miss a mark; to lose, 
 be disappointed; to go astray; deviate, swerve; to 
 mistake, err; to pass by, neglect, omit; to sin, 
 transgress, offend. In the New Testament this 
 word is generally rendered, to sin. It is in a few 
 instances rendered to trespass, and to offend. 
 
 These words hamatia and hamartano are gener- 
 ally used in the Septuagint in translating the 
 Hebrew words of the Old Testament.* 
 
 From those terms studied in the various connec- 
 tions in which they are used in the Holy Scriptures 
 we are to learn what sin is, its nature and charac- 
 teristics. 
 
 i. The forms to lose, to be disappointed, to go 
 astray, to swerve, to deviate, to mistake, to err, to 
 
 * Note. For an elaborate and scholarly discussion of these 
 Greek words the reader is referred to Dr. R. Beard's Theology. 
 Vol. II. Sec. 4 and 5
 
 31 
 
 neglect, to pass by, to omit, to transgress, to offend, 
 to sin, are general expressions which of themselves 
 do not tell us exactly what we want to know. 
 They give us in general terms the predicates or 
 characteristics of the thing, rather than the thing 
 itself. Something more specific is needed to enable 
 us to see exactly what sin is. This desideratum is 
 given in the definition to miss the mark; as an 
 archer shooting at a mark misses it. This gives 
 the exact thing in a concrete form, easy of appre- 
 hension, and of which we can make predications. 
 Hence we can properly say to miss the mark is to 
 lose our end, to miss the mark is to be disappointed 
 in our expectations; to miss the mark is to stray, 
 swerve, deviate from the goal aimed at; to miss the 
 mark is to mistake the false for the true; to miss 
 the mark is to omit or neglect what duty and inter- 
 est require ; to miss the mark is to transgress and 
 offend against God and humanity ; to miss the 
 mark is to do any and all these things, each of 
 which is sin in some sense. 
 
 2. The archer in shooting has a mark at which 
 he aims, an end which he purposes to accomplish. 
 So every rational being has an end at which he 
 aims, an end which he purposes to reach. That 
 end is good at least to himself, if to no others. 
 This is the motive of all action; it underlies all 
 rational activity. But every sin is a missing of 
 this mark, a failure to accomplish the good 
 intended, and a failure to realize the ultimate end 
 of action and of life. Hence to sin is to bring 
 injury or evil upon ourselves, and also upon others.
 
 32 ANTHROPOLOGY. 
 
 No man liveth to himself. Sinning is an offense 
 to the Father of our spirits because it is a misuse of 
 our abilities, and an abuse of the freedom that he 
 has bestowed upon us for his honor and our good. 
 As sin in relation to God is insubordination, in re- 
 lation to ourselves it is the means of self-ruin. All 
 this seems to be involved in the original and 
 proper notion of sin. 
 
 3. The Bible says (i John iii. iv.): "Sin is the 
 transgression of the law." A more literal and a 
 better translation is, Sin is lawlessness. Hamartia 
 estin anomia. Of course every act of transgression 
 is lawlessness, but every lawless act is not literally 
 a transgression. To do what the law forbids is lit- 
 eral transgression. Not to do what it commands is 
 not transgression, a going over or beyond, but a 
 falling short of, what the law requires. The first 
 is a sin of commission ; the last is a sin of omission. 
 But omission and commission are equally acts of 
 lawlessness. Some critics doubt whether John's 
 word, " Sin is lawlessness," is properly a definition 
 of sin. Others affirm that it is a definition. The 
 truth seems to be that it is not a literal definition 
 of sin (hamartia), but is rather an abstract charac- 
 terization of all sin. Lawlessness is properly pred- 
 icable of every sin. No act of disobedience to 
 civil law is defined as lawlessness, but every such 
 disobedience is an act of lawlessness, or (changing 
 abstract into the concrete) is a lawless act. 
 
 The Westminster and subsequent Presbyterian 
 catechisms generally describe sin as any want of 
 conformity unto, or transgression of the law of
 
 33 
 
 God. This is sufficiently exact for practical pur- 
 poses, though it is not quite logical. 
 
 (1) The statement is ambiguous. The first and the 
 last part may be taken as antithetical. The meaning 
 then would be, sin is either any want of conform- 
 ity unto or a transgression of the law of God ; 
 dividing all sins into two classes ; one consisting 
 in a want of conformity unto law and the other in 
 transgression of the law. This is illogical because 
 transgression is as really a want of conformity unto 
 law as any other sin can be. Those holding this 
 view first distinguish between " transgression " and 
 "want of conformity," while by the terminology 
 the former is actually included in the latter. The 
 logical distinction is given by the terms omission 
 and commission. 
 
 (2) The last part of the statement may be taken 
 as the equivalent of the first part, and as explana- 
 tory of it. This obliterates the difference between 
 transgression and other sins, and is of course illog- 
 ical, making, as it plainly does, a part (transgres- 
 sion) equal to the whole sin, (want of conformity 
 unto) which, as previously stated, includes all sin, 
 or making a species equal to the genus of which it 
 is species. Sin is lawlessness, or any want of con- 
 formity unto the law of God. Both omission and 
 commission are included in a want of conformity. 
 Lawlessness is the genus and omission and commis- 
 sion are the species. This is logical and clear. 
 Certainly John, when he said, " Sin is lawless- 
 ness," or "discrepancy from law," or "want of 
 conformity unto law," did not mean to exclude sins
 
 34 ANTHROPOLOGY. 
 
 of transgression or sins of any kind. He rather 
 meant to assert what is necessarily true of every 
 sin, viz. : that it is a lawless act or state. 
 
 SECTION II. Sin considered as lawlessness. 
 From this point of view let us consider sin and its 
 logically related truths. Lawlessness presupposes 
 two things ; first, a law, and secondly, an act or 
 state violative of the law. Obviously there can be 
 no lawlessness when there is no law, nor when 
 there is no act or state violative of the law. Bach 
 of these points requires a brief notice. 
 
 1. What is the law? The answer is, It is an ex- 
 pression or revelation of the will of the law-maker 
 in whatever manner that will may be revealed ; 
 whether as a verbal or written revelation, or as a 
 law written upon the heart, and apprehensible by 
 the intuitions of reason. The law in this last form 
 is common to all men. (Rom. ii. 14, 15.) 
 
 2. This law is the law of God, not as Creator 
 merely, but as the Father of men. 
 
 All created things are under law, under divine 
 law, and all law in relation to material and irra- 
 tional things may be attributed to God as Creator 
 merely. Between such things and God the rela- 
 tionship of fatherhood and sonship does not exist. 
 
 We never say God is the Father of the earth or 
 of any irrational thing. The reason for not doing 
 this is that they do not bear the image and likeness 
 of God. Men, on the contrary, are made in the 
 image and likeness of God, and for this reason they 
 are the children of God. Like produces like, not
 
 35 
 
 in creation but in genus and progeny only. Adam 
 begat a son in his own likeness. Cain created or 
 built a city but not in his own likeness. These 
 facts illustrate the difference between generation 
 proper and mere creation. It is the distinctive 
 characteristic of generation that the likeness of the 
 parent is transmitted to the progeny. But in mere 
 creation there is no transmission of such likeness. 
 To be made in the image and likeness of God con- 
 stitutes sonship, and this implies fatherhood. Hence 
 Adam was truly the "son of God." This he was 
 because God gave to him his own likeness, thereby 
 making him his son, and differentiating him from 
 all other things pertaining to the earth. 
 
 It is true men have a physical organism, common 
 with other animals, and as such may be regarded as 
 the product of a mere creative act. But this act 
 does not distinguish from other animals, nor make 
 them the children of God. God is the creator of 
 our bodies, but the "Father of our spirits." This 
 distinction between creatorship and Fatherhood 
 between creation and sonship is of immense im- 
 portance in the sphere of morals and religion, as 
 we may see in due time. It may be urged as an 
 objection to this view that the scriptures sometimes 
 confound creation and generation, or represent the 
 same act both as a creation and a generation, that 
 Christ himself is called the beginning of the crea- 
 tion of God (Rev. iii. 14 ; Prov. viii. 25,) and yet 
 he is called the only begotten son of God ; that 
 God created man in his own image, and yet Adam 
 was called the ' ' son of God ;' ' that those who be-
 
 36 ANTHROPOLOGY. 
 
 lieve savingly are created anew in Christ Jesus, yet 
 that those who believe are born of God and are the 
 sons of God. 
 
 These facts teach us that when God is the creator 
 and generator, both creation and generation are 
 predicated of what seems to us the same divine act. 
 This is true, however, only of God, not of creatures; 
 with them creation and generation are broadly dis- 
 tinguishable. Creation and generation are often 
 predicable of the same thing. What the plant or 
 animal generates, God creates, and the two acts are 
 not the same. Even when God is both creator and 
 generator there is necessarily a difference between 
 the products of the creative and the generative acts ; 
 otherwise all originated things would sustain to 
 God the same relation all things would be sons of 
 God, or none would be so. It is a self-evident fact 
 that the divine act which produces a child of God 
 is a different act in kind from that which produces 
 only an animal or a plant. This difference may be 
 expressed by the general statement that all acts 
 that transmit, produce, or reproduce the divine 
 likeness, and secure sonship are generative acts, 
 and hence are the acts of Fatherhood, and not of 
 creatorship; conversely, that all divine acts that do 
 not give the divine likeness to the things thereby 
 produced, are acts of creatorship and not of Father- 
 hood. If this is true then creatorship and Father- 
 hood express essentially different relations; the 
 same is true of creature and sonship, and the terms 
 creation and generation are not strictly convertible 
 terms, though both in a few instances are applied
 
 37 
 
 to what to us seems to be the same thing. We 
 know that generation, both in the sphere of the di- 
 vine and the human always gives to the progeny 
 the likeness of the progenitors. This gives the re- 
 lation of father and son. We know equally well 
 that creation does not give this likeness, and con- 
 sequently does not establish the relation of father 
 and son. 
 
 It may, however, be true that all divine genera- 
 tion is accompanied with some form of creation, 
 though all creation is not accompanied with gener- 
 ation. If this is so, then we can perceive how both 
 creation and generation can be affirmed of Christ, 
 Adam and those that savingly believe in Christ. 
 
 Be this as it may, it is apparent enough that all 
 that bear the image of God are the children of God, 
 and became so by generation rather than by crea- 
 tion. 
 
 These distinctions may at first seem to be of small 
 value, either theoretically or practically. Yet with- 
 out them we are exceedingly liable to form inade- 
 quate or even egregiously false conceptions of many 
 grave questions of both theoretical and practical 
 value; such as divine sovereignty, the divine law, 
 the nature of sin, and other related subjects. Some 
 of these will now be considered. 
 
 SEC. III. The Ground of Sovereignty. Cer- 
 tainly God is sovereign supreme and absolutely 
 sovereign. To deny this is to deny the divine per- 
 sonality and reduce the deity to a blind and purpose- 
 less omnipotence.
 
 38 ANTHROPOLOGY. 
 
 But what is the ground of this sovereignty, or 
 what gives to God the right of sovereignty? I an- 
 swer negatively : 
 
 1. It is not his uncreatedness nor the uncondi- 
 tionedness of his being, nor his omnipotence, nor 
 his wisdom, nor his justice, nor his benevolence, 
 nor any one or all of his attributes combined. The 
 discriminating mind, upon a little reflection, cannot 
 fail to see that no one, nor all these attributes com- 
 bined, can confer sovereign rights. This is so plain 
 that it needs only to be stated to be understood. 
 
 2. Sovereignty does not have its ground in crea- 
 torship; or the fact that God is the creator of all 
 things does not give him sovereign prerogatives. 
 
 I am not unaware of the fact that this statement 
 is in palpable conflict with the commonly accepted 
 opinion. How common, or rather how well-nigh 
 universal, is it to say, God is universal creator and 
 therefore universal sovereign. Truly God is uni- 
 versal creator and equally is it that he is universal 
 sovereign. But he is not sovereign because he is 
 creator. 
 
 To make creatorship the source of sovereignty 
 strongly favors the miserable maxim that might 
 gives or makes right. It also favors, if it does not 
 require, the belief that God is in an offensive sense a 
 despotic ruler and that the government of the moral 
 world is a pure absolutism which determines human 
 character and human destiny independently of 
 human freedom. It thus strongly favors the pessi- 
 mistic view of the world, and leaves thousands of 
 reflecting minds in serious doubt as to whether the
 
 SIN. 39 
 
 supreme Ruler is in any sense the Father of our 
 race. All this and much more to the same effect 
 comes legitimately enough out of the false notion 
 that sovereignty is a prerogative of creatorship or 
 that God is properly sovereign because he is crea- 
 tor. Hence in some of our most popular schemes 
 of theology the Divine Fatherhood is scarcely ac- 
 knowledged at all. Legitimate sovereignty is dis- 
 torted into a sort of selfish aristocracy which 
 capriciously pretermits all equitable methods oi 
 administration and distributes favors it would seem 
 only for self-aggrandizing purposes. Other more 
 liberalized schemes of theology give greater prom- 
 inence to the doctrine of universal Fatherhood, but 
 make it subordinate to creatorship and account God 
 justly sovereign because he is the creator. (Cer- 
 tainly creatorship has its rights, but sovereignty in 
 any proper sense is not one of them.) 
 
 Let us consider a few facts. 
 
 (i) Creatorship, of course, gives a property right 
 in what is created, but these property rights are 
 not identical with the rights of sovereignty, nor are 
 they analogous to them. The mechanic that makes 
 or creates a house has a valid property right in that 
 house. It is his because he created it (did not orig- 
 inate de novo, the materials but constructed them 
 into a house). He is at liberty to dispose of it at 
 will, to change it, sell it, give it away, or destroy 
 it. The man also has a right in his children, but 
 this is a very different right from his right to his 
 house, and a much superior one. The two rights 
 are not only not identical, but are in no respect
 
 40 ANTHROPOLOGY. 
 
 properly analogous; and any attempt to illustrate 
 one by the other necessarily leads to grievous error 
 in that it degrades our divine Father to a property 
 holder, and the man and his children into a mere 
 species of chattel. The two rights, both valid, rest 
 on grounds wholly independent and distinct.* 
 
 This difference is simply the difference between 
 the rights arising respectively out of creatorship 
 and Fatherhood. Mere creatorship does in no 
 instance impart likeness to what is created. The 
 house is not like the man that made it. But father- 
 hood does invariably impart or reproduce the 
 father's likeness, and for this reason and this alone 
 the progeny is a child and a lawful heir. This 
 impartation of likeness, and this alone, gives to the 
 parent the right to require of the child reverence, 
 love and obedience. Creatorship, of itself, gives no 
 such right. But this right to the reverence, love 
 and obedience is simply the right of sovereignty is 
 in fact the very essence of sovereignty. On the 
 contrary the rights inherent in creatorship are in 
 no sense those of sovereignty, but are exclusively 
 those of mere propriety or ownership. 
 
 No man would seriously say that the mechanic 
 has sovereign rights in the house or over the house 
 or to the house which he makes. But he might 
 very pertinently be called the sovereign over his 
 household or children. Hence sovereignty is a 
 function of fatherhood alone, and in no proper sense 
 
 *NOTK. The Father has a natural right to the reverence, love 
 and obedience of the child, at least 'till he forfeits this right. 
 But he has no right to sell it.
 
 41 
 
 of creatorship. If it should be said in opposition to 
 this view that the Bible does not discriminate be- 
 tween creatorship and fatherhood ; that God 
 formed man of the dust of the ground ; that he 
 created man in His own image ; that Adam was as 
 truly a creature of God as he was the son of God ; 
 that men are often spoken of as creatures as well as 
 the children of God, and that God is represented 
 both as our Creator and Father. This is all read- 
 ily admitted in its full force, but it does not dis- 
 prove the difference between creation and genera- 
 tion, or between the relation established by the two 
 acts. It is too plain to require elaborate argument 
 that the act which produced the animals and the 
 act which produced Adam in the image of God 
 and made him the son of God were specifically dif- 
 ferent acts. The specific difference is clearly shown 
 by the difference in their respective products, the 
 one producing mere animals and the other trans- 
 mitting the divine likeness and constituting a be- 
 ing called "the Son of God." All that have the 
 image of God are creatures, but all creatures do not 
 bear the image of God ; all the children of God are 
 creatures, but all creatures are not the children of 
 of God. This gives the relation of genus and spe- 
 cies. The generic name includes the specific and 
 is often used for it, just as we often call the white 
 oak by its generic name oak. This sufficiently ex- 
 plains why the children of God are often spoken of 
 as the creatures of God. 
 
 The earth and the ox are creatures but not chil- 
 dren because they were not created or formed in
 
 42 ANTHROPOLOGY. 
 
 the image of God. Adam was a creature and also 
 a son because he was created in the image of God. 
 Sonship implies fatherhood, and fatherhood gives 
 sovereignty. God is not the sovereign of the ox 
 but the owner. "The cattle upon a thousand hills 
 are mine," but he is the sovereign of all beings that 
 bear hi simage because He is the Father of all such. 
 
 God, as Creator, displays his being and his eter- 
 nal power and Godhead in the physical world. 
 "The heavens declare the glory of God, and the 
 firmament showeth His handiwork." Over the 
 physical world God rules, not as sovereign but as a 
 pure, necessitating or causal power. All freedom 
 and moral suasion are excluded. 
 
 But God as Father rules over those that bear his 
 likeness, over his children, not by necessitating or 
 causal force, but by moral suasion or by motives 
 addressed to beings intelligent and free. Hence it 
 is not creatorship as such, but fatherhood alone 
 that gives the possibility of sovereignty of a moral 
 world and moral government. 
 
 (2) Law. As we have seen, fatherhood alone 
 gives sovereignty. In like manner fatherhood and 
 sovereignty alone give moral law, or for brevity we 
 may say sovereignty, which necessarily implies 
 fatherhood, gives law or is the law-making power. 
 This, I suppose, will be universally conceded. 
 
 Creatorship may and does give physical law, but 
 not moral. If it did, then of necessity everything 
 created would be subjected to moral law which no 
 one would admit to be true. Physical law implies 
 no reason, no rational intelligence, no freedom in
 
 SIN. 43 
 
 its subjects. It consequently excludes the possibil- 
 ity of moral distinctions, or of moral retribution, or 
 rewards and punishment. We never charge physi- 
 cal things with moral wrong, or think of inflicting 
 punishment, or of bestowing reward upon them. * 
 
 But the reverse of all this is true of moral law. 
 It implies reason and freedom in its subjects, and 
 supposes them to have a moral sense and a con- 
 science, and to be capable of moral retribution. 
 Only because men have the image of God, or are 
 the children of God are they the subjects of such a 
 law or capable of its award. It is connate with 
 sonship, and co-extensive with the paternal relation, 
 and comes necessarily out of the sovereignty in- 
 volved in paternity, and can come from no other 
 source. (It of course may be also objectively given 
 as it is to us in revelation.) 
 
 What human authority except that of the parent, 
 or someone acting in his place, has the right to 
 control the child as to say what it shall eat or drink 
 or wear or do, or to require its supreme reverence, 
 love, or obedience ? In its minority the will of the 
 parents is the supreme law of human authority 
 over it. This none can question. But why? Only 
 because of the existing parental relation. Because 
 it is their child, bearing their image, the parents 
 have absolute human sovereignty over it, and the 
 
 *The little boy may personify his toy horse and deal 
 with it as if it were capable of reason and feeling, reward and 
 punishment. But this is all imaginary, not real. A man may 
 teach his horse or dog, but he does this by physical suasion, 
 or other means than moral suasion, or appeals to no moral
 
 44 ANTHROPOLOGY. 
 
 only human sovereignty over it. (Of course the 
 parent in the exercise of this supreme human 
 authority is bound by the will of the Supreme 
 Father of all.) 
 
 If the child is deprived by death or otherwise 
 of its parents, its natural sovereigns and protectors, 
 and some other person takes the place of the 
 parents, such persons have lawful authority over 
 the child only because they have taken the parents' 
 place. In every conceivable case the sovereign 
 authority rests upon parenthood. 
 
 This is just as true of civil or state sovereignty 
 as it is of domestic or family sovereignty. Only so 
 far as the State fills the place of fatherhood has it 
 any sovereign right over its citizens ; for all civil, 
 all legal authority rests on ethical ground, and that 
 ethical ground is fou0d in fatherhood alone. 
 
 All human rights are birthrights, natural or God 
 given rights. Civil governments do not give them, 
 and cannot without usurpation take them away or 
 abridge them. On the contrary civil governments 
 are only the agencies established by the people, ei- 
 ther formally or informally, to exercise the function 
 of the common fatherhood, and to secure to every 
 citizen the full enjoyment of his birthrights. Hence 
 the ethical relation between the State and the citi- 
 zen is strictly the relation of parent and child.* 
 
 But sovereignty gives law, or rather the sovereign 
 
 *The rights of State sovereignty, when reduced to their ulti- 
 mate ground, have absolutely no foundation except in father- 
 hood. All civil authority exercised without respect to this 
 fact is a sheer usurpation. Governments should not be per-
 
 45 
 
 will is the law in whatever manner it may be ex- 
 pressed, and fatherhood being the sole ground of 
 sovereignty is of course the source, and the only 
 source, of ethical law, which is the only valid 
 ground of civil law. 
 
 The divine fatherhood given, what should we, a 
 priori, believe concerning the end and requirements 
 of the divine law? I reply : 
 
 i. We should reasonably expect the supreme end 
 of the law to be the good of those that bear the im- 
 age of the Divine Father, and whom he recognizes 
 as his children. So reasonable is this inference 
 from the essential nature of fatherhood, that we 
 should be greatly horrified to learn that the reverse 
 is true; for this would set divine Fatherhood in the 
 utmost antagonism to all human parentage and to 
 the instincts of even the lower animals generally. 
 We know that human parents have the greatest so- 
 licitude and make the greatest sacrifices for the wel- 
 fare of their children. The supreme end of the 
 law adopted for the government of their households 
 is the good of their children. If this is not essen- 
 tially true of the divine Fatherhood, then men are 
 not like their heavenly Father, and do not bear his 
 image; God actually deceives us when he proclaims 
 himself our Father and calls us his children; or the 
 Bible becomes a riddle and not a revelation. 
 
 It is known that the view of law here maintained 
 is in conflict with very high human authorities. 
 
 mitted to exist for their own sakes or for the spoils and emolu- 
 ments of office, for in so far as they do this they pervert the 
 ends of their own existence.
 
 46 ANTHROPOLOGY. 
 
 It seems to be a favorite opinion of many great 
 and good men that the supreme end of the law is 
 the good or glory of the lawgiver alone. 
 
 Of course God did not create the world without 
 a motive or purpose, and his desires constitute the 
 rule or law of his administration for the accomplish- 
 ment of his purposes. This motive or purpose we 
 are authoritatively told was "for the glory of his 
 sovereign power over his creatures." This purpose 
 is explicitly stated thus: " By the decree of God for 
 the manifestation of his glory, some men and angels 
 are predestinated to everlasting life, and others fore- 
 ordained to everlasting death:" or the motive of 
 God in creation was the manifestation of " the glo- 
 ry of his sovereign power over his creatures. ' ' The 
 motive of the election decree we are told was 
 " the praise of his glorious grace," and the motive 
 of his decree of reprobation was "the praise of his 
 glorious justice." Westminster Confession, p. 3.* 
 
 *It is impossible to conceive of a more heartless selfish ness 
 than is here attributed to the Father of our spirits, who is n- 
 peatedly declared to be " love." A greater incongruity or dis- 
 tortion of terms than is here displayed would be hard to find. 
 To create immortal spirits and decree and procure their sin 
 (ch. 6) would be an act of heartless cruelty. To deliver such 
 from their helpless misery (not guilt) would not be an act of 
 grace or mercy at all, but only a poor compensation for the 
 prior actof flagrant in justice. Again, for God to create immor- 
 tal spirits and decree and procure their sin, and then for the 
 manifestation of the "glory of his sovereign power over his 
 creatures" ordain them to dishonor and wrath, would be an 
 act of injustice and cruelty that I should hesitate to attribute 
 to Satan himself.
 
 SSM. 47 
 
 From this scheme of sovereignty divine Father- 
 hood is quite excluded. It makes sovereignty a 
 function of creatorship exclusively. It also makes 
 God's sovereignty over his creatures (children) iden- 
 tical in kind with man's "dominion " or rule over 
 the lower animals (Gen. i. 27) except that man has 
 the right only to use, not abuse, the animals under 
 his dominion; while to God is attributed the sover- 
 eign right "for the glory of his dominion over his 
 creatures" to reprobate his own children prior to 
 their existence and sin, "to dishonor and wrath." 
 
 Happily for the future of Christianity this barba- 
 rian philosophy (not theology) which for centuries 
 has greatly impeded the progress of Protestant 
 Christianity, now finds advocacy only in a few able 
 but fossilized pessimistic philosophers. 
 
 The great majority of those that have received 
 the doctrine by inheritance from an honorable and 
 pious ancestry, now either reject the doctrine as in- 
 herently false, or wisely deem it imprudent to preach 
 it. It consequently is measurably expelled from 
 the pulpit, and measurably suppressed from current 
 religious literature. 
 
 This change of opinion and practice in regard to 
 the doctrine requires a corresponding change as to 
 the grounds of divine sovereignty, requires the rec- 
 ognition of Fatherhood and not mere creatorship, 
 as the proper and only true ground. 
 
 Just in proportion to the recognition and appre- 
 ciation of this glorious truth the Fatherhood of 
 God will Christianity be freed from pessimistic 
 hues with which it has been draped by a cold and
 
 48 ANTHROPOLOGY. 
 
 false philosophy. The Fatherhood of God fully 
 recognized as the source of sovereignty and law 
 will, without doubt, invest our holy religion with a 
 radiance and a warmth which cannot fail to com- 
 mend it with far greater force, both to the reason 
 and affections of men. 
 
 How different the whole mental state of the child 
 when standing in the presence of one recognized 
 as a father or mother from that state experienced 
 when standing in the presence of one recognized as 
 a stranger, a master, a tyrant ! How much more 
 readily and cheerfully does the child obey com- 
 mands when it comes to know that they are imposed 
 by a loving father for its own good, and not merely 
 for the cold selfish ends of one who gives the com- 
 mands as ' ' for the glory of his sovereign power 
 over it. ' ' 
 
 It is well-nigh a self-evident truth that any theory 
 of divine sovereignty other than that which rests on 
 divine Fatherhood, while it may awaken a slavish 
 fear, cannot inspire reverence, love, and filial obedi- 
 ence. This is in full accord with the Bible, reason, 
 and human experience. Fatherhood given, we readi- 
 ly infer, and cannot fail to infer, that the paramount 
 design of the law is the good of God's household. 
 
 2. This most rational conclusion is fully sup- 
 ported by a posteriori arguments, f We safely infer 
 the design of a thing from its uniform tendency.") 
 We know by actual experience and observation that 
 the divine law is conservative of good. We know 
 that'obedience to law insures our safety ; that diso- 
 bedience to law brings only evil. This conserva-
 
 SSN. 49 
 
 tive power of law proves its design to be our good 
 and not evil. Certainly there is no ground for 
 doubt on this subject. If the animal perils its life 
 in the interest of its young ; if the reason and in- 
 stinct of the human parent, notwithstanding his 
 imperfections, prompt him to adopt and enforce 
 rules for the good of his children rather than to 
 serve his own selfish ends, how abhorrent to reason 
 is it to suppose that our divine Father, who is love 
 and in whose image we are, should impose on us a 
 law whose supreme end is not our good, but to 
 ' ' display the glory of sovereign power over (us) his 
 creatures. ' ' 
 
 3. The nature of the requirements of the law is 
 easily inferred from what has been said. 
 
 (i) It requires nothing except our good. We are 
 so constituted that our well-being is conditioned 
 upon our obedience to law ; and every man is the 
 chief beneficiary of his own obedience. His good 
 deeds affect the well-being of his fellows his evil 
 deeds may bring evil upon others ; but neither his 
 good nor bad deeds essentially affect the well-being 
 of his Maker. He would be as truly God, pos- 
 sessed of infinite self-sufficiency, without us and our 
 imperfect services as with them. When we rever- 
 ence God, love God, obey God, we do not profit 
 him, but ourselves and our fellows. He requires 
 nothing of us because he is in any way dependent 
 upon us, or profited by us. 
 
 When we do right love and obey him he is 
 pleased with us. When we do wrong hate and 
 disobey him he is displeased with us.
 
 50 ANTHROPOLOGY. 
 
 Certainly every requisition which he makes, of us 
 is prompted solely by his Fatherly love, his desire 
 for our good. 
 
 Infinitely self-sufficient in himself, what motive, 
 other than the good of his children, could he have 
 for requiring anything of them? 
 
 True, he sometimes speaks to us in the stern tones 
 of authority. But when he does so he is no less our 
 loving Father than when he speaks to us in the lan- 
 guage of persuasion and soft entreaty. When the 
 human father sternly, even angrily, commands 
 his ignorant or thoughtless child to keep out of the 
 fire, where danger lurks, he loves the child as truly 
 as when he speaks approvingly or complacently. 
 In fact the command, however stern, is itself proof 
 of that love. So when our divine Father speaks 
 in threatening words, it is but the stern voice of 
 love saying, " Do thyself no harm. " 
 
 It is also true that he visits aggravated and per- 
 sistent rebellion against his Fatherly authority with 
 justly deserved punishment sometimes extraordi- 
 nary punishment. 
 
 Although he is our Father, his sovereign power 
 over us is not restricted as is the power of human 
 parentage. As the Supreme Father, it is his sever- 
 eign right to create and destroy, to kill and to make 
 alive, and, in his infinite wisdom, to do whatever 
 he sees is best for his children, and none may, with- 
 out blasphemy, challenge the justice or wisdom of 
 his ways. We may be startled, appalled at the fear- 
 fulness and seeming severity of his visitations, be- 
 cause we do not understand them they are too
 
 SIN. 51 
 
 high for our comprehension but we are not war- 
 ranted in impeaching his justice, his wisdom or his 
 love on account of our inability to understand his 
 purposes and the means he employs for their ac- 
 complishment. 
 
 The finite may apprehend but cannot compre- 
 hend the infinite. What to our very limited and 
 .distorted minds may seem unjust or severely cruel, 
 may be in fact the highest display of Fatherly love 
 and favor. The overthrow of the Antedeluvians, 
 the Sodomites, and the Canaanites and other physi- 
 cally and morally debauched peoples may have been, 
 and probably was greater display of Fatherly love 
 than the deliverance of the Hebrews from Egyptian 
 cruelty. Anger and love, even among human- 
 kind often coexist in the same bosom. God's 
 acts of anger (so called) doubtless are only the ex- 
 pressions of a wisdom and love too high for our 
 comprehension. We should rejoice in the convic- 
 tion that his anger never obscures his wisdom or 
 contravenes his Fatherly love for those that bear 
 his image. If he chastens or afflicts or punishes, 
 however severely, it is not through any hatred or 
 animosity or to gratify any malevolent or revenge- 
 ful feeling, but solely for the good of those for 
 whose welfare he is always concerned; "but though 
 he cause grief, yet will he have compassion according 
 to the multitude of his mercies, for he doth not afflict 
 willingly (or from the heart), nor grieve the children 
 of men; to crush under his feet all the prisoners of 
 the earth, to turn aside the right of a man before 
 the face of the Most High." (L,arn. iii. 32-35.)
 
 52 ANTHROPOLOGY. 
 
 Possibly more good comes to men out of what we 
 call calamities than out of what we deem good ; or 
 what we deem the evil and deem the ggod are so in- 
 terblended in the manifold providence of God, that 
 we often, no doubt, mistake the one for the other. 
 
 It is therefore the truest philosophy and also the 
 highest piety to submit cheerfully to his will, even 
 under what seems a calamity, and even implicitly 
 to cast our care upon Him who above all others 
 careth for us, knowing that he will never leave us 
 nor forsake us, having said that "all things work 
 together for the good of them that love God." 
 
 We have every assurance of the fact in every 
 condition in which we may be placed, whether in 
 prosperity or adversity, in wealth or in poverty, in 
 honor or dishonor, in health or affliction, in saint- 
 hood or in sinhood, God is still our Father, loving 
 us, pitying us, rejoicing with the pure and good, 
 and having no pleasure in the death of the wicked 
 who despite his Fatherly warnings and entreaties, 
 have brought ruin upon themselves. 
 
 In the light of such truths as here indicated, we 
 are, if I mistake not, better prepared to apprehend 
 the end of the divine law and the nature of its re- 
 quirements. Surely we can truthfully say the end 
 of the law is good, and all its requirements just 
 such and only such as the infinite wisdom of 
 the All-loving Father sees to be best for our pres- 
 ent and endless happiness. 
 
 This view of the source, end and nature of the 
 law enables us to see in its true light the real na- 
 ture or characteristics of sin.
 
 CHAPTER IV. 
 SIN (CONTINUED). 
 
 IN the light of the above truths let us consider sin 
 in some of its aspects. 
 
 i. Sin is lawlessness, insubordination, rebellion, 
 not against our Creator, as such, not against a 
 heartless autocrat who has by accident or otherwise 
 obtained unjust power over us, but against the will 
 and rightful authority of our Supreme Father who 
 stands in no need of our services, and requires ab- 
 solutely nothing of us except for our own good and 
 the good of others than himself. 
 
 This lawlessness is the climax of unreason. 
 
 (1) Because it is necessarily displeasing to our 
 Father, who loves us as no others can love us, and 
 whom it should be our supreme delight to rever- 
 ence, love and obey; or whom we above all others 
 should seek to please. What child commands so lit- 
 tle sympathy or provokes more general and deeper 
 aversion than such as persistently defy parental au- 
 thority and despise parental favor? If sins against 
 human parentage are justly deemed odious, how 
 much more odious are sins against a heavenly 
 Father, who has given us our earthly parents and 
 all other blessings ? 
 
 (2) Sin is the essence of unreason or folly, be- 
 cause it is as destructive of our own interest as 
 it is displeasing or offensive to God. We often
 
 54 ANTHROPOLOGY. 
 
 think and even speak of sin as if it, at the utmost, 
 could subject us only to some objective[li^e oT) 
 punishment, such as may be inflicted upon a~Tnere 
 brute, as an ox or dog. Because of this low and 
 utterly false notion of sin, many hesitate not to com- 
 mit it, hoping that, like the ox or dog, they may 
 escape punishment; or that the gratification of the 
 sinful desire will more than compensate them for 
 the punishment. Thousands deceive and ruin them-" 
 selves by these and similarly fallacious methods; not 
 recognizing the fearful truth that every sin against 
 their divine Father is equally a sin against them- 
 selves. 
 
 Our mental and moral well-being is as truly 
 conditioned upon our obedience to law as is our phys- 
 ical good. In neither respect can we transgress 
 with impunity. The transgression of hygienic law 
 brings injury, disease or death. So it is of the trans- 
 gressions of moral law. The retributions of the latter 
 are not less sure and generally far more terrible than 
 the former. In both cases the transgressor is 
 a sinner against himself and suffers the bitter con- 
 sequences of his lawlessness. Sin is consequently 
 of all unreasonable things the most unreasonable. 
 
 2. Sin is arrogance. Our heavenly Father tells 
 us for our own good what to do and what not to do. 
 But we arrogate to know better than he what is for 
 our good. The father says to the child: You must 
 not play with the fire. You must keep out of 
 the pond. You must not play with the razor, nor 
 trifle with the gun, nor eat poisonous berries, etc. 
 All these restrictious are made in love and for the
 
 55 
 
 child's good. But the child thinks it knows better 
 than the father what is for its good thinks the 
 father does not want it to be happy and does not 
 hesitate to violate these and all other parental com- 
 mands; and injury, disease or death or calamity in 
 some form is the result, and no amount of unavail- 
 ing regret can undo the evil done. 
 
 In like manner our divine Father tells us for our 
 good what we must do and what we must not do. 
 But we, like the ignorant and self-willed child, ar- 
 rogate to know better than our Father what is best 
 for us. This is supreme arrogance. 
 
 3. Sin is ingratitude in its most aggravated form. 
 Our father is pre-eminently the Father of mercies, 
 from whom comes every good and perfect gift 
 from whom we receive being itself and all our ca- 
 pacities for good and all the means for securing 
 good. We receive all these blessings much as the 
 irrational animal receives its food, without even 
 in the slightest manner acknowledging the kind 
 hand that bestows them. If we receive these in- 
 numerable and inestimable favors at all, we often 
 attribute them, not to their prime source, our mu- 
 nificent and provident Father, but to that blind im- 
 personal thing called nature, or to chance or to our- 
 selves, or to some other than the true source. 
 These inestimable blessings we often use for pur- 
 poses in utter conflict with the purposes for which 
 our heavenly Father confers them. This not only 
 convicts us of the deepest ingratitude to the Giver 
 of all good, but actually converts his richest bless- 
 ings into curses to ourselves.
 
 5 6 ANTHROPOLOGY. 
 
 4. Sin is a perversion or misdirection of our powers. 
 Our mental powers are given us that we may know 
 God and our relation to him, and also know the means 
 by which we ma}' secure to ourselves his compla- 
 cent love and all the blessings temporal and spirit- 
 ual that he has in store for us; and only so far as 
 our intellects and all our mental acquisitions con- 
 tribute to this end are they of any use to us. But 
 instead of making our chief concern to know God 
 and his character and will as revealed in ourselves 
 and in external nature, in his providence and word, 
 we are wont to shut him out of our thoughts. We 
 do not like to retain him in our thoughts, but are 
 much inclined, not only to exclude him from our 
 hearts, but also to exclude him from all nature, and 
 attribute his great and marvelous works to chance 
 or fate or some nondescript power deified as the 
 unknown and unknowable. This is one form of 
 the perversion of our intellectual powers. Another 
 and far more common mode of perversion consists 
 in directing its activities to the device of means for 
 the gratification of desires and the accomplishment 
 of ends as dishonoring to God as they are delete- 
 rious to the true interests of men. 
 
 All our mental powers are given us only for the 
 purpose of promoting our own good and that of 
 others; and this can be done only by subordinating 
 all our mental activities to the will of God as our 
 supreme rule of life. 
 
 Our ignorance of physical or moral law is largely 
 the result of misdirected mental energy and from 
 our ignorance of God's laws in the physical and
 
 57 
 
 moral world, or their willful disregard comes the far 
 greater part of the misery, unhappiness, and discon- 
 tent with which the world abounds. Men by their 
 ignorant or willful violation of hygienic law bring 
 about disease, pestilence, and plague, and hesitate 
 not to charge their afflictions to the Ruler of the 
 world. 
 
 In like manner, but in Christendom with a much 
 greater degree of culpability, we by our ignorance 
 or willful transgression of moral law produce moral 
 abnormalities and moral pestilence which blight 
 human hopes and drown souls in remediless perdi- 
 tion. Such calamities are the natural result of the 
 violations of the beneficent laws upon conformity 
 to which our heavenly Father has conditioned the 
 physical and spiritual well-being of the world, and 
 are not properly, as is often asserted, supernatural 
 visitations of providence. This is evident from the 
 fact that the pestilence stays its ravages when the 
 proper sanitary conditions are restored, N and the 
 moral malady ceases to kill when the soul is restored 
 to its normal state, its obedience to moral law. 
 
 It is the sum of absurdities to violate hygienic 
 law and then expect to enjoy perfect health ; equal- 
 ly so to violate moral law and yet expect to be 
 morally healthy, contented or happy. A virulent 
 ulcer on the body is a hungry canker-worm that 
 drinks up the vital energy faster than nature can 
 supply it; so sin is to the soul an ever-active vora- 
 cious canker-worm which turns the sweets of self- 
 complacent innocence into gall and creates a moral 
 death.
 
 58 ANTHROPOLOGY. 
 
 5. Sin is ruinous prodigality. It misuses or 
 abuses or perverts the bounties of heaven into evils. 
 Our divine Father has bestowed upon his children 
 (all are his offspring) a good inheritance, suited to 
 all and sufficient for all. In an inventory of this 
 common patrimony might be named sunlight, air, 
 water, and the varied and inexhaustible treasures 
 of the earth which are adequate to supply the wants 
 and furnish food, raiment, shelter and comfort to 
 hundreds of millions more than now exist. He al- 
 so furnishes to every people brawn and brain suffi- 
 cient to insure food and raiment and comfort to 
 every human being. There is absolutely no neces- 
 sity of nature why any should go hungry, or starve, 
 or suffer any discomfort from the want of those 
 things that the great Father has conditioned upon 
 human activity. An inestimable part of this divine 
 patrimony is the moral faculty, the power of cog- 
 nizing right and wrong, our duty to him as our 
 common Father and to our species as a common 
 brotherhood. 
 
 True, sin has greatly enfeebled this moral faculty 
 so as to render it an imperfect guide in morals and 
 in religion. Still, it exists as a part of human her- 
 itage in every human breast, and is of high value 
 in enabling every man to be a law unto himself and 
 to be at peace with himself. 
 
 All the facts bearing on the subject show, in a 
 satisfactory way, that our common Father has made 
 bountiful provisions for all the physical and spirit- 
 ual needs of his own household. But that house- 
 hold is far from realizing the happiness provided for
 
 SIN. 59 
 
 them and made attainable by them. The world 
 abounds with human wretchedness and sore dis- 
 content. In many respects it seems less a paradise 
 than a pandemonium. Human wretchedness in 
 almost every conceivable degree and form largely 
 abounds wretchedness from poverty, wretchedness 
 from physical disease, from moral pestilence, from 
 causeless discontent, from fraternal strife, from fam- 
 ily broils, from incurable animosities, from blighted 
 hopes, from disappointed ambition, and from tor- 
 menting fears, from unavailing regrets, and from 
 remorseful consciences. 
 
 Nearly the whole of this unhappiness is directly 
 or indirectly the product of human wills and human 
 hands, and of course might be avoided. Instead 
 of crediting all this human wretchedness to divine 
 Providence and impeaching the wisdom and love 
 of the Father of our spirits, we should, without 
 ignoring a universal providence, rather attribute it 
 to human laziness, filthiness, improvidence, dissi- 
 pation, sensuality, cupidity, lying, cheating, de- 
 frauding, envy, malice and ambition, and kindred 
 causes, all of which are but other names for sin. 
 Sin is the mighty fountain that floods the world 
 with all its real woes. Of course it is not meant 
 that every man's sins affect only himself, or that 
 every man's afflictions and calamities, physical and 
 moral, are the product of his own sins, for one 
 man's sins may bring evils upon others besides him- 
 self. 
 
 The actual state of the world is that of an im- 
 mense household, the greater part of which is in
 
 60 ANTHROPOLOGY. 
 
 open rebellion against supreme parental authority. 
 All are desirous of the same thing and all striving 
 for it, viz: happpiness, but each one seeking it in 
 his own way, each making his own will the supreme 
 law of his own actions, and ignorantly or purposely 
 violating the very laws upon obedience to which 
 parental wisdom and love have conditioned their 
 happiness. What right have we to expect happi- 
 ness when we ignorantly or purposelessly fail to do 
 the very things that our divine Father for our good 
 has commanded us to do; or when we persistently 
 refuse to do what he requires us to do for our own 
 safety? Surely none. The self-willed child that 
 despises parental authority and defiantly violates 
 precepts intended for its good, comes naturally to 
 grief and shame and is the author of its calamities, 
 and yet thinks its fate a hard one. But the re- 
 bellious household not only fails to reverence, love 
 and obey its beneficent and loving Father, but in 
 reckless lawlessness tramples under foot the com-, 
 mon rights of the brotherhood. Impelled by a su- 
 preme selfishness each seeks the accomplishment of 
 his own ends largely, perhaps wholly, regardless of 
 the rights and interests of others, and thus they 
 bring upon one another innumerable evils, physi- 
 cal and moral. A large percentage of the hard 
 earnings of mankind is required to support the 
 civil government and the world. But the only 
 reason for the existence of the government is to 
 make men mind their own business and let other 
 people alone. But the agents of these governments 
 are more or less ignorant or selfish, either not
 
 S/M, 61 
 
 knowing how to accomplish the end of their ap- 
 pointment or are too selfish to do right. Hence 
 the governments themselves can claim, even the best 
 of them, to be nothing more than necessary evils. 
 Their necessity arises out of the ignorance, the 
 moral corruption, and selfishness of humanity. 
 They are evil because they are as ignorant, mor- 
 ally corrupt and selfish as those they attempt to 
 govern. Ignorance is set to enlighten ignorance; 
 corruption to purify corruption, and selfishness to 
 subdue selfishness. 
 
 Instead of an obedient and harmonious house- 
 hold, each loving the other as he loves himself, as 
 the loving Father of all commands, and the highest 
 good of all requires, we have a household which 
 is a quasi pandemonium, where ignorance, discord, 
 envy, jealousy, hatred and every possible form of 
 selfishness reign. Human misery in every formisa 
 natural result of all this lawlessness. Wherever 
 lawlessness abounds misery must abound. The 
 latter is in exact proportion to the former. The 
 world can never be relieved from these evils, phys- 
 ical and moral, except by a return to obedience to 
 the divine law. 
 
 Let men come to love God supremely and 
 their neighbors as themselves, learn to love 
 mercy and deal justly in all things, to do unto 
 others as they would have others do unto them, 
 then would moral evils be swept from our world, 
 and our physical evils be mitigated a thousand-fold 
 or even well-nigh banished. For though the phys- 
 ical and the moral are distinct, yet they are so in-
 
 62 ANTHROPOLOGY. 
 
 timately connected that a large per cent of our 
 physical evils have their ultimate source in the in- 
 fractions of moral law. These facts are verified to 
 a limited extent in cases where no great deteriora- 
 tion is inherited, and where the individual lives 
 mainly obedient to the requirements of both hy- 
 geinic and moral law. A moral world without the 
 liabilities of sin and consequent suffering is an im- 
 possible thing; impossible not because God is not 
 omnipotent and wise and good, but because mo- 
 rality is impossible without freedom, and freedom 
 gives to all newly created minds the possibility and 
 the liability to sin. Sin as sin is impossible to 
 created minds only when they have learned that 
 obedience is the best thing possible, and when they 
 can have no motive or desire to sin. 
 
 This brief allusion to the sources whence come 
 nearly the sum total of our miseries, physical and 
 moral, is sufficient to show us that the human 
 race is the author of its own miseries; that these 
 miseries form no necessary part of the divine 
 plan, that they are simply the inevitable conse- 
 quences of human lawlessness which has its source 
 in supreme selfishness. True it is we are ac- 
 customed to regard many things as evils that lie 
 quite beyond control; such as floods, cyclones and 
 earthquakes. It is, however, probable that if the 
 world of mankind were living in full accord with 
 the will of our beneficent Father and were free 
 from all the evils brought on us by our lawlessness, 
 the flood, the cyclone and the earthquake, and 
 even physical death itself would not be regarded as
 
 63 
 
 evils or calamities at all. We may very well pity 
 those that bring ruin upon themselves; the mur- 
 derer, who by his lawlessness brings himself to the 
 scaffold. But we should not blame the law under 
 which he suffers or the law-makers whose motives 
 are wise and good. We should rather blame the 
 lawlessness that brought his ruin. 
 
 We may very properly pity the world while writh- 
 ing in its physical and moral agonies produced by 
 its own lawlessness; but we should not question the 
 wisdom or beneficence of the law whose transgres- 
 sions have caused these agonies; nor the love of the 
 divine Father who has imposed these laws for our 
 good. 
 
 While men are taught to regard God simply as 
 their creator who has a right to their obedience, be- 
 cause he has created them, will they be inclined to 
 render only a reluctant obedience. So long as men 
 are taught that his object in their creation is for the 
 glory of his sovereign power over his creatures will 
 they be little inclined to serve him. 
 
 So long as they are taught that the supreme end 
 of his law is a vindication of his rights as their 
 creator and proprietor, having no special adaptation 
 to their good, so long will men find it hard to trust 
 and love him. They may fear him slavishly and 
 obey him cringingly as a captive his captor, or a 
 slave his master, or a satrap his superior, but not 
 otherwise. 
 
 Not until men recognize God as their Father who 
 loves them, protects them, pities them as kind 
 parents pity their children, do they truly trust him,
 
 64 ANTHROPOLOGY. 
 
 reverence, love and obey him with a cheerful, happy 
 delight. We all know that the predominant ten- 
 dency of pulpit performances for more than a thou- 
 sand years has been to make conspicuously promi- 
 nent the divine creatorship and its autocratic pre- 
 rogatives, and to leave in the dark background the 
 divine Fatherhood. 
 
 In this losing sight of the divine Fatherhood and 
 making prominent the divine creatorship and gov- 
 ernorship, the attribute of divine justice has been 
 pressed out of all past relations in that it has 
 been made to dominate all the other attributes, thus 
 making it incompatible with mercy, and, logically, 
 (happily only logically) making God himself un- 
 able to pardon without first punishing his ignorant 
 and erring children in a substitute. 
 
 Surely it is no marvel that our popular Chris- 
 tianity has achieved so little in comparison with 
 what its friends think it ought to have accom- 
 plished. Certainly God is immutably just, is never 
 unjust. But this is not incompatible with mercy. 
 If it were, pardon would be forever impossible. 
 No unjust act is merciful, and no unmerciful act is 
 just. Divine justice and divine mercy are simply 
 obverse aspects of the same divine wisdom and love. 
 This view of justice and mercy presents a brighter 
 prospect to the world, being in full harmony with 
 the Fatherhood of God. Happily for Christianity 
 the divine Fatherhood is coming into greater promi- 
 nence in the pulpit and religious literature than has 
 been accorded for centuries; and this fact is prophet- 
 ic of greater triumphs of the cross in the future.
 
 SIN. 65 
 
 Let men generally come to recognize God as their 
 loving, merciful Father, who notwithstanding their 
 unnatural rebellion, pities them that fear him as a 
 father pitieth his children; that he is merciful and 
 gracious, slow to anger and plenteous in mercy, 
 that all he requires of them is strictly and literally 
 for their good; that he doth not afflict willingly, 
 that he has no pleasure in the death of the wicked; 
 that their punishments are the inevitable conse- 
 quences of their own sins; that if they suffer pun- 
 ishment now and hereafter it is all their own fault, 
 and not from any necessity imposed upon them by 
 a natural or a supernatural providence; let men 
 come to know and appreciate these facts in their 
 true light and as sure as day follows night men will 
 cease to regard God as a merciless tyrant instead of 
 a loving Father who could not create men simply 
 to damn them for his own glory, they will cease to 
 regard themselves as the hapless and helpless vic- 
 tims of a tyrant that afflicts them simply for the 
 glory of his sovereign power over his creatures. 
 
 On the contrary, recognizing God as a loving 
 Father as their Father who doth not afflict wil- 
 lingly, who has no pleasure in the death of the 
 wicked, who is willing to forgive iniquity, trans- 
 gression and sin, who is anxious to receive with 
 open arms and heart the returning prodigal men 
 will see their sins in a light they never saw them 
 before. They will see and feel their ingratitude, 
 folly and shame as never before. If they do not 
 repent and return to a cheerful obedience to their 
 Father's will, they will at least cease to question
 
 66 ANTHROPOLOGY. 
 
 his love and to charge their unhappiness to his pur- 
 poses concerning them. They will come to know 
 there is immunity from evil only in obedience to 
 law or God's will. This is equally true both of 
 physical and moral law. Hence lawlessness is the 
 means by which we bring upon ourselves innumer- 
 able physical and moral evils, and obedience to law 
 the only means of averting evils both of body and 
 mind. The remedy for moral evils is found in 
 Soteriology, or the science of salvation.
 
 CHAPTER V. 
 
 SIN, TRANSGRESSION AND INIQUITY. 
 
 (Continued.) 
 
 terms are expressive of the same gen- 
 A eral idea, either of lawless acts or lawless men- 
 tal states of the actors, and are consequently 
 interchangeably used in the Sacred Scriptures. The 
 characteristics of one of these terms may be ac- 
 cepted as the essential characteristics of all of them. 
 
 SEC. I. Sin as an act. Sin is of two essentially 
 different kinds. 
 
 Voluntary acts of disobedience to the known will 
 or law of God, such as the sin of the first man in 
 eating the forbidden fruit, the treachery of Judas 
 and many others named in the Bible. This is the 
 most aggravated form of sin, and subjects the per- 
 petrator to the severest penalties. " He that 
 knoweth his master's will and doeth it not shall be 
 beaten with many stripes." 
 
 Voluntary acts in violation of the unknown law 
 or will of God. These acts constitute what are recog- 
 nized as sins of ignorance. Though less flagrant 
 than those previously named, still they are sins and 
 subject those that commit them to the loss of that 
 good or blessing that comes from obedience to law. 
 Such is the condition of those that know not the 
 law. (Such must be punished morally according to
 
 68 ANTHROPOLOGY. 
 
 their knowledge of the law. This is a fair infer- 
 ence from the parable of the talents and other Bible 
 facts.) This punishment, I suppose, must consist 
 in the deprivation of good, as in the deprivation of 
 health by violation cf human law, rather than in 
 the infliction of positive evil, as in remorse of con- 
 science and a sense of self-degradation. 
 
 SEC. II. Sin as a state. The words sin and 
 iniquity are in the Scriptures often used to express 
 not an act but a state or "habit resulting from vol- 
 untary action, directly or indirectly. We know 
 that our acts of perception, also our acts of will, 
 our purposes and endeavors produce corresponding 
 states of mind or bring the mind into different re- 
 lations to the objects perceived, or purposed or done. 
 
 In accordance with this universal law every sin- 
 ful act is followed by a corresponding sinful state 
 of mind, because of the inseparable relations be- 
 tween act and state the same word is used to ex- 
 press sometimes the act and sometimes the state. 
 This simple state is never produced and in the 
 nature of the case can never be produced except by 
 a voluntary act, but this sinful state having been 
 thus produced by the voluntary act of one man in 
 himself may be transmitted ,to his progeny by 
 heredity, just as any other physical or moral quality 
 may be transmitted. This fact is fully avouched 
 both by the science of heredity and by the sacred 
 Scriptures. Hence a sinful state may be truthfully 
 affirmed of children that have committed no sin- 
 ful act.
 
 SfN. 69 
 
 2. That the words sin and iniquity are often used to 
 express a state and not an act might be proved by 
 scores of Bible texts. A few instances of such use 
 of these terms will be sufficient for my purpose. 
 
 (1) "Wash me thoroughly from mine iniquity 
 and cleanse me from my sin." Psa. li.2. It is a 
 common characteristic of Hebrew poetry that the 
 same idea is repeated by the use of equivalent terms. 
 In this text the words " iniquity" and " sin " mean 
 the same thing, so do the words "wash" and, 
 cleanse." Now it is evident from mere inspection 
 that the words "sin" and "iniquity" here mean a 
 state and not an act; for it would be little less than 
 nonsense to speak of cleansing or washing an act. 
 Plainly enough it is the actor and not the act that^ 
 needj^to be cleansed, and is capable of being cleansed 
 or washed. 
 
 (2) "I was shapen (formed or brought forth) in 
 iniquity, and in sin did my mother conceive me." 
 Psa. li-5. Here sin and iniquity obviously mean 
 a sinful state and not a sinful act; otherwise {he 
 text would teach that David was a child of adultery 
 or that all conception was sin. This text also 
 teaches with sufficient precision and force that child- 
 ren are born in a depraved or sinful state. Three 
 remarks may here be pertinently made: 
 
 First, we need not and should not with the Cal-V 
 vinist predicate of infant condemnation or liability 
 to punishment simply because the infant is born in 
 this sinful state; (a) because in its irrational state it is 
 not the subject of moral law at all ; (b) because in that 
 it is not liable to moral retribution at all; for accord-
 
 70 ANTHROPOLOGY. 
 
 ing to our Ccnfession of Faith, dying in an irra- 
 tional state it is " regenerated and saved." 
 
 Secondly, we need not and should not with some 
 Armenians predicate of the infant justification and 
 a fitness for eternal life; (a) because as previously 
 said it is not the subject of moral law and, (b) be- 
 cause if born in a sinful state, it is not in a state of 
 spiritual life, and consequently needs to be put into 
 that state or relieved of its sinful state. 
 
 Thirdly, when reason and the moral sense are so 
 far developed that the child can distinguish between 
 right and wrong, it comes under law or is required 
 to love God, and failing to do this necessarily passes 
 under condemnation, or becomes by nature a child 
 of wrath as in actual transgression. Possibly child- 
 ren under highly advantageous circumstances may 
 come to love Christ and actually pass from a state 
 of death unto life before they are capable of any 
 distinct sense of moral accountability. 
 
 (3) "Therefore as through one man (Adaui) sin 
 entered into the world (humanity), and death (spirit- 
 ual and no other) through sin; and so death passed 
 unto all men for that all sinned." Rom. v.ia. 
 This text through ages has been the puzzle of 
 exegetes. It is confessedly difficult and much of 
 this difficulty arises, I think, from taking the word 
 "sin" as expression of an act instead of the con- 
 sequence of an act; or as the expression of a sinful 
 act instead of a sinful state, as it is often taken in 
 other texts. This is, I suspect, the chief source of 
 difficulty. 
 
 (a) " Sin entered into the world. " There is some-
 
 SIN. 71 
 
 thing grotesque and solecistic in the idea of sin as 
 an act entering into the world or human beings. 
 It is unintelligible and, of course, inexplicable. 
 On the contrary the words "through one man sin 
 entered into the world," if we take the word " sin" 
 to mean a sinful state, become intelligible and capa- 
 ble of rational explanation. We have only to admit 
 that Adam by willful disobedience corrupted his 
 moral nature, and then by generation transmitted 
 that sinful state to his posterity. This view with- 
 out any aid from realism in any form or fiat impu- 
 tation gives us at once a rational and scriptural ac- 
 count of the introduction of sin into humanity. 
 
 (b) "Death, (entered into the world, humanity) 
 by or through sin. " (Spiritual death alone is here 
 intended as will be subsequently shown.) Sin as a 
 willful act is causative of sin as a state or causative 
 of a sinful state, and sin as a state is followed by 
 death as its wages or natural consequences; just as 
 education, as an act, is causative of education as a 
 state, and education as a state of the mind is fol- 
 lowed by the advantages of this state, or as a crim- 
 inal act is causative of a criminal state which is fol- 
 lowed by penal consequences. 
 
 (c) "And so death passed (over) unto all men." 
 The word passed over teaches that Adam's spiritual 
 death is transmitted, of course, by heredity to his 
 posterity. This fact condemns both realism or the 
 idea that all men voluntarily participated in the 
 first human sin; and also condemns federal imputa- 
 tion; for what a man voluntarily does himself does 
 not pass over to him, nor is it imputed to him or
 
 72 ANTHROPOLOGY. 
 
 become his by federal representations, but it is 
 strictly his own act and its necessary consequences 
 are the products of his own act. 
 
 (d) ' ' So that (because or inasmuch as) all 
 sinned." Does the word "sinned" here express 
 an act or a state resulting from an act ? Some say 
 the former, and some the latter. All actually sinned 
 in a previous state of existence, answers the pre* 
 existentist. All actually sinned in Adam answers 
 the realists. No one actually sinned except the first 
 man, but his sin was imputed to all his posterity, 
 answers the federal imputationist. The pre-exist- 
 entist and the realist make the word "sinned " ex- 
 press a literal, voluntary act. The federalist makes 
 it express not a voluntary act, but the judicial vis- 
 itation of Adam's corruption and guilt upon his pos- 
 terity; i. e., all are accounted and treated as sin- 
 ners, not because they have actually sinned, but 
 because Adam as their federal head or representa- 
 tive actually sinned. The federalist is, I think, 
 right in denying that the word sinned in this case 
 expresses a voluntary act, but radically wrong in 
 attributing the death in which all are involved to 
 any artificial contrivance, such as federal headship, 
 or any other fiction. Federal headship and natural 
 headship cannot be co-causes of depravity. If a 
 child resembles its father it is not because he is its 
 legal representative and protector, but because he 
 is its progenitor. Federal headship is just as in- 
 competent to account for human depravity as is pre- 
 existentism or realism. Natural headship or pro- 
 genitorship only can give an intelligible and satis-
 
 SIN. 73 
 
 factory explanation of the source of depravity. 
 
 But if we take the word "sinned " in this text to 
 express not an act, but a state resulting from an 
 act, then we must take it in a metonymical sense, 
 or put the cause for the effect. Are we just- 
 ifiable in doing this? I think we are. This 
 figure of speech is often used in the scriptures. 
 Paul used it in this very connection (v. 14), when 
 he said, "Death reigns from Adam to Moses." As 
 we have seen from v. 12, sin is causative of death; 
 and in v. 21, it is said that "sin hath reigned unto 
 death." Here the reign, which in v. 21 is at- 
 tributed to sin, the real cause of death is in v. 14, 
 attributed to death; that is, death, the effect, is put 
 for sin, the cause. So the words " all sinned" are 
 by metonymy put for all become sinners, or subjects 
 of sinful state and, for this reason, the victims of 
 spiritual death, the consequences of this sinful 
 state. 
 
 This view, I think, frees the subject from the em- 
 barrassment in which pre-existentism, realism and 
 federalism have each respectively involved it. 
 
 It releases us from the absurdity of believing that 
 men lived and sinned in a previous state of which 
 they now have no knowledge. 
 
 It releases us from the absurdity of saying that 
 men lived in this world and actually sinned volun- 
 tarily thousands of years before they were born, of 
 which events they now have no knowledge. 
 
 It releases us from the absurdity of .attributing 
 depravity to two different and conflicting causes; 
 viz., To federal headship and natural headship. It
 
 74 ANTHROPOLOGY. 
 
 is the least difficult of rational explanation and 
 defense, and is therefore presumably the correct 
 view of the subject 
 
 SEC. III. Sin as a state subjects us to punish- 
 ment. The preceding discussion of sin as an act 
 and sin as a state enables us the better to under- 
 stand the real ground of punishment and also the 
 nature of moral retribution. Men are punished for 
 their sins. This is a uniform teaching of the Bible 
 and experience confirms the fact. 
 
 But the question arises: Are they punished for 
 their acts as such ? or for their mental states 
 whence their external acts proceed ? Most persons, 
 if they speak without reflection, would answer, For 
 their acts. Due reflection, however, would cause 
 them to reverse this answer and say that subjects 
 of moral law are rewarded and punished for their 
 mental states and not for their external acts. It is 
 true that a volition, a' mental act, primarily de- 
 termines the mental state. But it is the mental 
 state, the intention, that subjects us to punishment. 
 The external act is ordinarily an expression of in- 
 tention and, of itself or apart from the mental state, 
 has no moral character. 
 
 This is true even in human laws concerning 
 crime and is pre-eminently so in moral law. 
 Guiteau was not hung for the act of shooting Gar- 
 field, but for the state of mind with which he did 
 the act. Tfithad been proved that the shooting 
 was accidental, or unintentional; that his mind was
 
 75 
 
 morally right, without bad feeling or evil intention, 
 he would not have been hung. 
 
 So it is in all criminal cases. Men are punished 
 for what they are rather than for what they do, or j 
 for their sinful states rather than their external 
 acts. Because of the difficulty of determining the 
 exact state of the mind of the criminal human 
 tribunals, no doubt, make many mistakes, some- 
 times awarding greater and sometimes less punish- 
 ment than the real measure of guilt requires. 
 
 The rule holds with infallible certainty in rela- \ 
 tion to morals. Adam became a criminal at heart, 
 a criminal in fact when he formed the purpose to 
 eat the forbidden fruit, or before he stretched forth 
 his hand to take it. 
 
 The external acts of putting forth his hand and 
 eating the fruit were mere expressions of a previously 
 formed purpose, or pre-existent state of mind. We 
 call the external act sinful not because it was in- 
 trinsically so, but because it was the product and 
 expression of a prior sinful state of mind. Having 
 fully formed the purpose to eat, had the external 
 act of eating been by any means prevented, he 
 would have been as truly a sinner as the man that 
 hates his brother is a murderer though he never 
 commits the external act of killing. In both these 
 cases in fact in all cases it is sin as a state 
 rather than sin as an act that subjects to moral 
 retribution. 
 
 SEC. IV. The relation of sin and its punish- 
 ment. Sin and its punishment are related exactly
 
 76 ANTHROPOLOGY. 
 
 as an act and its natural consequences, as cause and 
 effects. The punishment comes naturally out of 
 the sinful state; is inseparable from it, is not some- 
 thing adventitious or abitrarily added to it, but is 
 its own natural product, Hence u to be carnally 
 minded (in a sinful state) is death." The wages 
 (the natural or divinely established consequences) of 
 sin is death. (Rorn. vi. 23.) "Whatsoever a man 
 soweth that shall he also reap. He that soweth to 
 his flesh shall of the flesh also reap corruption ; " i.e., 
 destruction. (Gal. vi. 8.) These and other texts 
 show that punishment is unseparable from sin as a 
 state of the mind or heart. Not more surely does 
 pain follow a diseased state of the body than 
 does punishment follow a sinful state of the 
 heart. 
 
 Very high human authority says, "There is no 
 sin so small but it deserves damnation." No one 
 ought either affirm or deny this proposition with- 
 out explanation and it is easier to make a new state- 
 ment than to satisfactorily explain the old one. 
 The Bible never so states the relation of sin and 
 penalty; never says sin deserves punishment, or 
 ought to be punished, or merits punishment. It 
 rather teaches that sins or sinners are punished, or 
 shall be punished, or that sins are causative of pun- 
 ishment, as sickness is causative of suffering or 
 death. No one would say that sickness ought to pro- 
 duce pain, or deserves pain. This would be equiva- 
 lent to saying that the cause ought to produce its 
 effects or deserves its effects. We do not properly 
 predicate deservednesss or oughtness or obliga-
 
 5/A1 77 
 
 tion or liability of what is absolutely necessary. 
 
 It is only when we conceive that men are pun- 
 ished for their sinful acts, rather than for their sinful 
 state, and that the punishment is objective and sep- 
 arable from the sinful state that we talk of what 
 penalties sin deserves, or ought to be inflicted 
 upon sinners. This corruption rests upon the as- 
 sumption of an analogy between human and divine 
 law which does not exist and of course gives a 
 false and pernicious notion of the relations of sin 
 and its punishment. The sinner, at least in his 
 ordinary state of mind, not being conscious that 
 his sin " deserves (external) damnation," very nat- 
 urally comes to regard God, not as his Father loving 
 and merciful, but as unmerciful and perhaps as un- 
 just, and is consequently repelled rather than 
 drawn to him. On the contrary, if the sinner is 
 made to know that God is his loving Father, more 
 willing to forgive than he is to be forgiven, and 
 that the penalties to which his sin subjects him are 
 the natural and subjective consequences of his own 
 sinful state, he will be more likely to cease his re- 
 proaches against the goodness of God and turn 
 against himself as the guilty cause of his own 
 wretchedness. 
 
 Let the sinner be made to know that the state of 
 his own mind and heart determines the nature and 
 severity of his punishment and that so long as he 
 continues in his state of enmity to God and insub- 
 ordination to his will he must suffer, he will be 
 more inclined to take heed to his ways and leave 
 off his sins.
 
 78 ANTHROPOLOGY. 
 
 SEC. V. Sin and its pardon. If the above ex- 
 pressed views of the relation of sin and its penal- 
 ties are true, then we cannot fail to see the unreason- 
 ableness of all theological schemes that proceed on 
 
 ^/ the assumption that sin and its penalties are sep- 
 arable one from the other absolutely capable of 
 such complete separation that one man may be the 
 criminal and the other man bear the punishment; 
 or as it is sometimes expressed, one may bear the 
 reatus culpce and another man bear the reatus 
 fioentz; and that the punishment of any sin, or all 
 sin, may be borne by one person thousands of years 
 before it is committed by the other party. 
 
 According to the advocates of this theory the 
 
 Y punishment of sin is purely objective, as really so 
 as is the punishment of a thief who receives " forty 
 stripes save one, " or the punishment of an ox. 
 
 The advocates of this scheme themselves admit 
 (at least those that know anything about it) that if 
 the punishment of sin is subjective, then it is im- 
 possible for one person to bear the criminality and 
 another the penalty. 
 
 Now I wish in this connection only to say that 
 this method of pardon is not only unreasonable but 
 is equally unscriptural. According to the scheme 
 Christ actually suffered the punishment proper to 
 
 Y all for whom he died and by consequence released 
 all such from all penalty. But the Bible tells us 
 that this is not true, that the wrath of God abideth 
 upon unbelievers, and such are condemned al- 
 ready. 
 
 Again, the scriptures nowhere teach that Christ
 
 SfN. 79 
 
 came to bear, or that he did bear, or take away or 
 blot out the penalties of sin. 
 
 On the contrary the scriptures teach in the most 
 explicit manner that he came to put away sin, not 
 its penalties, by the sacrifice of himself; that he 
 bore our sins (not our penalties) in his own body 
 on the tree; that it is our sins and not their penal- 
 ties, that are blotted out, remitted, forgiven, par- 
 doned. Of what use would it be, were such a 
 thing possible, to take away the penalty and to 
 leave the sin that caused it intact? Or to take the 
 effect and leave the cause in full vigor ? The phy- 
 sician in treating his patient does not deal with the 
 pain, but with the disease that causes it. In like 
 manner Christ, the great physician, in his visible 
 ministry did not deal with the sufFering, physical 
 and mental, of men but with their disease, taking 
 away, blotting out, forgiving their sins or chang- 
 ing their physical and mental states to a normal 
 from the abnormal states in which their sufferings 
 had their origin. He did not take away the suf- 
 ferings of Peter's wife's mother and leave the fever 
 in her; or relieve the demoniac of his sufferings 
 and leave the legion of devils in him. When he 
 said, " Son, be of good cheer; thy sins be forgiven 
 thee," he did not take away the punishment of 
 pain and leave the sins unmolested, but relieved 
 the paralytic of the sins which cause his sufferings. 
 Never did he deal with the penalties of sin as some- 
 thing separate from sins themselves. Never did he 
 take away the punishment except by taking away 
 the sins which produced them. In this respect
 
 8o ANTHROPOLOGY. 
 
 physical and moral laws are strictly analagous. 
 
 Such facts show us exactly what is meant by blot- 
 ting out, remitting, forgiving and pardoning sins, 
 iniquities and transgression, viz : It is not to take 
 away or relieve us of punishment or liability to 
 punishment, but to free us, deliver us, save us from 
 the sinful state which produces this punishment. 
 
 In view of such facts how inexpressibly abhor- 
 rent to reason and to revelation is the doctrine that 
 Christ bore the guilt and punishment of sin the 
 sins of all or of a part of mankind, but leftthesins 
 themselves undisturbed ? Or that he by a substi- 
 tutionary and penal death took away our reatus 
 poenae, but did not and could not in that manner 
 take away our reatus culpae or sinful state? If 
 this doctrine was true it would exempt all for whom 
 Christ died from all the natural punishments both 
 in this life and in the life to come, as truly so as 
 would the payment of a debt by a substitute exempt 
 the principal from obligation to pay it, for there 
 would be no debt to pay. 
 
 A governor invested with pardoning power may 
 release a convict from the penalty awarded him by 
 the court. Substitutionists sometimes deceive 
 themselves by thoughtlessly assuming the penalties 
 of moral law to be analagous to those of the civil 
 law, and that as the governor sets aside civil penal- 
 ties without any actual change in the state of the 
 convict's mind, so Christ could and did set aside the 
 penalties of those for whom he suffered without 
 any antecedent change of their sinful state. 
 
 But it should be carefully noted that there is no
 
 S/N. 8 1 
 
 analogy between civil and divine law in this respect. 
 The civil law is not written on the heart is not a 
 connection of the mind itself. The moral is so 
 written. 
 
 The penalties of civil law are purely objective 
 and are for this reason separable from the mental 
 states of the criminal. The penalties of the moral 
 law are subjective and are consequently inseparable 
 from the actual state of the transgressor. Hence 
 no one can take my punishments without taking 
 the actual state of my mind, my criminality, my 
 sense of guilt and my conscience. Nor can I pos- 
 sibly be delivered from my punishment except by 
 antecedent change of mind and heart. This need- 
 ful change is identical with pardon, remission, for- 
 giveness of sin. It is represented in the Bible as a 
 washing, a cleansing, a healing, a renewal, a regen- 
 erating, a_ creating anew, a purging of the con- 
 science from dead works to serve the living God. 
 
 This presentation of the divine law and its rea- 
 sonable requirements; of sin, penalty and pardon, 
 which is here but imperfectly given, is not only in 
 harmony with our Confession of Faith, but is in 
 part, in every essential point, the only explanation, 
 of which it logically admits. See Con. Faith, sec- 
 tions 66-70. 
 
 Parenthetically it may be stated as a fact of some 
 interest that, so far as I know, our New Confession 
 of Faith is the first doctrinal symbol that formally 
 declares a difference between the ordinary and 
 natural punishments of sin and judicial and extra- 
 ordinary punishments, making the former subjec-
 
 82 ANTHROPOLOGY. 
 
 tive and the latter objective. The seventieth (70) 
 section is in these words : " The penalties of this 
 law are the natural and subjective consequences of 
 transgression, and unless set aside by the provisions 
 of the gospel must of necessity be eternal; and 
 such they are declared to be by the Holy Scriptures. 
 These moral retributions must be distinguished 
 from judicial punishment which are arbitrary, ob- 
 jective and temporary, and are always inflicted as 
 occasion may require for administrative purposes.' '
 
 CHAPTER VI. 
 
 THE RELATION OF SIN TO NATURAL OR PHYSIC- 
 AL EVIL. 
 
 SEC. I. Does sin sustain a causal relation to all 
 evil, physical as well as moral? 
 
 BY many it has been and is yet so regarded. But 
 there are evidently many things properly re- 
 garded as evils or calamities that have no de- 
 pendence upon sin. These may be classified as fol- 
 lows: 
 
 (i) Evils resulting from the operation of physical 
 forces in the inorganic ivorld. While these forces are, 
 on the whole, highly beneficial and no doubt neces- 
 sary to the well-being of both the physical and 
 moral world, they nevertheless are often destructive 
 to human life and happiness. Through the opera- 
 tion of these forces of nature, under a divine superin- 
 tendence, the world has always been subjected to 
 rains, winds, floods and volcanic actions, earth- 
 quakes, excessive heat and cold, etc. By these 
 agencies of nature millions of valuable property 
 have been lost, millions of valuable lives destroyed, 
 millions of fond hopes blighted, and whole com- 
 munities and States filled with anguish and woe. 
 That these forces and human sin have no causal 
 connection is evident from the fact that they exist- 
 ed according to the revelations of geology unnum-
 
 84 ANTHROPOLOGY. 
 
 bered ages prior to the man-period of the earth's 
 history. Sin, from its inherent nature, has no more 
 power to produce them than they have to produce 
 sin. They are the forces God has ordained for the 
 conservation of the physical world, and though 
 they existed and operated long anterior to man, yet 
 if God chose to use them for purposes of moral ad- 
 ministration, as we know he sometimes does, this 
 does not imply that they have any dependency up- 
 on moral evil, or moral evil upon them. Or if the 
 earth had been intended for habitation by a race of 
 beings no higher in the scale of being than beasts 
 and birds, these same forces would have existed, 
 just as they now do, and the same results would 
 have followed, so far as these inferior creatures are 
 concerned, that now occur. 
 
 (2) Evils resulting from the operation of the laws 
 of vegetable life and death. 
 
 The world, for various reasons, could not exist 
 without the flora or vegetable kingdom. Both man 
 and animal without vegetables would certainly per- 
 ish with hunger. Their effects on man and beasts 
 are in many ways highly beneficent ; yet various 
 evils often come from this beneficent provision of 
 nature. Vegetation powerfully modifies the tem- 
 perature, hence the prevailing of heat and cold. 
 Its decay often generates bad air, miasmatic poisons, 
 and brings on terrible epidemics, and epizootics, 
 destructive to men and beasts. These epidemics 
 that destroy men and beasts by the thousand, are 
 esteemed great evils, but the natural forces that 
 produce them existed and operated no doubt on the
 
 SfN AND PHYSICAL EVIL. 85 
 
 animal kingdom long before man existed at all, and 
 hence can sustain no causal relation to sin. If God 
 in his providence chose to use such instru- 
 mentalities for administrative purposes in the mor- 
 al world as he doubtless does, he of course is at 
 liberty to do so and then bring moral good out of 
 physical evil. 
 
 (3) Evils res2ilting from the laws of instincts of 
 the animal creation. 
 
 The design of these laws is the conservation and 
 perpetuation of animal life, and their general ten- 
 dency is beneficial, whether we consider the animals 
 themselves or the human race, as the objects of be- 
 neficence. But from this source of benefactions 
 evils often result, both to animals and to men. 
 Some of these animals are strictly herbivorous, 
 others are carnivorous, and others are called om- 
 nivorous. Now while the animal creation seems 
 indispensable to man there are two classes of evils 
 incident to man from this source. First, human 
 food and clothing are largely derived from animals. 
 The domestic animals have become property in all 
 ages, and have constituted a large part of the food 
 and property of man. But these have always been 
 the coveted prey of the more powerful carnivor- 
 ous tribes, and consequently great losses in property 
 are sustained from this source. Hence, in all new- 
 ly-settled countries one of the first public necessi- 
 ties is to free the country from the natural enemies 
 to man's secular good. The extermination of these 
 vicious beasts seems to have formed a large part of 
 the exploits of the fabulous Hercules.
 
 86 ANTHROPOLOGY. 
 
 Samson, too, was a laborer in this department of 
 philanthropy. David had adventures with a lion 
 and a bear. Now the economy of the animal world 
 was established long prior to the creation of man, 
 and it is certainly a fair inference that if the human 
 race had become numerous without having sinned 
 this evil would have existed as it does now. That 
 is, the wolf nor the lion would no more respect 
 the lamb or the kid of a righteous man than of a 
 sinner. A second evil from this source is man's 
 liability to lose his life as well as his property. 
 This is so now, and we have no reasonable ground 
 to suppose it would be otherwise if man had never 
 sinned. On the contrary hypothesis we have to 
 suppose that the creator changed the nature of the 
 instincts, and also the mechanical structure of the 
 animal world, on account of Adam's sin. But this 
 would be an assumption as ridiculous as incredible. 
 In fine, to answer on this point that Adam's sin 
 and all natural evil are causally connected, is to as- 
 sume that in consequence of that sin the creator 
 has materially changed the whole course of nature 
 in organized matter ; in the vegetable and in the 
 animal creation, or else to suppose that God, in 
 case of man's perpetual obedience, would have 
 wrought a perpetual miracle in defending him from 
 the numerous evils to which he would have been 
 subjected from these sources. But we have no right 
 to assume any such miracle for such a purpose, for 
 it is abundantly demonstrated that man was never 
 an object of deeper solicitude and greater providen- 
 tial care before his fall than he has been since. Yet
 
 AND PHYSICAL EVIL. 87 
 
 we know that all these evils do now come upon 
 him, hence the inference that they would have come 
 upon him if he had never sinned. 
 
 But there are possible evils arising from a want 
 of food, raiment, etc. Suppose sin had not entered 
 the world, and the rates of increase of the sinless 
 race had been equal to what it has actually been, 
 then there is a strong presumption amounting al- 
 most to certainty that suffering in some cases would 
 have resulted on the score of physical discomfort. 
 The hypothesis that there would have been no 
 deaths but for sin increases this presumption an 
 hundredfold. Even according to the chronology 
 about two hundred generations have passed away. 
 Suppose the average population of these genera- 
 tions to have been only half of the present popula- 
 tion of the globe the number of its dead would be 
 one hundred times as great as the number of the 
 living with the knowledge actually possessed by 
 mankind. Could such a number be accommodated 
 with food, fuel, raiment and shelter? I should 
 think not, without a continual miracle, which we 
 have no right to suppose. 
 
 Of all natural evils death is regarded as the great- 
 est by all men except a few crazy suicides. Now 
 it is pertinent to inquire whether natural death, in 
 all its phases, is a penal consequence of sin. Au- 
 gustine believed the Adamic sin was the cause of 
 death to man and also to all other animals, and this 
 irrational figment has had a very strong hold on 
 the religious mind. He was very certain animals 
 never would have died in Eden had not sin been
 
 88 ANTHROPOLOGY. 
 
 originated. Had he lived in the nineteenth centu- 
 ry his mystic tendencies would not have carried 
 him so far. He would have been content to allow 
 sin to be the cause of physical death to human be- 
 ings only, and would have allowed the animals to 
 die, seeing God had so constituted some species as 
 to make their subsistence dependent on the flesh of 
 others. You ask the physiologist, the anatomist, 
 the scientist generally, whether Christian or infi- 
 del, whether the creator intended man to live 
 eternally in the animal body as when first created. 
 , They will answer emphatically, "No." The basis 
 of this conclusion is, man is an organized being 
 J and hence from a necessity inherent in his nature 
 he, like all other organized beings, plants and ani- 
 / mals, must die. 
 
 If you suggest to the infidel scientist that sin is 
 the cause of death he will laugh at your credulity. 
 If you suggest the same idea to a Christian scientist 
 he will probably suggest that you must either mis- 
 interpret the Bible in its general teachings on the 
 subject, or take the word death in a sense not in- 
 tended by the inspired writers. Now the book of 
 
 V nature and the book of revelation are both from 
 God. He is as truly the author of the one as of the 
 other. When the students of these books make 
 
 ^ them contradict each other God is misinterpret- 
 ed. 
 
 SEC. II. Are death and all haman sufferings 
 Penall In this connection I propose to consider 
 the question: Are natural death and all its physical
 
 SIN AND PHYSICAL EVIL. 89 
 
 sufferings punishments for sin in the person of the 
 sufferer ? 
 
 The affirmative of this question has been perti- 
 naciously asserted from the day of Augustine to the 
 present hour. But when we inquire for the proof 
 of this proposition we are utterly amazed at its 
 scantiness. 
 
 Let us briefly glance at the proof. Gen. ii. 19: 
 "In the day," etc. It is assumed that death in 
 this verse is to be understood in a complex sense, 
 so as to include both spiritual and physical death. 
 But it is, as far as I can see, an assumption with- 
 out any conclusive proof. This interpretation 
 seems to me impossible for the following reasons: 
 
 1. All the facts stated in the previous chapter 
 concerning sin and natural evil afford powerful pre- 
 sumption against this interpretation, for if natural 
 evil existed before Adam, natural death has no 
 causal relation to sin. Then of course natural 
 evil cannot be the punishment of sin or any part of 
 that punishment. 
 
 2. That the word death is often used to express 
 the separation of the soul from God, and is also of- 
 ten used to express the separation of soul and 
 body, is readily admitted. But what authority 
 have we for believing that this single word death 
 in this text is intended to express both these ideas? 
 Is it used in the complex or double sense in any 
 other text in the Bible or in any human composi- 
 tion? If so, where? Is any other word in the 
 Bible used in any single proposition without qual- 
 ification to express at one and the same time two
 
 90 ANTHROPOLOGY. 
 
 ideas so essentially distinct as that of spiritual and 
 physical death ? I do not know one. Indeed if this 
 were the rule, language, instead of being a vehicle for 
 conveying clear and distinct thought, would be 
 only a source of endless confusion. Though most 
 words are more or less ambiguous, yet we are im- 
 peratively required by the laws of interpretation to 
 take them in every instance of their use in one of 
 their accepted meanings and not in more than one. 
 With the application of this obvious and necessary 
 rule to the word in hand, we are not at liberty to 
 assert that death, natural, spiritual and eternal, is 
 here intended to be expressed. We must, in all 
 fairness, say one thing and not many, is intended. 
 But all admit that spiritual death is at least a part 
 of the penalty. Then if we infer that Adam did 
 die spiritually, spiritual death, and not natural 
 death, was intended. 
 
 3. The penalty threatened was immediate death 
 and it is allowed that spiritual death did instantly 
 intervene the instant Adam purposed to eat the 
 fruit, even before he had accomplished the external 
 act. This literally verifies the truth of the text. 
 But if natural death was a part of the penalty in- 
 tended in the text, then its truthfulness was not 
 verified, for he did not die according to the natural 
 import of the text, but lived according to our chro- 
 nology more than nine hundred years. If it should 
 be said that though he did not die instantly, yet he 
 was instantly put under condemnation to death, 
 the event itself being deferred by the mediation of 
 Christ, then I briefly reply, (a) That this view does
 
 SIN AND PHYSICAL EVIL. 91 
 
 not interpret the text, but largely supplements it. 
 To be put under condemnation to death and to die ,. 
 are two very distinct things, especially when sepa- 
 rated by a period of nine hundred years. If Adam 
 became a pious and good man, as is generally al- 
 lowed, I can very well imagine that he, like good 
 old Simeon, learned to long for an event which 
 would prove to him the end of all earthly ill and a 
 gate to endless joy. Not much curse, not much 
 penal anguish in that death, (b) If the mediation 
 of Christ availed to defer one part of the penalty /- 
 for nine hundred years and then convert it into a 
 blessing, why did it not avail to defer the other 
 part of the penalty also ? As it did not avail in one 
 case we have no authority, so far as I know, to be- 
 lieve it did in the other. The text fairly treated is un- 
 favorable to the idea that natural death is any part 
 of the penalty threatened in Eden. This conclusion 
 is supported by the following facts: 
 
 Adam when called to account for his sin seemed ,^- 
 to stand in no apprehension of natural death. 
 When called to account by his creator he said : "I 
 heard thy voice in the garden and was afraid be- 
 cause I was naked and hid myself." He is truly 
 afraid but the ground of that fear was not the ap- 
 prehension of death but, as he alleges, his naked- 
 ness. He was deeply and painfully conscious of . 
 the moral effect of his sin, but seems to have thought 
 of no natural evil. Now if physical death was a 
 part of the penalty Adam certainly knew it and 
 when brought face to face with his creator and 
 judge would have had his thoughts fixed upon his
 
 92 ANTHROPOLOGY, 
 
 liability to instant death rather than upon the sim- 
 ple fact that he was naked. But not a word of such 
 explanation is given, and the reasonable explana- 
 tion is that what does not exist needs no explana- 
 tion. Gen. iii. 14, 19, is very much relied on to 
 prove that natural death is a penal infliction upon 
 Adam and by imputation upon his posterity. Per- 
 haps no paragraph in the Bible has been more 
 abused by learned critics and exegetes than this 
 which is commonly called the Adamic curse. 
 
 An extreme rationalism that seeks to eliminate 
 from the Bible every element of the supernatural 
 is certainly a dangerous form of error. But an ex- 
 treme literalism that seeks to eliminate the natural 
 and replace it with the supernatural is perhaps not 
 less dangerous. Modern as well as ancient com- 
 mentators seem to lose sight of the highly an- 
 thropomorphic and anthropopathic character of 
 the Old Testament scriptures, especially of the first 
 part of Genesis. Also of the very important fact 
 that what is done by human agency and occurs by 
 laws of matter, and also the laws of mind, is 
 ascribed to the supernatural agency of God. And 
 the natural is excluded and the supernatural is made 
 to take its place. Thus the Great Spirit is repre- 
 sented as walking, or standing, or planting a gar- 
 den in Eden, or making coats of skins to clothe 
 Adam and Eve, as driving man out of the garden 
 and placing there a cherubim to keep the way of 
 the tree of life. 
 
 This method of expression, I suppose, was nec- 
 essary in the state of human knowledge then exist-
 
 AND PHYSICAL EVIL. 93 
 
 ing. Adam knew something, perhaps much, of God 
 through this anthropomorphic mode of communi- 
 cation, but from the necessity oi the case he knew 
 nothing or but very little of nature or God in na- 
 ture. Hence almost everything both the natural 
 and the supernatural were indiscriminately ascribed 
 to the supernatural. But in our interpretation of 
 the Bible we must discriminate as far as possible 
 between the natural and supernatural and, as has 
 been said before, we must never admit the superna- 
 tural except where the natural is utterly inadequate 
 to account for the facts that may have to do with 
 the subject in hand. On any other plan we con- 
 found things in themselves essentially distinct, ren- 
 der the supernatural incredible and resolve all re- 
 ligion either,into a cold rationalism or a blank 
 superstition. God never uses extraordinary means i/ 
 when ordinary ones will do just as well. 
 
 Now the exegetical vice that results from a dis- 
 regard of these common sense principles is com- 
 mitted, I believe, in this explanation of this so- 
 called Adamic curse. Gen. iii. 14, 19. 
 
 1. I understand the curse to be purely subjective, 
 
 or that all the evils here specified were the neces- V 
 sary consequences of alienation from God. These 
 consequences aifected nothing outside the guilty 
 parties themselves. 
 
 2. The serpent was not a beast of the field. The 
 words by which he is designated say he was more 
 subtle than any beast of the field. Of course, then 
 he was no mere serpent, whatever may have been 
 his form. Satan, it is allowed, was the serpent.
 
 94 ANTHROPOLOGY. 
 
 He was cursed for this as for all other sins, for every 
 sin brings a curse. This crawling upon his belly 
 and eating dust, if the reference be to Satan, must 
 be taken metaphorically. 
 
 As crawling upon the belly is a skulking and un- 
 obtrusive as well as a degrading mode of move- 
 ment, so the movement of Satan, as eating dust is 
 a low means of subsistence, so the enjoyments of 
 Satan. If a literal curse is meant the curse pro- 
 nounced upon him is, of course, symbolical, or he 
 certainly crawled upon his belly as literally before 
 the fall as after it and no more truly ate dirt after 
 than before it. The serpent, I take it, was in no 
 sense injured by the fall, unless to be used as a sym- 
 bol of Satan might seem an injustice. If he is con- 
 scious of this fact, he has not taken it much to 
 heart. He had his natural enemies before as after 
 the fall. 
 
 3. The curse upon the woman consisted of two 
 points: First, the multiplication of her sorrow; 
 and second, subjection to her husband. The lan- 
 guage fairly implies that if she had never sinned 
 she would have had sorrow. We cannot multiply 
 nothing into something. Hence sin did not orig- 
 inate, only multiplied, it. As to her subjection to 
 her husband, it is certainly true that she was created 
 in that state. Her sin did not originate that sub- 
 jection, it only rendered possible some household 
 trouble and family broils, the natural consequence 
 of sin as it is yet. 
 
 4. The special points in Adam's case are as fol- 
 lows: "Cursed is the ground for thy sake," or on
 
 SIN AND PHYSICAL EVIL. 95 
 
 thy account in relation to thee. The ground was 
 cursed not on its own account but on Adam's. This 
 directs attention to Adam as the offender, and as 
 the real object of the curse, for we are not at liberty 
 to suppose that the ground became a substitute for 
 him or was punished in his stead. 
 
 If the curse was objective then the physical con- 
 dition of the earth was materially changed. The 
 supposition that God deprived it in part of its fer- 
 tility, and changed to some extent its flora, exter- 
 minating some of its most valuable fruit bearing 
 trees and plants, and causing less valuable ones, as 
 thorns and thistles to grow in their places is with- 
 out sufficient proof. We learn from Genesis that 
 God created the flora of the earth on the third of 
 the creative days. But if this objective theory is 
 true, then after the fall of man God revised his own 
 work and changed its form from the better to the 
 worse. But is it admissible to suppose, or is it 
 creditable, that God did create thorns and thistles 
 as a means of tormenting poor guilty men ? This 
 it seems to me is quite too anthropomorthic, or 
 rather too diabolomorphic to receive the assent of 
 any intelligent mind. There were a thousand other 
 methods of punishing the culprit without defacing 
 the fair works of his own divine hand. If the sub- 
 jective theory be true then we are at liberty to be- 
 lieve that God created the thorn and the thistle on 
 the third creative day when he created the other 
 flora and that he did not on the occasion of Adam's 
 sin in a rage of towering passion fall upon his own 
 beautiful work to despoil it of its excellency. What
 
 96 ANTHROPOLOGY. 
 
 a wonderful change is that which occurs when a 
 sinner who has all his life regarded Christ as a root 
 out of dry ground, having neither form nor come- 
 liness, and suddenly conies to regard him the chief 
 of ten thousand, and the one altogether lovely. 
 Or when a sinner united to Christ by faith feels 
 that he is a new creatnre, that old things have 
 passed away and all things have become new. 
 Wonderful changes are these. But where is the 
 change, in the object or in the subject, in Christ or 
 in the sinner? Everyone knows how to answer 
 this question. The change is purely subjective in 
 the sinner's heart. It is a well-known philosoph- 
 ical truth that things external to ourselves are to us 
 for the time being just what we esteem them to 
 be. That is the soul throws its inner light or inner 
 darkness over everything around it, and things are 
 esteemed comely or uncomely, good or bad, bless- 
 ings or curses, according to the prevalence of this 
 inner light and darkness. 
 
 According to the subjective theory the thorn and 
 the thistles grew as truly and abundantly before the 
 fall as after it, but they were not sources of annoy- 
 ance to the innocent pair in Paradise, because they 
 did not esteem them evil. Duty was a pleasure, 
 and if occasion required the removal of a thorn or 
 thistle it was no less a pleasure than any other duty. 
 It gave no occasion of dark brooding over objective 
 evils, provoked no impatience or mtirmurings 
 against nature or providence, or God. No com- 
 plainings against a hard lot. The ground brought 
 forth thorns and thistles, but they were no thorns
 
 AND PHYSICAL EVIL. 97 
 
 to them, or no occasion of discontent, or disquie- 
 tude or unhappiness to them. 
 
 The third evil pronounced against Adam was that 
 he should eat bread by the sweat of his face. Here 
 the evil falls directly upon the sinner. The point 
 of interest in this respect is, was this the result of 
 sin ? What has been said previously will aid us in 
 the solution of this question. Man was made for 
 activity, for labor both physical and mental, and 
 his subsistence and comforts were conditional upon 
 his labor. God gave him the means of acquiring 
 these, but he was required to use the means God 
 had given just as he does now and always will do. 
 The first recorded command the creator ever gave 
 the newly created pair contained the specific injunc- 
 tion to subdue the earth. Here was work in abund- 
 ance for both brain and muscle, and when the gar- 
 den was planted Adam was put in charge of it with 
 the injunction to dress and keep it. These com- 
 mands, be it remembered, were given before the 
 fall. Hence it is certain man was made to labor, 
 and to live by his labor. This was as much the 
 order of nature before the fall as after it. What 
 then can be meant when it is said to him after the 
 fall, "In the sweat of thy face shaltthou eat bread?" 
 Nothing more than that his own sinful, querulous 
 and discontented nature should greatly embitter that 
 which before the fall was both a duty and a pleas- 
 ure. What was before esteemed a pleasure a de- 
 lightful recreation is now esteemed a drudgery, a 
 hard necessity, a calamity, a curse. The change is 
 in the man, not in the soils or seasons, nor in his
 
 98 ANTHROPOLOGY. 
 
 dependence upon personal exertion for subsistence 
 and comfort. The change that came over man in 
 regard to labor may be imperfectly represented by 
 the marked difference between individuals in regard 
 to both muscular and brain labor, also by the differ- 
 ence in the same individual at different periods of 
 his history. What some esteem a pleasure others 
 esteem a hard necessity and make it the occasion 
 of a continual self-torture. Some children hate 
 labor, mental and physical, but afterwards learn to 
 love one or both. Now all this results from sub- 
 jective and not objective causes, from the state of 
 mind and not things external to ourselves. This 
 illustrates the nature of the evil brought on our 
 race by sin and on us, i. e., by a subjective and not 
 objective process. 
 
 I wish now before I close this brief reference to 
 the Adamic curse to contrast the two schemes of 
 interpretation. 
 
 For the sake of brevity let A. be the objective, 
 B. the subjective scheme. A. asserts that the changes 
 wrought upon the several parties concerned were 
 supernatural, objective and physical. B. denies and 
 asserts that the changes were natural, subjective and 
 moral. A. asserts that the changes were wrought 
 by the direct fiat of the creator. B. denies and 
 asserts that the changes were the necessary results 
 of second causes, or of the corruption of the moral 
 nature by rebellion against the creator. A. asserts 
 that the serpent before the fall moved erect, or in 
 some way different from its subsequent mode of 
 movement. That it was so changed in its physical
 
 SIN AND PHYSICAL EVIL. 99 
 
 structure and habits that it crawled upon its belly 
 and ate dust. B. denies and holds that the literal 
 serpent is a symbol of Satan and the evils pro- 
 nounced upon it are symbolical of the character- 
 istics and doom of that "old serpent, the devil," 
 and that the literal serpent was not changed, either 
 in form or habit. A. asserts that the woman was 
 physilogically so changed as to render her condi- 
 tion in gestation and parturition more painful and 
 perilous. B. denies and asserts that there was no 
 physiological change or change of any kind (in this 
 regard) except what sin and moral depravity are 
 capable of producing upon womanly functions by un- 
 hygienic habits in the deliberation of the vital func- 
 tions and constitutional debility. Sin withers and 
 abnormalizes whatever it touches, and pours its 
 virus along the veins of humanity through the suc- 
 cessive generations. A. asserts that the woman 
 was, by a divine fiat, put under an abnormal sub- 
 jection to her husband. B. denies, and alleges that 
 woman was created in a state of subjection to her 
 husband, and that all the abnormalness of that 
 subjection after the fall was the natural result, not the 
 supernatural, of moral corruption and its consequent 
 ignorance, unkindness, injustice and brutality. A. 
 asserts that the ground was so changed as to 
 lose in part its former fertility, and its flora lit- 
 erally changed so that profitable fruit bearing trees 
 and shrubs were actually destroyed and noxious 
 trees and plants caused to grow in their stead, for 
 the purpose of rendering man's toils more arduous, 
 and his subsistence more precarious. B. denies,
 
 ioo ANTHROPOLOGY. 
 
 and alleges that the course of the physical world 
 was not stipernaturally changed, that the earth was 
 cursed, not physically but only in relation to man, 
 in such a way that what was in itself good, might by 
 the corruptness and perversness of the human 
 heart be made the occasion of evils, just as are 
 these blessings of the divine Father by human wick- 
 edness converted into curses. B. also asserts that 
 thorns and thistles grew before as well as after the fall, 
 and these terms in the text may be taken in a sym- 
 bolical sense, as representative of all these things, 
 harmless in themselves, which men may make the 
 occasion of trouble. They grow along every path, 
 beset every vocation, and are incident to every sta- 
 tion of life. But they may be in a large measure 
 avoided or overcome; or by God's goodness even 
 turned to good account. A. asserts that man's 
 state of labor is abnormal, subsequent to the fall, 
 and that it was supernaturally and judicially im- 
 posed as a punishment for sin. B. denies, and al- 
 leges that a state of labor is man's normal condi- 
 tion, whether sinful or innocent, and that all ab- 
 normality in his sinful state is the natural result of 
 his own abnormality. A. asserts that because of 
 Adam's sin the creator turns away from man, and 
 in wrath denounces upon him the curse, and by the 
 curse brought upon him, the total corruption of his 
 moral nature, and all other evils physical and 
 moral, thus making the sin the occasion of the 
 curse, and the curse causative of all evil. B. de- 
 nies, and asserts that Adam's own voluntary sin 
 was causative of his corruption of nature and of his
 
 SIN AND PHYSICAL EVIL. 101 
 
 changed ethical relation to the physical world, that 
 the so-called curse did not in any sense change for 
 the worse his condition, for the whole curse was in 
 his sin and his consequent depravity, both of which 
 transpired before the utterance of the curse; that 
 the so-called curse was consequently rather a reve- 
 lation than the origination of the curse and 
 also a gracious revelation unfolded to Adam, even 
 more fully than his consciousness had already 
 done, the enormity of his guilt, and also what his 
 future trouble should be on account of his sins, 
 thus forewarning him against other sins. A. as- 
 serts, or seems to. assume, that God was in some 
 way taken by surprise at Adam's sin, and in wrath 
 denounced curses upon him, and turned away from 
 him, or withdrew from him his great love. B. ob- 
 jects to this and alleges that God knew the end 
 from the beginning, and was fully prepared for the 
 event, that man, instead of ceasing to be an object 
 of the creator's solicitude and care, was if possible 
 an object of deeper anxiety after the fall than be- 
 fore it, on the principle that there is more joy 
 among the angels over one sinner that repenteth 
 than over ninety and nine that need no repentance, 
 and for the reason that the good shepherd leaves 
 the ninety and nine and goes to the mountain in 
 search of the one stray sheep. The divine heart is 
 affected by the sad ruin that sin has wrought very 
 much as the heart of a wise governor and father 
 would be by the condition of a self-ruined child. 
 As a governor he administers the law, as a father 
 he must and does deeply pity his sin. As a con-
 
 102 ANTHROPOLOGY. 
 
 elusive evidence that the creator did not turn away 
 from the sinner, or that his hitherto overflowing 
 complacency is now turned to overflowing love of 
 commiseration, we find that in his announcement 
 to the serpent and before he had revealed to Adam 
 the consequences of sin, he actually announced a 
 " Savior " a deliverer. "The seed of woman shall 
 bruise thy head." 
 
 I have now given you briefly the fundamental 
 characteristics of the two theories of the so-called 
 Adamic curse, the objective and the subjective. 
 The former has the sanction of orthodoxy so- 
 called. The latter, in my judgment, has the sup- 
 port of philosophy and the logic of Bible facts. 
 You can choose for yourselves.
 
 CHAPTER VII. 
 
 THE RELATION OF SIN TO NATURAL AND PHYSI- 
 CAL EVIL. 
 (Continued.) 
 
 IN order to reach a clear and satisfactory explana- 
 tion of Gen. iii. 22-24, we must first exclude the 
 ideas of physical life and physical death. The 
 text, I think, is to be regarded as both literal and 
 symbolical. 
 
 1. The garden was literally the place and sym- 
 bolically the state of happy communion with God. 
 
 2. The tree of knowledge of good and evil was 
 literally a tree, but symbolical of the consequences 
 of disobedience, i.e., alienation from God, or spir- 
 ual death. 
 
 3. The tree of life was literally a tree, and also 
 symbolical of the consequences of disobedience, 
 i.e., spiritual life, or happy fellowship with God 
 not the source of either physical or spiritual life. 
 
 4. The expulsion from the garden was literal, 
 and also symbolical of loss of fellowship with God, 
 i.e., spiritual death. 
 
 5. The cherubim and the flaming sword were 
 possibly literal, but probably only symbolical of 
 divine providence, preventing access to the tree of 
 life.
 
 104 ANTHROPOLOGY. 
 
 With this presentation of the subject, everything 
 in the text can, I think, be satisfactorily harmon- 
 ized, and the difficulties which beset all adverse 
 theories successfully obviated. 
 
 I will make my explanations as brief as compat- 
 ible with clearness. 
 
 i. "The man is become as one of us to know 
 good and evil." 
 
 These words may be, and I think generally are, 
 taken as ironical. The serpent had said to Eve, 
 "Ye shall be as Gods knowing good and evil." 
 Chap. iii. 4. 
 
 Many expositors think that God repeats these 
 words of the serpent ironically. 
 
 We know that the Bible does sometimes use 
 irony. Christ himself ironically repeats the^ lan- 
 guage of the man to whom one talent had been 
 given. "Thou knowest that I reap where I sowed 
 not and gather where I have not strowed." 
 
 If these words, "The man has become as one of 
 us to know good and evil," had been spoken to 
 Adam himself, and had God made the allegation 
 the ground of his expulsion, we might very reason- 
 ably consider them to be used ironically. But to 
 use irony of a person and then proceed to make the 
 allegation the ground or reason of an important ac- 
 tion is not very consistent, because it assumes that 
 the action is without reason. 
 
 I therefore think that the words were not intend- 
 ed as irony, but as expressing a real historic fact. 
 If this is so then the words, "The man has become 
 one of us to know good and evil," mean, I sup-
 
 S/N AND PHYSICAL EVIL. 105 
 
 pose, that Adam had come to know good and evil 
 experimentally, or had experienced good and evil 
 in contrast. Hence what God knew intuitively, 
 perhaps Adam knew in a bitter experience. 
 
 2. "Lest he put forth his hand and take also of 
 the tree of life and eat and live forever." 
 
 This language fairly implies that Adam, if per- 
 mitted to remain in the garden, and to have access 
 to the tree of life and to eat of its fruit, would, 
 in some sense, live forever. To prevent his living 
 forever seems to be the reason for his expulsion 
 from the garden and for the employment of the 
 cherubim and the flaming sword. 
 
 The difficulty of the explanation arises out of 
 the words " live forever." 
 
 In what sense would he live forever if permitted 
 to eat of this tree? This is the vital question. 
 
 1. If these words refer to true spiritual life a 
 happy fellowship with God to have free access to 
 this tree of life was the very thing Adam most 
 needed, and also the very thing that God, if he de- 
 sired his happiness, would be quite willing to give. 
 But as God did not give him access we must seek 
 some other meaning for those words, "live for- 
 ever." 
 
 2. If we say these words refer to physical life, as 
 is generally done, then we render any satisfactory 
 explanation impossible. 
 
 (1) Because we assume that Adam could, by eat- 
 ing of this fruit, set aside God's purpose as to his 
 mortality and make himself immortal. 
 
 (2) As we assume that this tree had in itself a
 
 io6 ANTHROPOLOGY. 
 
 power stronger than God, and that to prevent him 
 from becoming, contrary to God's will, physically 
 immortal, he must be expelled from the garden. 
 
 (3) This physical life hypothesis assumes that 
 God had power to put Adam out of the garden and 
 keep him out, but not power to prevent him, if he 
 remained in the garden, from eating of this tree 
 and from being physically immortal. 
 
 All these glaring incongruities grow necessarily 
 out of the assumption that natural death in Gen., 
 chap. ii. 17, and natural life in chap. iii. 22, are re- 
 spectively intended. 
 
 In opposition to this hypothesis I suggest that 
 the words "live forever" refer not to real spiritual 
 life, not to physical life in any form, but to sym- 
 bolical life, a life not real, but purely ideal or nom- 
 inal. 
 ' Let us test this hypothesis by the facts. 
 
 1. It was not the mere eating of the fruit of the 
 tree of knowledge, but this intention, the disobe- 
 dience in the intention to eat that produced death. 
 The act of eating was the evidence of the inten- 
 tion. Hence we may consider the tree itself as the 
 symbol of death. In like manner the tree of life 
 was not the source of real life, but only the symbol 
 of life. If this is true, then the words "live for- 
 ever" cannot mean anything more or different 
 from symbolic life. For illustration, if baptism is 
 a symbol of regeneration, then of course the ad- 
 ministration of it can give only symbolic, not real, 
 regeneration. 
 
 2. But do the sacred writers recognize this sym-
 
 S/N AND PHYSICAL EVIL. 107 
 
 bolic or nominal life? Certainly. " I know thy 
 works, that thou hast a name that thou livest, and 
 art dead." Rev. iii. i. 
 
 In the apostles' day all that believed in Christ 
 had spiritual life, and all that professed to believe 
 had nominally the same. All that were baptized 
 were called saints or holy ones, but all such were 
 not really so, as Simon Magus. Such had nomi- 
 nal, but not real, spiritual life. If Adam had been 
 permitted access to the tree of life he would have 
 been nominally alive but really spiritually dead. 
 
 3. Adain was already mortal, either by crea- 
 tion, or by the decree of God for his disobedience. 
 The fruit of the tree of life could not convert his 
 mortality into immortality. 
 
 4. Adam was already spiritually dead alienated 
 from God dead in sin, and this tree of life could 
 not restore to spiritual life. 
 
 The hypothesis seems to harmonize all the facts, 
 and is, as far as I can see, the only one that can 
 harmonize them. If this is so, it is of necessity 
 the true one. 
 
 If this is the proper explanation of the text, it 
 was not a curse to be expelled from the garden, but 
 a blessing; for it is a great calamity to have the 
 nominal without the real spiritual life the form 
 without the power of godliness. Because we know 
 that none are so hard to save as those who assume 
 to be already saved. 
 
 I will now return to the subject in hand. Is 
 physical death a part of the penalty of Adam's sin? 
 I have examined the evidence relied upon ill sup-
 
 io8 ANTHROPOLOGY. 
 
 port of the affirmative of this proposition. This 
 proof is supposed to be conclusive from several ex- 
 pressions used in the so-called Adamic curse, as 
 "all the days of thy life," "till thou returnest 
 unto the ground, for dust thou art and unto dust 
 shalt thou return." Now it seems to me that 
 every one of these expressions, when carefully ana- 
 lyzed, instead of teaching that man was created 
 immortal, as to his body, do teach by inevitable 
 implication the very reverse. 
 
 i. "In sorrow shalt thou eat of it all the days of 
 thy life " imply that both sorrow and life should 
 have an end. The sorrow, in one aspect of it, 
 was confessed to be a consequence of sin. But 
 if death was also a penal consequence (of sin), then 
 one penal consequence is removed by another penal 
 consequence. Capital punishment is sometimes 
 commuted into imprisonment for life. In this case 
 the imprisonment is accepted as the equivalent of 
 death. The imprisonment is penal; the death is 
 not penal, but the limitation or removal of the 
 penalty. If both the imprisonment and the death 
 were penal, a double penalty would be exacted. 
 Hence I conclude this language, "all the days of 
 thy life," was an event incident to man from his 
 creation. This is further evident from the fact that 
 exactly the same words are used to the serpent, 
 "dust shalt thou eat all the days of thy life." 
 Hence it inevitably follows that if Adam's death 
 was penal, then that of the serpent was also penal, 
 and if that of the serpent, then of all other ani- 
 mals. But it was previously shown that some
 
 AND PHYSICAL EVIL. 109 
 
 animals were created to live by the death of others, 
 and that death, if there is any truth in geology, 
 reigned over the animal world thousands of years 
 before the fall of man. These facts seem to be 
 irreconcilable with the penality of Adam's natural 
 death. 
 
 2. The words "till thou return unto the ground, 
 for out of it thou wast taken," teach the same 
 truth. The reason given for returning to the 
 ground is that he was taken out of it, and not be- 
 cause he had sinned. 
 
 3. "For dust thou art and unto dust shalt thou 
 return." Here we have the fact of mortality stated, 
 and the reason of it given. Dust thou art, there- 
 fore unto dust shalt thou return. Chemically con- 
 sidered, the body of man is literally dust, and this 
 was certainly as true before the fall as after it. 
 Some commentators allow that all these forms of 
 expression do imply liability to death at the time 
 these words were spoken, which was after the fall, 
 but insist that they refer to the death threatened 
 in the prohibition. My first remark is that this is 
 a cool petitio princippii, a sheer begging of the 
 question, and of course is useless as an argument. 
 
 My second remark is, if the death implied in 
 these texts refers to the death named in the prohi- 
 bition, then the serpent's death must, by logical 
 necessity, be referred to the same cause, which we 
 have seen is supremely preposterous. 
 
 Romans v. 12, 21 ("Let not sin therefore reign 
 in your mortal body, that ye should obey it in the 
 lusts thereof," "What fruit had ye then in those
 
 1 10 ANTHROPOLOG Y. 
 
 things whereof ye are now ashamed ? for the end 
 of those things is death "), is generally assumed to 
 teach that all physical suffering and death are 
 proper punishments of sin in the subject. 
 
 The text is certainly very difficult of a satisfac- 
 tory exegesis. Hence there is almost an endless 
 diversity of opinion among exegetes and theolo- 
 gians in regard to it. 
 
 At present I shall attempt nothing except to as- 
 certain what bearing it may have on the subject in 
 hand. It is very clear that death, in some sense, 
 is in some way connected with the first sin and the 
 first man the first sin rather than subsequent sins 
 because the first sin instantly produced the death 
 even before a record was possible. But the point 
 in question is, what death is here intended ? Dr. 
 Shedd says it is death temporal, spiritual, and eter- 
 nal. Dr. Hodge says death is here taken in the 
 sense of penalty for sin, and assuming physical 
 death to be penal, it of course was included. 
 
 We must not forget that assumption is not proof. 
 If physical death is included we ought to be able 
 to find some clear indication of it in this text or 
 elsewhere. I do not find any proof here or else- 
 where. On the contrary I find some strong pre- 
 sumption against it. 
 
 i. The context has not a word to say about phys- 
 ical death, except in relation to Christ. The sub- 
 ject under discussion is the mediatorial work of 
 Christ, and the benefit believers receive through his 
 mediation. As deliverance from physical death is 
 not one of these benefits its introduction into the
 
 SIN AND PHYSICAL EVIL. in 
 
 discussion would seem to be illogical and superer- 
 ogatory. 
 
 2. "Death" is confessed to be an ambiguous 
 word. It is generally admitted that spiritual death 
 is included in this death. But I protest against the 
 vice of taking an ambiguous word in any given 
 proposition, in two or more of its specific mean- 
 ings, unless there is something in the connection 
 to require it. There is nothing in the connection 
 to require it, and the common rule of interpretation 
 excludes the idea that more than one kind of death 
 is intended. Dr. Hodge evidently felt the force of 
 this fact, and to avoid the difficulty insisted that in 
 this connection death means "penalty" an easy 
 method of solving a difficulty if one word cannot 
 cover the ground take another that can. This 
 change of words, however, only relieves him from 
 the absurdity of using a word in a double sense. 
 It by no means proves what he assumes to be true, 
 viz. , that physical death is any part of the punish- 
 ment of sin. Any hypothesis that requires such a 
 use of words to support it is presumptively false. 
 
 3. Paul was certainly consistent with himself, 
 and if he used the word death in a complex sense 
 in this text in one Case, he is presumed to so use it 
 in all. If he used it in a specific sense in one in- 
 stance he did so in all. He uses the word death or 
 its equivalent six times. Now, if the reader will 
 read the whole text, putting the adjective spiritual 
 before the word death, he will find everything in 
 harmony, and withal perfectly perspicuous, and in 
 full accord with everything in the Bible.
 
 1 1 2 ANTHROPOLOG v. 
 
 The hypothesis that spiritual death only is meant 
 explains all the facts, and is therefore presumably 
 true. On the contrary, pursuing the same course, 
 and supplying the adjective, physical, before the 
 word "death" we find no particular trouble until 
 we come to the fifteenth verse. "Many be (phys- 
 ically) dead," or in a state of physical death. The 
 word " many " is a synonym of the word " all " in 
 verse 12. If you read, "For, if through the offense 
 of one all be (physically) dead, or in a state of 
 physical death," you make the hypothesis contra- 
 dict the facts. It therefore cannot be true. But 
 no other hypotheses are possible in the case. The 
 hypothesis of spiritual death only explains all the 
 facts, the other cannot explain them. Then the 
 former must be true. 
 
 4. We have several pairs of antithesis in this 
 text, among them "condemnation" and "justifica- 
 tion." The judgment was by one to condemnation, 
 but the free gift is of many offenses unto justifica- 
 tion. Condemnation is preparative to punishment, 
 as justification is preparative to enjoyment. Con- 
 demnation in this case is unto death, say spiritual 
 and physical, and the justification is unto life, or 
 of life. Now we must, from logical necessity, make 
 these antithetical terms equally comprehensive, else 
 they are not antithetical at all. If we take con- 
 demnation to be unto spiritual death, then we must 
 take justification to be unto spiritual life. But if 
 we take condemnation to be unto both natural and 
 spiritual death, then of course the justification must 
 be unto both natural and spiritual life. Therefore
 
 AND PHYSICAL EVIL. 113 
 
 if sin subjects us to both natural and physical death, 
 then justification through Christ ought to exempt us 
 from both natural and spiritual death. But we know 
 justification does not exempt from natural death. 
 
 It is, therefore, a logical necessity that con- 
 demnation does not subject us to natural death. 
 This is absolutely conclusive. 
 
 This same conclusion flows out of the inherent 
 force of other antithetical terms, used in the text 
 out of the words "death" and "life." If we make 
 the term death include both natural and spiritual 
 death, we must make the term life include both 
 natural and spiritual life. This again brings the 
 theory in conflict with the facts, for those that be- 
 lieve have spiritual and eternal life, still they have 
 to die physically. Or if we accept Dr. Hodge's 
 idea, and say that death is put for the whole penal- 
 ty of sin, and substitute the word reward as its 
 appropriate antithesis, nothing is gained ; because 
 if we have put natural death in the penalty we must 
 put natural life in the reward. But we know it is 
 not there, or if natural death is in the penalty, the 
 apostle had to pay it, for Christ never paid it for 
 him ; or if he did, the penalty was twice paid, or 
 the divine administration has received more than 
 its due, or else Paul's own death supplemented the 
 atoning work of Christ. It seems to me to be im- 
 perative upon us to admit all these absurdities, or 
 reject the idea that human suffering is strictly the 
 punishment of sin. 
 
 i Cor. xv. 21, 22 : " For since by man came death 
 by man came also the resurrection of the dead.
 
 1 14 ANTHROPOL OG Y. 
 
 For as in Adam all die, even so in Christ shall all 
 be made alive." In the common theory this text 
 is assumed to furnish conclusive evidence that 
 natural death is a penal consequence of Ad- 
 am's sin. I readily grant that if we assume this 
 death to be penal then the text admits a very easy 
 solution. But we should remember that the very 
 point to be proved is that this death is penal, and it 
 is not to be assumed. It is evident that with a 
 little supplementing the text may be made to teach 
 that doctrine. For if we read, " Since by man's 
 sin came death," then the liability to death would 
 sustain to sin the relation of sequent to antecedent. 
 But we have injected into the text a very important 
 element, which is capable of changing the whole 
 aspect of the question. But the text, as it stands 
 without supplementing, does not necessarily nor 
 probably teach the penality of natural death. All 
 that the text clearly and unmistakably does teach 
 is that by man or through (dia) man came, or is, 
 death, and by man or through (dia) man, came, or 
 is, the resurrection, and as in Adam all die, or are 
 dying, so in Christ shall all be made alive. But 
 how death came through Adam, the text does not 
 so clearly teach. But from necessity it comes 
 through him in some way, involving us in its con- 
 sequences, as does human depravity, or else it comes 
 to us by virtue of natural relationships, as does 
 natural life, or as life and death both come to the 
 animal world, from natural relationship to their 
 progenitors. The last position, I take it, is the 
 true one, for the following reasons :
 
 S/N AND PHYSICAL EVIL. 115 
 
 i. From the structure of the text itself man in 
 both members of the antithesis is represented, not 
 in a casual or active relation, but in a passive rela- 
 tion to the words death and resurrection. Man is 
 not active, not the agent, but the medium through 
 which death comes, as the same man is the medium 
 through whom natural life comes to all. This is 
 the natural force of the language employed. This 
 conclusion is very much strengthened, if not posi- 
 tively confirmed, by the known facts in relation to 
 the second member of the antithesis. By man the 
 humanity of Christ came, also the resurrection. 
 Now, was Christ as man the cause, the author, the 
 agent of the resurrection? So far from this, he 
 was actually the first fruits of it, the first subject of 
 it, the first man raised from the dead. He was 
 raised up from the dead by the glory of the Father, 
 the resurrection came by an agent, a power outside of 
 his humanity; and just because he was the first 
 fruits of it, and in his human nature related to all 
 mankind, the resurrection comes to all men. This 
 is exactly the sense in which the resurrection came 
 by or through him to all men. This throws a flood 
 of light upon the first member of the antithesis. 
 Adam was not the cause, or the author, or the 
 agent that brought natural death into the world, 
 but the medium through which death comes to all, 
 just as through him life comes to all. The source 
 both of life and death was outside of himself, and 
 just as the humanity was the subject of the resur- 
 rection, and not the author, but the medium of it 
 to all other men. So Adam was not the author of
 
 1 16 ANTHROPOLOG Y. 
 
 death, but the subject, and being the first of his 
 kind is the medium of it to all other men. If this 
 reasoning be true, then natural death is not the 
 penalty of Adam's sin. 
 
 2. The 22d verse, torture it as we may, cannot 
 by exegesis, or logic, or anything else, be made to 
 teach a contrary doctrine. "As in Adam all die so 
 in Christ shall all be made alive." The preposi- 
 tion " in " denotes intimate relationship. The idea 
 is by virtue of this close relationship between " all " 
 and "Adam," all die, just as by this relationship all 
 live or receive life in or through him. By a simi- 
 lar relationship between the same all and Christ all 
 shall be made alive, raised to life. As Christ's hu- 
 man life is not the author of the resurrection life, 
 so Adam is not the author of natural death. Christ 
 being the first fruits of the resurrection life is the 
 pledge and prelude of the universal resurrection. 
 So Adam being the first mortal man is the pledge 
 and prelude of universal human death. 
 
 3. This view of the subject is very much favored 
 by a comparison of this text (i Cor. xv. 2i, 22) 
 with Romans v. 12-19. 
 
 In the latter the first and second Adam are con- 
 trasted as to their respective influence upon the des- 
 tiny of mankind in relation to moral and spiritual 
 things. The former brings sin, spiritual death, 
 and condemnation; the latter brings righteousness 
 and spiritual life. Adam's activity is expressed by 
 the words "transgression," "offense," "sinned." 
 These words all denote personal and voluntary ac- 
 tivity. The activity of Christ is implied in the
 
 SSN AND PHYSICAL EVIL. 117 
 
 whole mediatorial work by which he set aside the 
 consequences of the spiritual death and condemna- 
 tion. Both, by their voluntary activity, exert a 
 powerful influence upon mankind. One is the 
 source of spiritual death, the other is the source of 
 spiritual life. But in i Cor. xv. 21, 22, the first 
 and second Adam are contrasted in relation to 
 physical death and the resurrection. Here both 
 are profoundly passive, are far from being authors 
 or agents. They are the non-active mediums 
 respectively, of the power of death and the power 
 of the resurrection. If Adam's personal and 
 voluntary activity brought into the world physical 
 death, as it confessedly did spiritual death, why is 
 not the important fact expressed, or at least implied, 
 in this long discussion of natural death and the 
 resurrection ? 
 
 In Romans this authorship is repeated over and 
 over. But in Paul's long argument on the resur- 
 rection, in which the words "dead" and "death" 
 are used about twenty-three times, all referring to 
 natural death, it is never once said, nor is it ob- 
 scurely implied, that he had any active participa- 
 tion in the introduction of this physical death into 
 the world. Is not this a most remarkable fact, if 
 death physical and death spiritual and death 
 eternal are the penalty of the Adamic sin ? The 
 most rational explanation of this remarkable silence 
 is that Paul did not feel himself called upon to 
 explain what did not exist. 
 
 Romans viii. 10: "And if Christ be in you, 
 the body (soma) is dead, (nekron] because of sin
 
 1 18 ANTHROPOLOG Y. 
 
 (ctt amartiari); but the spirit is liYe because of right- 
 eousness." The meaning of the words, "the body 
 is dead because of sin," is in doubt. 
 Two explanations are proposed : 
 
 1. "The body indeed is dead, i. e., must die, is 
 obnoxious to death." (Hodge in loco.} 
 
 2. The body of those in whom Christ dwells is 
 dead, or inactive as to, or in reference to, sin in a 
 sense analagous to that in which the unregeuerate 
 soul is dead to righteousness. Authorities differ, 
 some advocating the first and some the second ex- 
 planation. The subsequent context of chap. viii. 
 seems to favor the first explanation. The preced- 
 ing context seems to favor the second. The argu- 
 ments in favor of the first are substantially as 
 follows: 
 
 (a) That the word "body" very rarely, if ever, 
 has the sense of the word "flesh" as used in the 
 context, and therefore does not favor the idea that 
 the word "dead" means non-activity, or the non- 
 enjoyment as to sin; it must, therefore, refer to nat- 
 ural death. 
 
 (b) That the nth verse refers to the resurrection 
 of the mortal bodies, and that fact requires us to 
 believe that the loth verse refers to natural death. 
 This explanation is plausible and in strict harmony 
 with the theory of the causative relation of sin and 
 natural death. But the argument is not satisfac- 
 tory. 
 
 i. It takes undue liberty with the word "dead." 
 "The body is dead" means the body must die, is 
 obnoxious to death. We have just as much exe-
 
 SIN AND PHYSICAL EVIL. 119 
 
 getical authority to say that the words, " the spirit 
 is life," in the next member of the sentence, means 
 the spirit must become life, is obnoxious to life. . 
 This would make the entire proposition unintelli- 
 gible. Paul, in this verse, speaks of what exists 
 now, and not of what will be hereafter. We un- 
 derstand that there is a material difference between 
 a dead body and a body that is only obnoxious to 
 death, the difference being just that of the living 
 and the dead. Do the sacred writers predicate 
 death, either physical or spiritual, of any that are 
 not dead? I think not. This, then, is a liberty 
 taken with the word "death" not according to 
 usage or any other authority known to me. 
 
 2. The argument receives almost its whole force 
 from a misapprehension of the relation existing be- 
 tween the words "flesh" and "body." Dr. Hodge 
 urges that to use the words as equivalents is contrary 
 to usage, and that the word "body," in the sense 
 of flesh, never has the word "dead" joined with it. 
 Now, it is certainly true, if the doctrine of realism 
 is not true, that the abstract and the concrete are 
 not equivalents, and that the word " dead " is never 
 united with an abstract word, nor with any con- 
 crete word, used as its equivalents, for the simple 
 reason that the abstract has no existence independ- 
 ent of the concrete. Hence we should be very 
 careful not to join the word "dead" with nonen- 
 tity. The body and flesh are often used as syno- 
 nyms in the New Testament, notably in reference 
 to the Lord's Supper, and in reference to his body 
 in the tomb. In such cases the word flesh is taken
 
 120 ANTHROPOLOGY. 
 
 in the concrete sense, just as is the body. But in the 
 context, verses 4-9, Paul uses the word in the sense 
 m of sensuality, or, as Dr. Hodge expresses it, " cor- 
 rupt nature." But the terms are both pure ab- 
 stracts, and have no existence except in the con- 
 crete. It is the inheritance of all human beings, 
 and exists only in the concrete. It can be destroy- 
 ed only in the concrete, or in the mind and body. 
 In order to complete salvation according to 
 Paul's conception, four things are necessary : 
 
 1. The death of the human spirit as to sin. 
 
 2. The new life of the spirit as to righteousness. 
 
 3. The death of the body as to sin. 
 
 4. The quickening of the mortal body by the 
 spirit that raised up Christ from the dead. 
 
 The first is implied by the second, because there 
 can be no life as to righteousness without death as 
 to sin. 
 
 The second and third are expressed in the text. 
 The fourth is fully brought out in verse 13. The 
 first three are conditional upon union with Christ. 
 "If Christ be in you," these follow as results of 
 that indwelling, and are consequently true of all 
 believers. The fourth, or the quickening of the 
 mortal body, is not accomplished till the resurrec- 
 tion, when the complex salvation of the body and 
 mind is secured. This is the Pauline method of 
 the process from death to life. It meets fully the 
 demands of the preceding and the succeeding con- 
 texts, and fully harmonizes with the general teach- 
 ings of the apostles. If further evidence be re- 
 quired to prove that Paul, when he says the body
 
 SIN AND PHYSICAL EVIL. 121 
 
 is dead (di ' * amartian), does not refer to human 
 mortality, but to death as to sin, we have it abund- 
 antly in the fact that this death is in consequence 
 of vital spiritual union with Christ. ' ' If Christ be 
 in you the body is dead." Now, it is gratuitous to 
 say that natural death, or mortality, is in any sense 
 conditioned upon union with Christ, or in any 
 manner a consequence of it. If this were true, then 
 none but those in whom Christ dwells could ever 
 experience natural death. But all die physically, 
 whether Christ dwells in them or not. But only 
 those in whom Christ dwells are dead because of 
 sin (di ^armartian), therefore this is not physical 
 death. 
 
 Other grave objections might be presented to the 
 mortality theory with the same effect, but enough 
 has been said to show that Rom. viii. 10 does not 
 teach, and cannot be so tortured as to be made to 
 teach, that human mortality is a penal consequence 
 of sin. 
 
 I have now briefly noted the principal text relied 
 upon to prove the penality of physical death and 
 all physical sufferings. I confess myself utterly 
 surprised at the shallowness of the authority upon 
 which the theory rests. If I have not deceived 
 myself, the very texts relied upon for proof of the 
 doctrine, when carefully considered, actually dis- 
 prove it. I therefore might have declined further 
 discussion. But as you probably wish to know 
 what more could be said in favor of the negation of 
 the question I will, in a succeeding chapter, briefly 
 refer to a number of other facts.
 
 CHAPTER VIII. 
 
 SIN, TRANSGRESSION AND INIQUITY. 
 
 RE physical death and all human sufferings the 
 the penal consequences of Adam's sin? I 
 deem the following facts irreconcilable with 
 the affirmative : 
 
 i. Supposing the rates of increase in the human 
 family had not sin been introduced, to have been 
 equal to what it really has been, the population of the 
 globe would have been already one hundred times 
 greater than it now is, and in process of innumer- 
 able years would have constituted a bulk of living 
 humanity a thousand times greater than the globe 
 itself. Such is the legitimate consequence of the 
 theory. 
 
 Augustine, who did more than any other man to 
 fasten the absurd theory upon the church, seemed 
 to apprehend some trouble on this score, and sug- 
 gested that possibly at a suitable time sinless hu- 
 man bodies might be spiritualized, and then 
 removed out of the way of their successors. 
 
 Others, too, in contemplating the difficulty re- 
 sulting from this theory, have sought relief in the 
 same way. They do not tell us, however, as far as 
 I have seen, how the spiritualization is to relieve 
 the difficulty, whether by diminishing human 
 bodies to infinitesimal points, or by transforming 
 them into essentially spiritual entities, and then
 
 SfN AND INIQUITY. 123 
 
 constitute them the occupants of a super-sensible 
 and super- sensual sphere of being. If the former 
 is the idea, it is proper to remark that it does not 
 obviate, but only a little obscures, the difficulty. 
 For with any ratio of increase, however small the 
 bodies might be, in the course of an infinity of 
 years, the same startling results would be reached, 
 as indicated above. This latter idea, i. e., trans- 
 formation into spiritual entities, as in the resurrec- 
 tion, would, I suppose, meet with more general favor. 
 Now, what astonishes me above measure is that 
 Augustine, as well as his retailers, did not perceive 
 that his mode of obviating the difficulty was an 
 abandonment of his theory itself, or, which is the 
 same thing, two propositions are affirmed that are 
 mutually self-destructive, i. e., that an animal body 
 was created immortal, but it became immortal only 
 by spiritualization. 
 
 What is mortal is necessarily mutable in its mode 
 of being; what is immortal is necessarily immuta- 
 ble in its mode of being. All organic beings are 
 changeable, and therefore mortal. All inorganic 
 entities are unchangeable in their mode of being, 
 though material things may be changed in form. 
 At least we know of no instance in the realm of 
 nature or of mind of a departure from these funda- 
 mental truths, and such . a departure is scarcely 
 conceivable. The theory assumes that the allwise 
 Creator made the human body immortal, and then, 
 because man sinned, by a fiat, made it mortal. 
 
 God, in the domain of matter and mind, works 
 up, not down. He does not begin with the im-
 
 124 ANTHROPOLOGY. 
 
 mortal and work to the mortal. He takes no back- 
 ward steps. Onward and upward is the line of 
 movement. Moral degradation is possible, as the 
 world's history sadly proves. But degradation from 
 one mode of existence to another, as from immor- 
 tality to mortality, is incredible. Nature, speak- 
 ing through her multitudinous throats, utters an 
 imperative protest. The intuitions of reason reject 
 it, and God's word, I venture to say, never author- 
 ized it. Augustine and others asserted it, and 
 bolstered the figment with a few misapplied texts, 
 and the world blindly assented. If it should be 
 replied that there was no degrading fiat transmut- 
 ing the immortal into the mortal, but the change 
 was wrought by the natural operation of the laws 
 that subordinate the physical to the moral, the 
 animal to the intellectual; just as the soul by a 
 state of sin passes from a state of spiritual life to 
 a state of spiritual death; it is sufficient to reply 
 that sin did not change the soul's mode of exist- 
 ence, but its moral qualities. Sin took away no 
 old faculties, and added no new ones to the soul, 
 which was as truly immortal subsequent to sin as 
 before it. 
 
 But the theory in question assumes a change in 
 the mode of existence a change from the immor- 
 tal to the mortal, and from one set of adaptations 
 and accommodations to another set wholly differ- 
 ent. It is admissible I suppose, for illustration, to 
 refer to the fallen angels, Satan in particular, he 
 being the first and greatest of sinners. 
 
 He, as all the angels, is supposed to have a spir-
 
 AND INIQUITY. 125 
 
 itual body, as well as the saints, in the resurrection 
 state. Did his sin make his body mortal ? But if 
 Adam's sin made his body mortal, why did not Sa- 
 tan's sin make his body mortal ? Will it be said 
 Satan's body was spiritual while Adam's was ani- 
 mal, and that this is the cause of the difference ? 
 Partly right and partly wrong. Satan's body was 
 spiritual, and therefore immortal. But Adam's 
 body was animal, and therefore mortal. An immor- 
 tal animal ! Omnivorous in kind by creation, and 
 living on vegetables and fruits and the flesh of oth- 
 er animals, liable to hunger, heat and cold, and 
 sleeping when occasion required, and yet immortal ? 
 Marvelous indeed. These are not the characteris- 
 tics of immortality. Immortal creatures do not 
 subsist on such crude material, are not affected by 
 the necessities of a fickle climate, do not grow wea- 
 ry, never sleep as Adam did before he sinned, or if 
 they do heaven is not what we are expecting. An 
 immortal animal is a contradiction in terms, mor- 
 tality was a concreation with the first man. All 
 the facts seem to show that the idea of a possible 
 immortality conditioned upon obedience is a worth- 
 less foundation. Obedience expends itself upon 
 the spiritual and can affect the physical only slight- 
 ly, arid not in such a way as to metamorphose the 
 mortal into the immortal, the animal body into a 
 spiritual body. But it may be pertinently inquired : 
 If Adam had not sinned, would not his body at a 
 suitable time been either spiritualized or superseded 
 by a spiritual or resurrection body without the in- 
 tervention of death, as seems to have been the case
 
 126 ANTHROPOLOGY. 
 
 with Elijah and Enoch ? I reply, it is highly prob- 
 able, but for sin Adam's body would have been spir- 
 itualized and fitted for all the felicities of a higher 
 life as we suppose were the bodies of Elijah and 
 Enoch. But in that case the immortality would 
 have come, not from the original creation, but from 
 spiritualization just as the immortality of Christ'5 
 body, who was as sinless as ever Adam was, resulted 
 not from his sinlessness but from its quickenings 01 
 spiritualization. This is the point to be essentially 
 noted, that the immortality comes neither from the 
 creation nor from the sinlessness, but from the spir- 
 itualization. We know little about these translations 
 and need not speculate much concerning them. 
 They were evidently equivalent in effect to death 
 and the resurrection. That is, death in the sense 
 of deprivation of an animal nature, and resurrec- 
 tion in the sense of spiritualization, or the imparta- 
 tion of a new body. We can conceive of these two 
 distinct events as synchronal, as they evidently were 
 in the case of Enoch and Elijah, or as separated by 
 a greater or less interval of time, as in the case of 
 Christ, and possibly in the case of mankind gener- 
 ally. But in all cases bodily immortality comes 
 neither from creation or sinlessness, but from super- 
 natural spiritualization. 
 
 2. "Now this I say, brethren, that flesh and blood 
 cannot inherit the kingdom of God, neither doth 
 corruption inherit incorruptiou. " i Cor. xv. 50. 
 The context clearly shows that the kingdom of God 
 here means the church in the resurrection state. 
 The text alleges that flesh and blood cannot inherit
 
 SSN AND INIQUITY. 127 
 
 this kingdom, cannot enter it must of necessity 
 be excluded from it. But the body of Adam was 
 as truly flesh and blood, a natural or animal or cor- 
 ruptible, and therefore a mortal, body before the falJ 
 as it was afterwards, or as ours are now. Hence it 
 is plain that his sin did not make his body natural, 
 or as the word implies, animal, did not change it 
 from an immortal to a mortal body. His sin did not 
 bring natural death into the world as a punishment 
 for sin. 
 
 3. ' ' Christ hath redeemed us from the curse of 
 the law, being made a curse for us." Gal. iii. 13. 
 
 If natural death is the curse of the law, or any 
 part of it, then Christ hath not redeemed us from 
 the curse of the law, or at least not from the whole \ 
 curse, for believers are not exempt from natural V 
 death. It hence follows that Christ suffered a part 
 of the curse and every believer a part. This flatly 
 contradicts the text. 
 
 ' ' He was made sin (a sin offering) for us. ' ' 2 
 Cor. v. 21. If natural death is a penal consequence 
 of sin, then Christ, as a sin offering, does not take 
 away the penal consequence of sin, even in those 
 who are united to him by faith. 
 
 4. "Christ is the end of the law for righteousness 
 to everyone that believeth." The doctrine of this 
 text is that Christ saves the believer from the penal 
 consequences of sin, but he does not save them V 
 from physical death. 
 
 5. That natural death is not the penalty of Ad- 
 am's sin, or of any other sin, is both proved and 
 exemplified in the person of Christ. The first and
 
 /28 ANTHROPOLOGY. 
 
 second Adam were equally men. Adam's concreated 
 noliness, if we choose to call uprightness holiness, 
 was only negative. Christ was not only innocent 
 but properly and actively holy. He therefore, ac- 
 cording to the theory, ought to have had a stronger 
 guaranty against physical death than had Adam. 
 Yet he, in his sinless state, was mortal. He actu- 
 ally died. Will it be said Christ died for the sins 
 of others ? I reply, this is true ; (but the sins of 
 others were not the cause of his mortality, but the 
 occasion of his death?) This is evident from the 
 fact that if he had not been mortal he could not 
 have died on any account. To say it is possible 
 for any immortal being to die is a contradiction in 
 terms. I see no method of bending these stern 
 facts into harmony with the penal theory of death. 
 
 Christ, the .only sinless human being that ever 
 drew breath, since the fall of man, was created 
 mortal like all other men, and yet we are required 
 to believe that mortality is a penal curse of Adam's 
 sin ! 
 
 6. The penal theory of natural death is irrecon- 
 cilable with the doctrine of the resurrection. The 
 resurrection gives to men, in lieu of their natural, 
 corrupt, dishonored bodies, spiritual, incorruptible 
 and glorious bodies, in every respect like unto 
 Christ's glorious body. This exchange of the 
 worse for the better does not agree with our 
 notion of a penal curse, as the theory under consid- 
 eration affirms death to be. Is it in fact a curse to 
 take a man out of a worthless and dilapidated mud 
 wall hovel and put him in a mansion ; to pull down
 
 SIN AND INIQUITY. 129 
 
 his rickety earthly tabernacle and give him a house 
 not made with hands, eternal in the heavens? This 
 looks to me far more like benefaction than male- 
 faction, more like blessing than cursing. I like 
 the familiar sentiment, 
 
 Death is the gate to endless joy, 
 And dying is but going home. 
 
 7. The assumption that all human sufferings are 
 the proper punishment of sin in the person of the 
 sufferer, pretermits all distinction between physical 
 and moral law, confounding things which are in 
 themselves essentially distinct. All physical suffer- 
 ing results from the violation of physical laws. 
 This violation may be the act of the sufferer, as in 
 the case of imprudent eating, exposure, etc., or the 
 suffering may be brought upon the person by the 
 act of another, as in the case of murder, and other 
 lesser injuries, or by the excesses of ancestors, as is 
 often the case, or by ordinary providence, as in 
 case of accidents and epidemics, or by judicial 
 Providence, as in the destruction of Herod Antipas, 
 or the Sodomites. 
 
 Moral evils, of course, result from the violation 
 of moral law. The moral and the physical often 
 overlap each other. All acts put forth in violation 
 of physical la~w, for purposes of sinful pleasure, 
 gratification or advantage, result in both moral and 
 physical evil, as do all sorts of excesses and dissi- 
 pation. In such cases it naturally follows that the 
 individual, while enduring the penalty of violated 
 physical law, also suffers the penal consequence of 
 his violation of moral law, and consequently, while
 
 1 30 ANTHROPOLOG Y. 
 
 writhing in physical pain, may at the same time 
 feel the sting of penal fires in the domain of his 
 moral being in the sense of moral degradation and 
 shame, remorse, unmitigated guilt. 
 
 But notwithstanding this intimate relation be- 
 tween them, they are not blended or confounded, 
 but remain separate and distinct. 
 
 The violations of moral law never bring physical 
 retribution. Though the same act may be a viola- 
 tion of both laws. Unless we make the discrimi- 
 nation and hold it, we will be logically forced to 
 assert conclusions as false as they are revolting. A 
 very large per cent of the human family destroy 
 their health, bring on suffering and death by im- 
 prudence or through ignorance. 
 
 Parents in like manner often destroy the health 
 of their children, and the best of physicians that of 
 their patients. Now, are we prepared to say in the 
 light of such facts that all violations of physical 
 law are of necessity violations of moral law, or are 
 sins in the Bible sense of the word, which they 
 must be if all possible human sufferings are pun- 
 ishments for sins? But of whose sins are all 
 these sufferings the punishment? The theory 
 says all suffering is a punishment of sin in the 
 person of the sufferer. A man, though he may 
 be one of the purest of earth, by a little impru- 
 dence may ruin his health, or he may lose his 
 life by the hand of another, by an epidemic, 
 by accident, or, like good old Simeon, he may 
 pray to die, and God in answer may providen- 
 tially call him away. The little infant, though it
 
 SfN AND INIQUITY . 131 
 
 never had a rational thought, often suffers a fearful 
 death. In all such instances shall we say that the 
 suffering is a punishment for violations of moral 
 law ? This shocks common sense and indicates the 
 fallacy of the doctrine. 
 
 8. The theory in question contradicts all rational 
 views of many facts stated in the Bible. 
 
 I do not see how it can be reconciled with the 
 facts in the case of Job. God testified that there 
 was none like him in the earth, a perfect and an 
 upright man. One who feared God and avoided 
 evil, yet he was more severely afflicted than any 
 other man. Here we have the best man in the 
 world, and yet the most afflicted man. But accord- 
 ing to the theory, all these afflictions are the pun- 
 ishment of his sin. God's testimony makes him 
 the best man, but the logic of the penal theory 
 makes him the worst man. In fact, Job's comfort- 
 ers were strict penalists. They boldly defended the 
 doctrine against which I protest. They could find 
 no cause for Job's suffering but in his secret sins. 
 Their philosophy was the so-called orthodox theory 
 of the day. This, too, was Job's philosophy, but 
 he could not reconcile the facts with his philoso- 
 phy. He was conscious of innocency from the 
 great sins of which his philosophy convicted him. 
 Hence his utter embarrassment and confusion. His 
 consciousness testified to his innocence, but his the- 
 ory testified to his guilt, and between the two his 
 afflictions were inexplicable. All the foolish things 
 he said were provoked by his false philosophy; nor 
 was he relieved from his troubles till the young
 
 / 
 
 \ 
 
 132 ANTHROPOLOGY. 
 
 man Eliphas, demolished his false philosophy, and 
 referred his troubles to the allwise but inscrutable 
 providences of God. 
 
 This reference of all suffering to individual sins 
 was also the philosophy of the pagan world. This 
 fact finds a striking illustration in the conduct of 
 the inhabitants of Miletus, when Paul was cast 
 upon their coast and shipwrecked. They first 
 thought him a good man, then because a viper 
 fastened upon his hand they thought him a mur- 
 derer escaping from justice, but overtaken by the 
 fates; then, because he did not fall down dead, they 
 thought he was a god. All this vacillation result- 
 ed from a struggle to harmonize facts with a false 
 theory. The theory is absolutely refuted by the 
 facts in the case of the rich man and Lazarus. In 
 fact, it seems to be a part of the design, if not the 
 chief purpose, of this scripture to demolish the 
 false reasoning of men in regard to this absurd the- 
 ory. Christ here teaches three important lessons : 
 
 (1) That a man may be eminently pious and yet 
 be greatly afflicted in every sense. To such, death 
 is a blessing instead of a curse. 
 
 (2) The man may be a great sinner and yet be 
 blessed with all conceivable external good in this 
 world. 
 
 (3) That the moral government of God is not 
 administered in this world according to the prin- 
 ciples of exact retribution, but is disciplinary 
 
 the blind man found in the temple contradicts 
 the doctrine under review. "Master, who did
 
 SIN AND INIQUITY. 133 
 
 sin, this man or his parents, that he was born 
 blind?" This was the question asked by the 
 disciples. Jesus replied, "Neither hath this man 
 sinned or his parents, but that the work of God 
 should be made manifest in him." (a) The dis- 
 ciples assumed that sin caused the blindness of 
 this man. (b) Christ denied the assumption flatly 
 and explicitly, (c) But he alleges that his blind- 
 ness was providential, and for a sufficient reason, 
 (d) Hence the affliction was not a punishment for 
 his sin, but was purely administrative, not of the 
 wrath but of the wisdom and goodness of God. 
 
 Probably without this dispensation of providence 
 this man never would have come to a saving knowl- 
 edge of the truth, and the world would have been 
 left without the benefit of this clue to thousands of 
 similar providential occurrences. Many other sim- 
 ilar facts might be stated, which seem to be adverse 
 to the theory. I will consider in another chapter 
 other aspects of the subject which favor the same 
 conclusion.
 
 CHAPTER IX. 
 
 PHYSICAL DEATH AND RESURRECTION NOT CONSE- 
 QUENCES OF SIN. LIFE AND DEATH. 
 
 WHAT life is in itself we do not know. We 
 can know only some of its characteristics. 
 Facts as apprehended by us authorize the 
 affirmation that there is an infinite life which is the 
 source of all creature life. All creature life is finite 
 life, and is a product or derivation from infinite 
 life. Infinite life is exclusively the property of 
 God. It is unoriginated, underived, and intermina- 
 ble. Finite life is of two distinct kinds, spiritual 
 and physical ; but both have their source in infinite 
 life. The expression, spiritual life, is ambiguous 
 may mean existence as a spiritual entity, and as 
 such is imperishable or indestructible, partaking in 
 this respect of the nature of infinite life, e. g., all 
 spirits created in the image of God, whether good 
 or bad, are immortal. But the words spiritual life, 
 as used in the Scriptures, does not express the idea 
 of mere existence or being, but rather denotes the 
 state or quality of spiritual creatures. Bad spirits 
 have everlasting life in the sense of persistent 
 being, but are destitute of spiritual life in the sense 
 of a state of fellowship with God. 
 
 2. We know little more of death than we do of 
 life. We know, however, that it is the negation of
 
 LIFE AND DEATH. 135 
 
 life, or is in some sense the destruction of life. All 
 living material organisms, as plants and animals, 
 seem to be destined to resolution into primitive and 
 inorganic matter. It is not the primitive and con- 
 stituent material that is destroyed, but only the 
 organisms and their functions or offices. Such 
 organisms undergo continual changes in the incon- 
 stituent elements. These are not the same for two 
 consecutive moments. The process of decay or 
 waste is ever going on, and unless this waste is 
 more than compensated by the incorporation of new 
 matter there can be no growth; and unless it is 
 fully compensated there is actual decay. This decay 
 or disintegration is death, incipient death we may 
 call it, but real nevertheless, because it is the trans- 
 mutation of living into dead and inorganic matter. 
 Hence it is literally true that material organisms 
 begin to die in this sense the moment they begin 
 to live; and, of course, life abides only so long as 
 the new supply compensates the loss, or the abso- 
 lute suspension of the supply results in death, or 
 the dissolution of the organism. But this neces- 
 sary supply is dependent upon so many conditions, 
 both external and internal to the organism, that 
 life is in constant peril. An injury or impairment 
 of a vital organ, as the lungs, the heart, the 
 stomach, the kidneys, may render the organism 
 incapable of appropriating the needed supply of 
 nutriment, and death must follow ; or the necessary 
 food and air may be cut off by various causes, or 
 the body may be so injured or mangled by violence 
 from without as to produce death.
 
 136 ANTHROPOLOGY. 
 
 All supplies must come from without. The or- 
 ganism itself supplies nothing, originates nothing. 
 Like devouring flames it does not furnish the 
 material upon which it subsists, but only appro- 
 priates what is within its reach. If this external 
 supply is cut off, or for any cause fails, death from 
 starvation necessarily follows. But even when the 
 organism is invaded by disease and the external ma- 
 terials necessary to its support, such as air, food and 
 raiment, are abundant death sooner or later inter- 
 venes through sheer exhaustion of the vital organs. 
 Plants, animals, and men, if not killed by other 
 means, die of old age. This seems to be nature, or 
 rather God's inexorable decree concerning all mate- 
 rial organisms. To this there are no known excep- 
 tions, and none are believed to be possible. We 
 might as reasonably assume the existence of mate- 
 rial heavenly bodies exempt from the law of gravity 
 as to assume the existence of material organized 
 bodies exempt from the liability of decay and death. 
 To say that man would have been an exception 
 to the necessity of dying if he had not sinned is a 
 violent assumption, not only without any proof, 
 but in palpable conflict with all analogy and with 
 every science that sheds any light on the subject, 
 and in conflict with the Bible as well. 
 
 Another 'fact that has a vital bearing upon the 
 question is that the life of all material organisms is 
 capable of perpetuation only through the nutritious 
 materials furnished by death. The flora of one 
 period dies and furnishes plant food for the flora of 
 succeeding periods. The same is true of the fauna.
 
 LIFE AND DEATH. 137 
 
 All material life, vegetable and animal, subsists 
 upon the material furnished by the death and de- 
 composition of preceding organisms. Hence all 
 material life and material death, in the present state 
 of the world are mutually dependent. Without 
 life there could be no death, and without death no 
 perpetuation of life from one generation to another. 
 This is true of all known organisms, unless man is 
 the solitary exception. This admitted fact seems to 
 authorize the conclusion that death is common to 
 all material organic beings, and that it is not the 
 accident or the product of human sin, but is an es- 
 sential part of the divinely-ordained plan of the 
 world. There is nothing in nature, reason, or rev- 
 elation indicating that man is an exception to the 
 universal reign of physical death. 
 
 Perhaps no man would have ever conceived, the 
 idea that physical death is a consequence of sin had 
 not the sacred Scriptures associated sin and death, 
 making sin the cause of death in some form. But 
 we should remember that death in the sacred Scrip- 
 tures is a very ambiguous word, having several dif- 
 ferent contradictory meanings, as physical death 
 a separation of soul and body, spiritual death 
 a separation of the soul from God, a death in sin and 
 a death unto sin. The word death, in these uses 
 of the term, means radically different states, states 
 which are not dependent one upon the other. A 
 man may be physically alive but spiritually dead, or 
 both physically and spiritually alive, or physically 
 dead and spiritually alive, or both physically and 
 spiritually dead.
 
 138 ANTHROPOLOGY. 
 
 These well-known facts clearly show the necessi- 
 ty of cautious discrimination in fixing upon the 
 sense in which the word is intended to be taken in 
 any given text. Without discrimination we are 
 liable to deceive ourselves and misinterpret the text 
 in which the word occurs. It was exactly in this 
 way, I believe, that Augustine deceived himself, 
 and came to believe that not only physical death, 
 but all suffering all evil, physical and moral are 
 the penal consequences of sin. 
 
 It is a fact that all men are subject to physical 
 death, also a fact that all are subject to spiritual 
 death are born in that state. The fact that both 
 deaths are universal both have the same victims 
 may seem to favor the idea that both have the same 
 cause, viz., sin. But it would be an illicit inference 
 to conclude that because physical and spiritual 
 death are both universal, therefore both have the 
 same cause. Reason is common to men, and so is 
 a sinful nature common to all men, but these uni- 
 versal characteristics do not have the same cause. 
 The first is natural to man ; the second was not a 
 concreation of the first man, but was to him au 
 accident. So physical death is natural to man he 
 dies from a necessity inherent in his physical organ- 
 ism ; but spiritual death is not a necessity inherent 
 in the nature of spirit, but in the first man was a 
 necessary result of a sinful volition and in all others 
 is an hereditary state. The fact that both are uni- 
 versal is no proof that they result from the same 
 cause : that is, from the first sin. The only author- 
 ity claimed for the doctrine that physical death is a
 
 LIFE AND DEATH. 139 
 
 punishment for the first human sin is a few texts 
 of scripture, notably Gen. ii. 17 and Rom. v. 12. 
 It is generally admitted that the word "death" in 
 these texts includes spiritual death, and in order to 
 make it include physical death it is necessary to 
 give it a double meaning and make it in the same 
 proposition express two wholly distinct and inde- 
 pendent ideas. But this is an unpardonable abuse 
 of terms which generates only darkness and con- 
 fusion. Certainly the same word may be used in 
 different propositions to express different ideas, but 
 the same word is never used in a given proposition 
 to express two distinct and antithetical ideas. If 
 the word death in any text expresses spiritual death 
 it cannot also express physical death ; or if it ex- 
 presses physical death then it cannot, at the same 
 time, express spiritual death. We have just as 
 much authority to say that in the text, John iii. 36, 
 " He that believeth on the Son hath everlasting 
 life," the word "life" has a double meaning and 
 includes both spiritual and physical life, as to say 
 the word death, or die, in Gen. ii. 17, or Rom. v. 
 12, means both spiritual and physical death. The 
 cases are exactly parallel. But to so interpret John 
 iii. 36 would be to array the Scriptures against 
 themselves and contradict the universally known 
 fact that the believers are no more exempt from 
 physical death than are the unbelievers. 
 
 The most that can be fairly said in support of 
 this physical death theory is that it is mere gratuit- 
 ous inference from a few texts, an inference which 
 puts the scriptures in irreconcilable conflict with
 
 140 ANTHROPOLOGY. 
 
 all the revealings of every science that bears on 
 the subject. But more than this, and far worse 
 than this, the doctrine is irreconcilable conflict with 
 the plain teachings of many Bible texts, or with the 
 logical implications of such texts. Conspicuous 
 among these may be noted the following: 
 
 i. Ecc. iii. 19, 20: "For that which befalleth 
 the sous of men befalleth beasts: even one thing 
 befalleth them; as the one dieth so dieth the other; 
 yea, they have all one breath; so that a man hath no 
 pre-eminence above a beast; for all is vanity. All 
 go unto one place : all are of the dust and all turn 
 to dust again." 
 
 This text is sufficiently plain, and its teachings 
 easily understood. It teaches that man, as to his 
 liability to death, is on exact equality with the 
 beast or the animal world, or that death is just as 
 natural to him as it is to beasts. The natural evils 
 that befall one befall the other, as one dies so dies 
 the other, both having one breath, and the man 
 has in this respect u no pre-eminence above a beast. ' ' 
 The reason assigned for this equal subjugation of 
 both to death is the simple fact that both are liter- 
 ally dust, and hence must turn to dust again. It 
 is, I think, not unsafe to say that no discriminating 
 mind that has not a foregone conclusion to support 
 could, in the face of this text; attribute the death 
 of man and the death of the animal to wholly dif- 
 ferent and independent causes, or say that the death 
 of the animal is due wholly to its physical organ- 
 ism and the death of man to Adam's sin. 
 
 Yet, those holding the theory that death is the
 
 LIFE AND DEATH. 141 
 
 product of sin, actually do this most unreasonable 
 thing. 
 
 This text, with any rational interpretation of its 
 terms, requires us to believe that if sin is the cause 
 of the death of the human body then it is also the 
 cause of the death of the animals, for men have no 
 pre-eminence in this respect above the beast, for all 
 go to one place ; all are of the dust, and all return 
 to dust again. 
 
 Surely no truth needs to be more fully establish- 
 ed by both science and revelation than that phys- 
 ical death is natural to man, just as it is to all 
 physical organisms, and, of course, was a funda- 
 mental part of God's plan of creation and adminis- 
 tration of the world. But in immediate association 
 with this truth is another, namely, the resurrection 
 of the dead, or the environment of the spirit in a 
 spiritual body after death. 
 
 But the fact that man was created mortal as to 
 his body or animal nature does not prove that his 
 mind or spirit is mortal, or that it ever experiences 
 death in the sense in which the body does. Many 
 texts teach with more or less directness the spirit's 
 survival of the death of the body. As we have 
 just seen Ecc. iii. 19, 20 teaches most explicitly 
 that physical death is alike common to man and to 
 beast, and for the same causes. But the 2ist verse 
 teaches that at death the spirit of a man goeth up- 
 ward and the spirit of the beast goeth downward to 
 the earth. The two distinct doctrines of the mor- 
 tality of the body and the immortality of the spirit 
 are more briefly and explicitly taught in Ecc. xii.
 
 142 ANTHROPOLOGY. 
 
 7: "Then shall the dust (the deceased body) re- 
 turn to the earth as it was and the spirit to God 
 who gave it." This is in exact accord with what 
 God said to Adam in Eden, "Dust thou art and 
 unto dust shalt thou return." Heb. ix. 27: "It is 
 appointed unto men once to die, but after this the 
 judgment." This teaches that death and judgment 
 are co-ordinate events in the history of man, and 
 one as truly a part of the original divine plan in 
 relation to man as the other. It also teaches that 
 the man, as to the mind or spirit, survives the 
 death of the body; for if the spirit perishes with 
 the body then after death there would be nothing to 
 be subject to judgment. 
 
 I have referred to these texts (and might refer to 
 many others), not merely to prove the immortality 
 of the human spirit, but rather to indicate God's 
 original plan or purpose concerning the nature and 
 destiny of human kind. Two fundamental truths 
 seem to me fully established by these scriptures : 
 
 1. That man was, as to his body, created mortal, 
 and consequently with the necessity of physical 
 death as inherent in his bodily nature. 
 
 2. That he was generated (not created), as to his 
 spirit, immortal, in the image of God, and inher- 
 ently incapable of dissolution in the sense in 
 which the human body and all other material or- 
 ganisms die. 
 
 With these two facts satisfactorily fixed in mind 
 I do not hesitate to advance another collateral 
 proposition, viz., that the resurrection of the dead, 
 or its equivalent, was a fundamental part of the
 
 LIFE AND DEATH. 143 
 
 divine purpose or plan concerning all human be- 
 ings; hence that death and the resurrection are not 
 consequences of sin; or that men would have died 
 and have risen from the dead as really without the 
 introduction of sin into humanity as with its intro- 
 duction. If this proposition is true it releases us 
 from the painful and humiliating necessity of be- 
 lieving that human sin somehow took the allwise 
 Creator on a surprise ; that he had not seen the end 
 from the beginning; that his original plan of ad- 
 ministration was inadequate for the purposes for 
 which he created the world, and that human sin 
 put him under some sort of necessity of revising 
 and materially changing his original plan of ad- 
 ministration in order to adapt it to the unexpected 
 exigencies arising out of human sin. 
 
 The word " death " in this connection is used in 
 its close literal sense of the separation of soul and 
 body, or the extinction of animal life, and without 
 any reference to the accidents or attendant circum- 
 stances of death. 
 
 The fearfulness of death ordinarily arises chiefly 
 from its accidents, rather than from the mere act 
 of dying. Prominent among these accidents is sin, 
 and the fear of the consequences of sin. Paul rec- 
 ognizes this fact when he says (i Cor. xv. 56), "The 
 sting of death is sin and the power of sin is the 
 law." This text teaches, not that sin is causative 
 of death, but that sin gives to death its sting. On 
 the contrary, an assurance of victory over sin and 
 the grave takes away, not death itself, but the sting 
 of death.
 
 144 ANTHROPOLOGY. 
 
 The words "resurrection from the dead," or from 
 a state of separation of soul and body, is used in 
 the sense of the investment of the spirit, separated 
 from the body of flesh and blood, with a spiritual 
 body, "a building from God, a house not made with 
 hands eternal in the heavens" (2 Cor. v. i), "a 
 body fashioned like unto Christ's glorious body" 
 (Thes. iii. 2). 
 
 Resurrection in this sense is essentially different 
 from the restoration to animal life of Lazarus and 
 the son of the widow of Nain, and other like cases. 
 In such cases there was only a temporary reunion 
 of the spirit and the animal body. But in the res- 
 urrection proper the spirit is invested with a spirit- 
 ual body, which is immortal, subject to no process 
 of waste or decay, and has consequently no need of 
 a compensating process of supply. 
 
 The spiritual and resurrection bodies of the re- 
 deemed are also free from all sensuous appetites 
 and passions, and are in this respect like unto the 
 angels (Luke xx. 34-38). 
 
 It is a noteworthy fact that the scriptures never 
 expressly speak of the resurrection of the animal or 
 material body They, on the contrary, generally 
 speak of " the resurrection of the dead " and " from 
 the dead " and of the dead as arising. This fact is 
 often overlooked in considering the doctrine of the 
 resurrection. This scripture mode of presenting 
 the subject of the resurrection suggests some grave 
 difficulties concerning the mode of the resurrection, 
 or as to what it really is, whether it is the reanima- 
 tion, or revitalization and spiritualization of the
 
 LIFE AND DEATH. 145 
 
 dead or devitalized animal body; or whether it is 
 the investiture of the human spirit with a spiritual 
 body wholly distinct from the dead body and inde- 
 pendent of it ; or whether the spiritual resurrection 
 body is a divinely appointed product of the immortal 
 spirit spontaneously seeking to reinvest itself with 
 an environment suited to its changed condition, like 
 the life principle of a naked grain of wheat seeking 
 to envelop itself with a new environment or body. 
 The first of these views seems perhaps only seems 
 to be favored by the resurrection of Christ; the 
 second seems perhaps only seems to be favored by 
 the few first verses of 2 Cor. v. , and the third seems 
 perhaps only seems to be proved by i Cor. xv. 
 36-38. But it is no part of my purpose to discuss 
 these extremely subtle and perplexing questions in 
 this connection. 
 
 Our inability to reach satisfactory conclusions as 
 to the manner of the resurrection is not even pre- 
 sumptive proof against the fact of the resurrection 
 any more than our inability to understand the man- 
 ner of creation is presumptive proof against the 
 fact of creation. 
 
 The question as to the manner of the resurrec- 
 tion, however, is coming into more prominence 
 than it has hitherto been, and in the future it 
 may be expected to receive more attention than at 
 present. 
 
 Further, it is coming to be a grave question 
 whether the immortality of the soul itself does 
 not depend upon the resurrection. Some of our 
 good and great men hold that the soul's life, or at
 
 146 ANTHROPOLOGY. 
 
 least its activity, depends upon its vital union with 
 the body. One of our recent and most popular 
 commentaries (James, Fausett and Brown, i Cor. 
 xv. 51-54) says: "Nowhere is the immortality of 
 the soul distinct from the body taught; a notion 
 which many erroneously have derived from heathen 
 philosophers. Scripture does not contemplate the 
 anomalous state brought about by death as the con- 
 summation to be earnestly looked for (2 Cor. v. 4), 
 but the resurrection, 54. Then, not before. Death 
 has yet a sting, even to the believers, in that his 
 body is to be under its power till the resurrection. 
 But then the sting and power of death shall cease 
 forever." The above brief quotations involve a 
 bundle of incongruities which no one can reconcile 
 with themselves or with the scripture. But all these 
 different questions aside, the question naturally 
 enough arises, whether the resurrection is not an 
 essential part of God's original plan concerning 
 human beings. Many texts seem by necessary im- 
 plication to authorize an affirmative answer. Note 
 the following: 
 
 i. i Cor. xv. 50: "Flesh and blood cannot in- 
 herit the kingdom of God." 
 
 By the kingdom is here meant not the kingdom 
 of grace, but the ultimate state of blessedness and 
 glory, the final state of sainthood. To inherit is to 
 receive or come into rightful possession and enjoy- 
 ment of the kingdom. No one would say that sin 
 gave to Adam his flesh and blood. All would admit 
 that he was as truly flesh and blood before he sinned 
 as he was afterwards. All too would admit that he
 
 LIFE AND DEATH. 147 
 
 was created to inherit this kingdom of God. The 
 inference, then, seems to be irresistible that God 
 intended from the beginning that his physical and 
 animal nature should undergo just such a change, 
 as to his body, as is involved in the resurrection, a 
 change from a natural to a spiritual body. This 
 change from the natural to the spiritual body is ex- 
 actly what the resurrection is intended to accom- 
 plish and what it did actually accomplish in the 
 person of Christ, who is the first fruits, the first vis- 
 ible fruits of it. 
 
 2. i Cor. xv. 50: u Neither doth corruption in- 
 herit incorruption (aphtharsian)." 
 
 Corruption and incorruption are abstract terms 
 equivalent to the concrete form. What is in itself 
 corrupt does not inherit or attain to what is incor- 
 rupt. The text means, neither does the mortal in- 
 herit immortality (aphtharsian), for what is physi- 
 cally corrupt is necessarily mortal, and what is in- 
 corruptible is of course immortal. Aphtharsian (in- 
 corruption) is so translated in Rom. ii. 7 and 2 
 Tim. i. 10. Now there was never a day in Adam's 
 history, either before or after his dejection, when 
 his body was not undergoing change and this 
 change is itself the product and proof of a corrupt- 
 ible and perishing body. Now as corruption can- 
 not inherit incorruption or the mortal produce the 
 immortal, we seem to be shut up to the necessity 
 of believing that God from the beginning purposed 
 to invest the human spirit with an incorruptible 
 or spiritual body, freed from its sensuous nature, 
 such as is assured to it in the resurrection.
 
 148 ANTHROPOLOGY. 
 
 3. i Cor. xv. 13 : " But if there be no resurrec- 
 tion of the dead, then is Christ not risen." 
 
 These words are used by Paul as an argument 
 against some parties who, it seems, admitted the 
 resurrection of Christ, but denied the general res- 
 urrection. Paul's argument against this position 
 is that if there is no general resurrection then Christ 
 himself hath not been raised ; or that Christ's res- 
 urrection presupposes a general resurrection; that 
 if there is no such resurrection then Christ himself 
 has not been raised, just as the fact that one man 
 dies presupposes that all other men are mortal, or 
 must die, all having the same essential characteris- 
 tics. Most commentators exactly reverse Paul's 
 argument, and assert a causative relation between 
 the resurrection of Christ and that of other men, 
 or that the resurrection of Christ is causative of 
 the general resurrection, or that the general 
 resurrection is conditioned upon Christ's resurrec- 
 tion. But Paul, on the contrary, conditions Christ's 
 resurrection on the fact of a general resurrection as 
 a part of God's plan or purpose. This is evident 
 from his language literally or naturally construed. 
 "For if there be no resurrection of the dead, then 
 is Christ not risen." Here the resurrection of 
 Christ is conditioned upon the general resurrection 
 as a fact in God's plan, just as the death of one man 
 is conditioned upon the fact that in God's purpose 
 all are destined to die, and as the death of one is 
 the conclusive proof that all must die, so the res- 
 urrection of one (Christ) is proof that all shall 
 rise. This is exactly Paul's argument against those
 
 LIFE AND DEATH. 149 
 
 that admitted Christ's resurrection but denied a 
 general resurrection. 
 
 So much importance did the Apostle attach to 
 this argument that he repeats it in v. 16. " For if 
 the dead rise not then is not Christ raised." Paul's 
 argument makes Christ's resurrection a single in- 
 stance, an exemplification and proof of a universal 
 law of humanity which has its origin in the pur- 
 pose of God. It is in no proper sense the cause of 
 the general resurrection, but is strictly an exempli- 
 fication and proof of a universal resurrection of the 
 dead. That the resurrection of Christ is not causa- 
 tive of the general resurrection but a proof of it is 
 put beyond all reasonable doubt by v. 20. "But 
 now is Christ risen from the dead and become the 
 first fruits of them that slept.' ' The reference man- 
 ifestly is to the earliest or first fruits of the harvest. 
 The first fruit is the pledge, a sort of 'assurance of 
 subsequent fruit. Now it is a self-evident truth that 
 the first fruits of a harvest do not produce them- 
 selves ; nor do they produce or cause or necessitate 
 the harvest. They only give proof or assurance 
 of a harvest. In like manner the resurrection of 
 Christ, as the first fruits of them that sleep, does 
 not cause or produce or condition or make necessa- 
 ry the general resurrection of the dead. It, on the 
 contrary, gives proof of such a resurrection. 
 
 The existence of a fact and the revelation of a 
 fact are different things. So the cause of an 
 event and the proof of an event are different things, 
 and must be distinguished, otherwise we shall 
 be involved in inextricable confusion. Making
 
 1 50 ANTHROPOLOG Y. 
 
 these pertinent distinctions we can, I think, 
 pretty accurately apprehend the true relation 
 of Christ's resurrection to the general resurrec- 
 tion, which may be fairly stated thus: Christ's 
 resurrection did not cause or originate the existence 
 of the resurrection as a factor of God's administra- 
 tion concerning human destiny but revealed or 
 made known to us its existence as an essential fac- 
 tor in God's plan or administration. Again, Christ's 
 resurrection is not the source or ground of the gen- 
 eral resurrection but the proof and exemplification 
 of it. Again, Christ's resurrection is neither the 
 cause nor the condition of the general resurrection, 
 but the proof of it. If this is a correct statement 
 then it is clear enough that Christ's resurrection 
 and the general resurrection are not related as cause 
 and effect, nor as condition and consequent, as is 
 often asserted, but as co-ordinate and nondependent 
 events, both having their cause in the divine pur- 
 pose or will, and that purpose, I think, was not an 
 afterthought of God suggested by the sin of the 
 first man, but God's original purpose coincident 
 with his purpose to create man a rational animal. 
 Death and the resurrection, I take it, are the divine- 
 ly-appointed means through which God from the 
 beginning purposed to exalt man to the highest 
 heaven ; hence neither death nor the resurrection 
 from the dead is conditioned upon the sin of the 
 first man. 
 
 One of the most plausible arguments in support 
 of the doctrine that physical death is the result of 
 sin is founded on the assumption ; that the resur-
 
 LIFE AND DEATH. 151 
 
 rection is chiefly, if not wholly, designed to set 
 aside the effects of sin in relation to our physical 
 nature. The argument assumes that the resurrec- 
 tion of Christ is causative of the general resurrec- 
 tion, which, as we have seen, is incapable of proof. 
 We know with the utmost certainty that the death 
 and resurrection of Christ do not set aside spiritual 
 death, nor do they set aside physical death even of 
 believers. It is true that the mission of Christ was 
 to abolish death, both spiritual and temporal (Heb. 
 ii. 14), but these things are accomplished not by 
 his death or resurrection or both, but by his 
 own life-giving power. He himself is the res- 
 urrection and the life. He abolishes spiritual death 
 by the impartation of his own spiritual life, and 
 temporal death by giving to the dead a body like 
 unto his own glorious body. Christ's earthly min- 
 istry his miracles, teachings, death, and resurrec- 
 tion did not originate life and immortality, but 
 brought them to light revealed them to the world 
 in a manner more striking and satisfactory than 
 could have been done by any other method. 
 
 The resurrection does much more than restore 
 life to the body or compensate for the loss of ani- 
 mal life. It gives a spiritual instead of a physical, 
 an incorruptible instead of a corruptible, an immor- 
 tal instead of a mortal body, a body like unto 
 Christ's glorious body, free from all sensuous appe- 
 tites and passions, incapable of all sensuous pains 
 and pleasures, making them in all these respects 
 equal unto the angels. It is not the whole truth, 
 not scarcely any part of the truth, to say that re-
 
 152 ANTHROPOLOGY. 
 
 generation puts the human soul back into the state 
 in which Adam was created. It does far more than 
 this as will be elsewhere seen. So the resurrection of 
 Christ does far more than restore the dead body or 
 furnish an equivalent substitute for it. The body of 
 Adam was subject to death, did actually die. But 
 the resurrection body, Christ himself tells us, can die 
 no more. " Neither can they die any more for they 
 are equal unto the angels; and are the children of 
 God being children of the resurrection." (L,u. xx. 
 36.) The fact that Adam's body was created capa- 
 ble of death shows irrefutably that it was not im- 
 mortal, and that God from the beginning intended 
 it to be superceded by a spiritual body, making it 
 equal to the angels in this respect and liable to die 
 no more. Such a change is just what the resur- 
 rection is intended to secure. 
 
 In the light of Bible facts it appears to me incon- 
 testably true that both physical death and the res- 
 urrection are intended in God's original plan or 
 purpose concerning the ultimate destiny of human- 
 ity. If this is not true, then God, it seems, was 
 somehow thwarted in his purpose and reduced to 
 the necessity of changing his original plans for ac- 
 complishing his purpose in regard to human im- 
 mortality. But this view attributes imperfection 
 to God, finitizes his wisdom or power or both and 
 must therefore be rejected. If these statements are 
 grounded in facts if both death and resurrection 
 of the dea^e integral parts of God's purpose or 
 plan concerning humanity then it is sun-clear 
 that men did not become mortal by Adam's sin or
 
 LIFE AND DEATH. 153 
 
 any other sin. Nor did sin originate the necessity 
 of the resurrection. 
 
 Suppose the scriptures were dumb as to the 
 source of physical death, then we could know noth- 
 ing of its source except what we could gather 
 from such sciences as biology, physiology, anat- 
 omy and geology. These sciences are founded upon 
 established facts learned by observation and the 
 necessary implications of these facts. Would the 
 facts upon which these sciences rest ever even sug- 
 gest that the human body was created immortal 
 and became mortal by a sinful act or any other act 
 possible to man ? Certainly not. On the contrary, 
 they are utterly irreconcilable with such a suppo- 
 sition and imperatively require us to believe that, 
 as to his animal nature, man is as truly subject to 
 death as the horse or any other animal. Nor is it 
 necessary that we shall be adepts in these sciences 
 in order to be able to see that men as really die 
 from a necessity as do all other animals. The man 
 of ordinary reasoning powers, however ignorant of 
 technical science he may be, if he permit himself to 
 reason upon the subject at all, cannot fail to see the 
 unreasonableness of attributing the death of ani- 
 mals and plants to a necessity of nature and the 
 death of men to the accident of sin.
 
 CHAPTER X. 
 
 NECESSITATED VIRTUE; OR, HOLINESS AND PROBA- 
 TION. 
 
 LKT it be assumed that necessitated virtue or hol- 
 iness, or necessitated vice or unholiness are 
 impossible things, because virtue and vice are 
 predicable only of free or unnecessitated acts. 
 Judicial holiness as it is sometimes called is 
 predicable of anything that is consecrated to God. 
 Hence this kind of holiness is in the Bible often 
 predicated of things rational and irrational, ani- 
 mate and inanimate. 
 
 But even this kind of holiness is never a concre- 
 ation, but is produced only by a consecration to 
 sacred uses. Holiness, in the sense of innocence 
 or uprightness, is a possible concreation. Indeed, 
 we cannot conceive it possible for a newly created 
 mind, as Adam's was, to be created in any other 
 state than that of uprightness or innocence; for it 
 is self-evident that such a mind could have no 
 more to do in determining its own mortal qualities 
 than in determining its own being or any of its 
 physical senses or functions. 
 
 Anything imparted to it in its creation would be 
 either its felicity or calamity, and not its virtue or
 
 NECESSITATED VIRTUE. 155 
 
 vice, and would, of course, be neither rewardable 
 nor punishable. 
 
 It has been the calamity of a large part of the 
 theological world, from Augustine to this day, to 
 mistake this concreated innocence for true holiness 
 or such holiness as meets the requirements of the 
 divine law and gives fitness for eternal life; or such 
 holiness as is the sequence of loving God with all the 
 heart. The orthodox confessions generally say that 
 God imbued man with righteousness and true holi- 
 ness, and the proof text chiefly relied upon in sup- 
 port of this idea is Gen. i. 26, "And God said, Let 
 us make man in our image, after our likeness." 
 The proposed proof seems wholly irrelevant. 
 
 The image and likeness of God as here used, 
 from the nature of the case, can include only the 
 psychological likeness of the Creator, and conse- 
 quently the possibility of positive or true holiness, 
 and not true holiness itself. Intelligence, sensi- 
 bility and will, or freedom, furnish the basis and the 
 only possible basis of a moral character. Without 
 these prerequisites, it is inconceivable how the 
 Deity himself or any of his creatures could possess 
 any moral attributes, or any moral character. On 
 the contrary, the combination of these qualities in 
 any one creature constitutes that creature a moral 
 agent, and as such capable of moral action. Both 
 righteousness and holiness presuppose a law or 
 standard of righteousness or holiness. But moral 
 Tightness or holiness consists in right or obedient 
 action from the right motive. The correctness of 
 this proposition, I suppose, will not be denied.
 
 156 ANTHROPOLOGY. 
 
 But as it is plainly impossible for the mind to act 
 before it is created, and as holiness consists in right 
 action from right motives, it naturally follows that 
 a concreated holiness is an impossible thing. No 
 fair exegesis of Gen. i. 26, or any other text of the 
 Bible, requires us to believe that righteousness and 
 true holiness are intended to be taught in it, and 
 the facts in the case prove that they are not in- 
 tended. If it should be said that though Adam 
 was of course created before he acted, yet he was, 
 in his creation, endued with righteousness and true 
 holiness, and out of the holy affections must spring 
 only holy or right motives, which would determine 
 his will to right action, and therefore he was truly 
 endued with true holiness. It is sufficient to re- 
 mark that if the philosophy that puts the will 
 under the causative dominion of the motive, and 
 the motive under the control of the moral feelings, 
 be true, then one of two facts logically follows : 
 
 1. God is the author of sin, or there is no such 
 thing as sin in the universe. The advocates of 
 this philosophy are at liberty to accept whichever 
 horn of the dilemma they may prefer. 
 
 2. The idea of a probation is inconsistent with 
 the assumption of a concreated holiness. If man 
 was created with true holiness, why put him on 
 probation at all ? If possessed of true holiness, 
 could the Creator require anything more than true 
 holiness ? Could the law require more than this, 
 or could his own obedience make what was true 
 any truer? Could human acts better or in any way 
 improve the handiwork of God ? Why then was
 
 NECESSITATED VIRTUE. 157 
 
 the first man put on probation? If it should 
 be said he was put on probation in order to be 
 confirmed in holiness, it is pertinent to reply 
 that according to the theory his own obedience had 
 no power or tendency to confirm his holiness ; on 
 the contrary, his confirmation, if it had transpired 
 at all, would have been by a sovereign judicial act 
 of his creator. That is, his own acts of obedience 
 could not confirm him, but his confirmation must 
 be by a judicial act of his creator. And if his con- 
 firmation must be by a sovereign judicial act, why 
 was he not then judicially confirmed at once and 
 without probation ? 
 
 If he was created in righteousness and true holi- 
 ness, and none but God could confirm him in holi- 
 ness, why was not his creation and confirmation in 
 holiness immediate, or from the beginning? 
 
 According to the theory this was altogether pos- 
 sible and would have been almost infinitely benefi- 
 cent, because it would have excluded forever the 
 possibility of sin and all its resultant evils from our 
 world, and would have superceded the necessity of 
 the whole scheme of redemption through the suf- 
 fering and death of Jesus Christ. 
 
 On this assumption of a concreated holiness and 
 judicial confirmation, embracing the first man and 
 all his posterity, a probation seems to be, not only 
 unnecessary, but well-nigh the worst method pos- 
 sible for the human race. It also bears hard on the 
 divine administration as may be shown elsewhere. 
 
 3. The hypothesis of a necessitated holiness is 
 contradictory of the fundamental principles of a
 
 158 ANTHROPOLOGY. 
 
 moral government, and is therefore an absurdity. 
 A physical and moral government are radically dif- 
 ferent in two respects. They differ in their sub- 
 jects, and then in their modes of government and 
 administration. 
 
 The physical world, consisting only of inert mat- 
 ter, is under the irresistible control of physical 
 causation relentless necessity reigns over all. The 
 moral world, comprising all rational and accounta- 
 ble creatures, is not governed by laws of physical 
 causation, or by necessity of any kind, but by moral 
 power, sometimes properly called moral suasion. 
 That is, by the power of truth, by appeals addressed 
 to the intelligence, in the interest of the right and 
 good. Matter and mind are fundamentally differ- 
 ent in essence and characteristics and equally 
 different in the mode of government to which the 
 creator has subjected them. It is just as possible 
 to govern the physical world by moral suasion as 
 it is to govern the moral world by physical force, 
 or by necessity of any sort. It is accordingly as 
 possible to cause a mountain to move by moral 
 suasion as to cause a mind to put forth a morally re- 
 sponsible act or a holy or a sinful act by physical or 
 necessitating force. Of course it is possible for 
 Omnipotence to act upon the mind so as to necessi- 
 tate any act or course of action he may choose. 
 
 The necessitating power may be in accord with 
 the inclinations of the mind or contrary to them, 
 it matters not which. But if the mind acts under 
 necessity then the act, so far as the mind is con- 
 cerned, has no moral character, is neither right nor
 
 NECESSITATED VIRTUE. 159 
 
 wrong, because the mind is not the agent or actor, 
 but merely the instrument, God, or the necessitat- 
 ing power, is the author. That necessitated acts 
 are grounds of moral accountability is one of the 
 vagaries of one of the schools of philosophy. All 
 men, even the advocates of moral necessity, practi- 
 cally acknowledge that freedom is necessary to ac- 
 countability. No one would think of punishing 
 an agent for an act known to be necessitated. The 
 Bible recognizes this principle from beginning to 
 end. Holy men of God, moved by the Holy Ghost, 
 wrote the sacred scriptures. These men were only 
 the organs of revelation. The Holy Ghost God 
 is the author. If what they thus wrote is true, it is 
 not their merit; if false, it is not their vice. As to 
 the truthfulness or untruthfulness of their writings, 
 they are in no sense responsible. Why ? Because 
 they spake and wrote from necessity. 
 
 Just so far as they could have had any voluntary 
 control over the matter the work would have been 
 human, not divine. It is also equally possible for 
 God to make the minds of bad men the instruments 
 of his will. So he used Balaam, necessitating him 
 to bless Israel when he wished to curse him. So he 
 compelled Saul and his soldier and Caiphas to 
 prophecy, and so he caused Balaam's ass to rebuke 
 his master. In all these cases the right thing was 
 doue, but doing the right thing was nothing to the 
 credit of Balaam or Saul or Caiphas. Why ? Be- 
 cause their acts were divinely necessitated. God 
 was the author, and they the passive instruments. 
 
 Another class of facts illustrates the same princi-
 
 i6o ANTHROPOLOGY. 
 
 pie in relation to wrong (wicked) acts. Pharaoh 
 ordered the slaughter of the male children of the 
 Hebrews. Herod the Great, ordered the male 
 children of Bethlehem under two years old to be 
 put to death. Herod Antipas ordered John the 
 Baptist to be beheaded. Neither of these tyrants 
 laid violent hands upon any of these innocent par- 
 ties. They are, however, adjudged guilty both by 
 the laws of God and man, because they were the real 
 authors of the bloody deeds; while the executioners 
 are adjudged innoceut, because they acted under 
 necessity, not truly under such necessity as God 
 or nature imposes on man, still, under a necessity 
 sufficiently imperative to excuse them from the au- 
 thorship of the crimes. Pharaoh and the Herods were 
 responsible and guilty because they acted freely or 
 without necessity. Their servants who did the blood- 
 spilling were innocent, because they acted under 
 necessity. No principle in ethics is better under- 
 stood or more generally acted upon than this, that 
 freedom from necessity is absolutely required to a 
 virtuous or vicious action, to holiness or unholi- 
 ness; on the contrary necessity exempts from all 
 criminality, whatsoever may be the enormity of the 
 deed. But as created holiness or virtue is a neces- 
 sitated holiness, it is therefore incompatible with 
 the fundamental principles of a moral government. 
 4. This will further appear from the fact that a 
 necessitated holiness is a contradiction in terms. 
 Any proposition involving such a combination of 
 terms is self-destructive. 
 
 As we have just seen, moral qualities are predi-
 
 NECESSITATED VIRTUE. 161 
 
 cable of free acts only, but holiness, virtue, etc., 
 are moral acts, and are therefore impossible as qual- 
 ities in necessitated acts or states. We would as 
 well talk of pleasant harm or vicious virtue and un- 
 righteous holiness. The ideas symbolized are mu- 
 tually repugnant and self-destructive. I will close 
 this paragraph with a question from the late Albert 
 Taylor Bledsoe, who was one of the most acute 
 thinkers America has ever produced. In his theo- 
 dicy, p. 193, he says: "As contradictions are im- 
 possible in themselves, so to say that God could 
 perform them would not be to magnify his power, 
 but to expose our own absurdity. When we affirm 
 that Omnipotence cannot cause a thing to be and 
 not to be at the same time, or cannot make two 
 and two equal to five, we do not set limits to it, we 
 simply declare that such things are not the objects 
 of power. A circle cannot be made to possess the 
 qualities of a square, nor a square the qualities of a 
 circle. Infinite power cannot confer the properties 
 of one of these figures upon the other, not because 
 it is less than infinite power, but because it is not 
 within the nature or province, or dominion of power, 
 to perform such things, to embody such inherent 
 and immutable absurdities in an actual existence. . . 
 If God should cause virtue to exist in the breast of 
 a moral agent he would work a contradiction. In 
 other words, the production of virtue by any ex- 
 traneous agency is one of those impossible conceits, 
 one of those inherent absurdities, which lie quite 
 beyond the sphere of light in which the divine 
 Omnipotence moves, and has no existence except
 
 1 62 - ANTHROPOLOGY, 
 
 in the outer darkness of a lawless imagination, or 
 in the dim regions of error, in which the true 
 nature of moral goodness has never been seen." 
 
 Finally, if a necessitated virtue is in the nature 
 of things possible, or if virtue is properly a product 
 of divine Omnipotence, as is the creation of the 
 earth or sun or the human body or the human 
 mind, then we should expect God, whose essence is 
 love, to exclude sin forever from his dominion as 
 the abominable thing that he hates, and to fill all 
 departments of his intelligent creation with virtue 
 and highest happiness. 
 
 Let it be assumed that in all newly created minds, 
 as was Adam's and the angels', the possibility of 
 virtue is of necessity the possibility of vice, or that 
 the rudiments or potentialities of moral character 
 in such minds may, by voluntary action, be devel- 
 oped into either a virtuous or vicious character, 
 and that a moral government is, from its inherent 
 nature, liable to moral evil. Virtue and vice, holi- 
 ness and unholiness, are the alternative possibilities 
 of such a mind. Virtue and vice are predicable 
 only of creatures possessed of intelligence, sensi- 
 bility, and freedom. Without intelligence there 
 could be no apprehension of moral distinctions, no 
 knowledge of right and wrong. Without knowl- 
 edge or thought there could be no sensibility, be- 
 cause sensibility is always conditioned upon percep- 
 tion. But without sensibility there could be no 
 motive to action, because action is always condi- 
 tioned upon motive. Hence without intelligence 
 there could be no motive, no volition, no virtue, no
 
 NECESSITATED VIRTUE. 163 
 
 vice, no moral character, good or bad. But we 
 cannot predicate either virtue or vice of mere intel- 
 ligence. Our knowledge may be valuable or worth- 
 less, but we cannot say it is either virtuous or 
 vicious, holy or unholy. The intelligence is purely 
 passive. It simply receives what the senses and 
 rational intuitions pour into it. What it thus re- 
 ceives is neither its merit or demerit, neither its 
 virtue nor vice. We must not forget to discrimi- 
 nate between the intelligence and the mind or 
 man. The man may be responsible both for the 
 measure and quality of his knowledge. 
 
 But this is only because it is the proper function 
 of the will to direct the attention of the perceptive 
 faculties, so as to enlarge the area of knowledge, 
 and so as to determine the character of the knowl- 
 edge thus acquired. Of this act of attention or of 
 the will, moral qualities may be predicated, as right 
 or wrong, but of the knowledge itself we cannot 
 predicate moral quality, though it may be profitable 
 or unprofitable. To do so is to confound an act and 
 its consequences. The same thing is true of the 
 sensibility. It, too, is passive. It does not origin- 
 ate action, but passively receives impressions made 
 upon it through the intelligence. Whatever in- 
 fluence the feelings exert upon the will is only a 
 transmitted influence that originated outside of the 
 sensibilities themselves. The sensibilities, like the 
 intelligence, in so far as they are not under the con- 
 trol of the voluntary power, are in themselves neither 
 virtuous nor vicious. Every thought produces a 
 corresponding emotion or moves the sensibilities.
 
 1 64 ANTHROPOLOGY 
 
 But our thoughts are involuntary, and the corre- 
 sponding emotions are equally so. Here, again, we 
 must discriminate between the abstract feelings and 
 the will, which is capable of exerting an influence 
 over them as it does over the intelligence in deter- 
 mining their measure and quality. We cannot, 
 therefore, predicate virtuousness or viciousness of 
 sensibilities or feelings only so far as they are vol- 
 untary, or rather, the virtue or the vice connected 
 with the voluntary feelings lies in the will and not 
 in the sensibility itself. Quite otherwise is it in re- 
 gard to the will. Its action is conditioned upon 
 motive, but it does not, like the intelligence and 
 sensibility, act only as acted upon, but originates 
 actions. The occasion of its activity is furnished 
 through the intelligence and sensibility, but as we 
 have seen, the .will is capable of reaction upon these 
 faculties of the mind and cannot therefore be under 
 their dominion, and is not by them or any other 
 means put under the laws of causation. Its acts are 
 not caused but are themselves self-originated and 
 causative. The human mind is in regard to its own 
 acts, like the Divine mind, free. 
 
 If the acts of the Divine mind are under the laws 
 of causation, or are in any way necessitated by a 
 force within or without, then God is not God, but 
 only a link in the chain of causation. If the Divine 
 mind acts necessarily then, of course, the universe 
 is a thing of necessity and nothing could be differ- 
 ent from what it is and all moral distinctions are 
 myths. If the Divine mind acts freely and not from 
 necessity then it was possible for the universe not
 
 NECESSITATED VIRTUE. 165 
 
 to be ; but as it does exist it must be a thing of 
 choice, and a moral world is a possible thing. If 
 the human mind was created in the image of the 
 divine Mind, as we are told it was, then it is cer- 
 tain it is free in its limited sphere, in exactly the 
 same sense in which the Divine mind is free ; for 
 if this is not true then the human mind is wanting 
 in the most essential feature of the Divine image, 
 to-wit, true freedom or the power to originate ac- 
 tion. We have previously seen that a concreated 
 holiness or a necessitated holiness is an impossible 
 thing, a contradiction in terms. The same is true 
 of sin or vice in any of its possible forms. But if 
 a concreated holiness is an impossible thing because 
 it would be antecedent to all voluntary action, and 
 if a necessitated holiness is also impossible because 
 it would destroy the most vital characteristics of a 
 moral agent, then it necessarily follows that if crea- 
 ture holiness exists at all, it must be the product of 
 the creature will. Holiness or virtue is predicable 
 both of the act and the actor, but not in the same 
 sense. A holy act consists in doing or purposing 
 to do the right thing from the right motive. This 
 is the highest possible form of holiness or virtue. 
 But every moral act, whether virtuous or vicious, 
 exerts a reflex influence upon the agent and in this 
 way, by an unbroken series, virtuous acts and habits 
 are formed, and under the operation of the law of 
 habit the agent becomes less and still less liable to 
 vice or sin until the habit of virtue, growing stronger 
 as time rolls on, and temptation after temptation is 
 resisted, is confirmed, that is, becomes so strong that
 
 1 66 ANTHROPOLOG Y. 
 
 no adverse influence to which the moral creature is 
 subject can break it. In this way I suppose the 
 holy angels were confirmed in holiness and rendered 
 indefectible. In this way I suppose Adam' would 
 have developed his native innocence into positive 
 virtue and would have been confirmed in holiness 
 had he chosen the right instead of the wrong. 
 
 If this does not give substantially the genesis, 
 the true and only possible genesis, of creature vir- 
 tue and creature vice, then it must be confessed I 
 have studied the Bible and the philosophy of human 
 character to little purpose. L,et it be distinctly 
 borne in mind that the process or genesis commences 
 not with the intelligence nor with the sensibility, 
 though they are both necessary to volition, but with 
 the will. How many right acts of the will it would 
 require to form an invincible habit of obedience in 
 a newly created mind, free from all bias to wrong, I 
 have no means of knowing. Obedience on the part 
 of such a mind I suppose would be rendered with 
 the greatest ease so long as it might not be assailed 
 by strong temptation. In the absence of tempta- 
 tion I suppose defection would be highly improba- 
 ble if not impossible. But the exclusion of such a 
 mind from temptation would be as inconceivable 
 and absurd as a concreated or necessitated holiness, 
 for if there were no evil srJirits to suggest the temp- 
 tation, as was the case with Eve in Eden, and with 
 Christ in the wilderness, yet the activities of the 
 mind itself would be altogether sufficient to furnish 
 the temptation. Nor would it be possible for the 
 creator to deprive the mind of becoming its own
 
 NECESSITATED VIRTUE. 167 
 
 tempter without depriving it of the attributes of a 
 moral agent. Hence we have no account of any 
 orders of intelligent creatures that have not been 
 subject to temptation. Satan, or the first fallen 
 angel, was self-tempted because there were no evil 
 spirits to tempt him, and we are authorized from 
 this fact to believe that any newly created intelli- 
 gence has innate power of creating sin without any 
 external seductive agency. Eve's defection was 
 facilitated by the suggestion of the serpent in the 
 garden, and Adam's by Eve. Christ's temptation 
 is attributed to the devil. All were tempted, and 
 all doubtless had power to resist the temptation and 
 obey God ; else they were the hopeless and helpless 
 victims of a remorseless despotism. (I hesitate to 
 speculate concerning our Savior's human nature. 
 It is enough to know that with the fallen angels, 
 with Adam and Eve, was the power to obey.) 
 
 Adam was, of course, obedient until he was 
 assaulted with the temptation presented by the 
 serpent, and this was probably the first temptation 
 he ever encountered. But this obedience was so 
 nearly a mere surrender to his natural inclinations 
 as scarcely to require a distinct and sharply defined 
 act of his will, and such obedience would, I suppose, 
 partake more of the character of innocence than of 
 virtue. But with the subtle temptation came the 
 real conflict, when he was by his circumstances 
 forced to a voluntary decision of the fearful ques- 
 tion, whether he would obey God or yield to the 
 tempter. 
 
 Obedience, to be such as the law requires, must
 
 i68 ANTHROPOLOGY. 
 
 be something more than such as results from mere 
 inclination without any conscious and well defined 
 act of the will put forth in deference to the rule of 
 duty. That kind of obedience that results in the 
 confirmation of the agent in a state of indefectible 
 holiness includes the power to resist all temptations 
 that can be presented to the mind, that is, the 
 power of full surrender of the whole man to God 
 and a settled purpose of resistance to evil in every 
 form. This confirmation is ethical, relates to 
 the state of the intelligence, the sensibility, and the 
 will, and not a mere judicial act of the divine 
 Mind. The judicial theory of confirmation, either 
 in sin or holiness, is without authority from the 
 Bible, there being, so far as I know, not a word 
 that authorizes it from Genesis to Revelation. In 
 my judgment, it is also entirely contrary to science 
 and subversive of the fundamental principles of the 
 moral government of God. It is at best a sort of 
 theological crotchet, designed to meet the exigen- 
 cies of an unphilosophical scheme of moral gov- 
 ernment. 
 
 But it is impossible to know how many acts of 
 obedience are required to so form the habit of obe- 
 dience, as to render the newly created agent proof 
 against all temptations, and therefore indefectible. 
 It is very evident, on the contrary, that one single 
 and premeditated act of disobedience is sufficient 
 to confirm such an agent in a state of sin. This 
 results from two facts, one legal, and the other 
 moral. 
 
 i. The nature of the law is such as requires per-
 
 NECESSITATED VIRTUE. 169 
 
 sonal and perpetual obedience, so that the trans- 
 gressor cannot atone for his offense. 
 
 2. By the act of the transgressor his heart is 
 alienated from God, and he is made a servant of 
 sin or a child of sin by his wicked works. Hence 
 he is unable to reconcile himself to its authority. 
 
 From what has been said it must be apparent to 
 all, that intelligence, sensibility, and will are indis- 
 pensable attributes of a moral agent; that all such 
 creatures, and none others, are capable of virtue 
 and vice, and therefore proper subjects of moral 
 government; also that all newly created minds that 
 are capable of virtue are capable of vice, or that 
 the possibility of virtue is the possibility of vice. 
 The power not to sin is the power to sin. The 
 power to sin is the power not to sin. By way of 
 illustration, it may be said that the sensibility is 
 the power alike of pleasure or pain. Hence the 
 possibility of pleasure is the possibility of pain. 
 To give the capacity of one is to give the capacity 
 of the other. To destroy one capacity is to destroy 
 the other capacity.
 
 CHAPTER XI. 
 
 GENERAL CONCLUSIONS. 
 
 It would be supremely absurd, not to say wicked, 
 for any finite mind to pretend to a rational and full 
 comprehension of the ways of God and his provi- 
 dence. When science and religion have thrown 
 their concentrated light upon the dark problem of 
 evil we see only enough to assure us of our own 
 ignorance and utter inability to bring the mighty 
 problem to a satisfactory solution. In fact, when 
 we fix our attention on any form of existence, 
 whether physical or spiritual, and attempt to trace 
 it in all of its relations we soon find ourselves in a 
 maze of darkness which we cannot dissipate, and 
 we feel compelled to be content with a very limited 
 amount of knowledge, even of the simplest and 
 most familiar phenomena. From the Bible and na- 
 ture, however, we may be able to form some gen- 
 eral conclusions that may serve as guides and 
 boundaries to our speculations concerning natural, 
 as well as moral, evils. Among these general con- 
 clusions or judgments I will name the following: 
 
 That the God and author of the physical and 
 moral world exercises absolute sovereignty over all 
 his works. This he does in such a way that the 
 prerogatives of sovereignty never trespass upon the 
 claims of his universal fatherhood. As Governor 
 and Father his justice and parental love never col- 
 lide. In fact justice and benevolence may be re-
 
 GENERAL CONCLUSIONS. 171 
 
 garded as different phases of the divine goodness; 
 for an unjust administrator is necessarily destitute 
 of true benevolence and an unbenevolent adminis- 
 trator cannot be just. If this is true it then fol- 
 lows as a moral impossibility for even divine Sov- 
 ereignty to institute a government over accounta- 
 ble creatures which is not, both in its physical 
 and moral aspect, designed for the highest good of 
 the subjects, or in which the good of the subjects 
 is not made potentially identical with the glory 
 of the governor. In the light of these facts, which 
 no intelligent optimist will call in question, we 
 conclude that all evil in such a government is for- 
 eign to its designs, and if it exists at all must be 
 the result of some abnormal action on the part of 
 the subjects. It is hardly necessary to say that 
 every moral government, from its essential nature, 
 is liable to this abnormal action and hence to moral 
 evil. This abnormal action and consequent moral 
 evil can originate nowhere except in the voluntary 
 action of the subject of the government. This 
 moral evil does not directly or indirectly change 
 anything in the exterior physical world, nor any- 
 thing fundamental in the nature of the sinner. It 
 does, however, subordinate his physical and intel- 
 lectual powers to the purposes of evil and at the 
 same time sadly changes his ethical relations to the 
 exterior world. Hence I think it is true that sin 
 is the only source of moral evil and the subjective 
 source of physical evil. By this last statement I 
 mean that if moral evil had not entered our world the 
 laws of the physical world would have been attended
 
 172 ANl^HROPOLOGY. 
 
 with the same phenomena that now attend them. 
 These would not have been of the nature of evil at 
 all and would not have been so esteemed. Even a 
 natural death or a change of state would have proba- 
 bly been esteemed a good rather than an evil, even 
 as it often is now so esteemed. In the providence 
 of the allwise and benevolent Ruler, in our present 
 sinful state, thousands of events occur which, con- 
 sidered apart from their actual consequences, are 
 felt to be great evils. But if estimated in connec- 
 tion with their consequences prove that they are 
 not great evils but great blessings. I feel quite 
 safe in saying all physical events that occur inde- 
 pendently of human agency are, when considered 
 in their possible consequences, blessings in dis- 
 guise. We in the meantime blindly esteem them 
 great evils. Even individual and national sins are 
 often overruled for good. The wrath of man is of- 
 ten made to praise God, not that there is any pos- 
 sible good in sin in itself or as a means. But God 
 in his goodness makes it an occasion of blessing, in 
 some way, to somebody, thus verifying the truth 
 that where sin abounds grace much more abounds. 
 This fact I think is exemplified in a most wonder- 
 ful manner in relation to Adam's sin. In connec- 
 tion with the above statement I wish to lay down a 
 few general propositions touching this subject. 
 They are not as fully expressed as they might be, 
 but they cover a part at least of this vast field. 
 
 I. Physical death, as a deprivation of animal life 
 and a change of state, is natural to man, and as 
 such is not a supernatural visitation.
 
 GENERAL CONCLUSIONS. 173 
 
 2. All that is deeply distressful in physical dis- 
 ease or death, or the accessories of death, are the 
 results of the violation of natural laws, and may be 
 indirectly or remotely the results of sin somewhere. 
 
 3. That all painful anxiety and apprehensions 
 concerning the future are the result of conscious sin. 
 This is the sting of death; its source is not phys- 
 ical, but moral. 
 
 4. Neither physical death nor physical evil of 
 any kind is in strict propriety of terms moral re- 
 tributive punishment, i. e., punishment in exact 
 accordance both in measure and kind with the 
 committed sins or their punishment, i. e., punish- 
 ment flowing necessarily out of the sins themselves, 
 and as enduring as the mind itself. 
 
 5. All physical evil is providential and strictly 
 administrative in character, and not retributive. It 
 is always temporary, and, when strictly judicial, 
 always arbitrary, on the part of the divine Admin- 
 istrator, i. e., it has no natural connection with the 
 nature of the sins committed. Hence the evil may 
 come in the form of sickness, plague, pestilence, 
 wind, fire, flood, earthquakes, famines, or war. 
 
 By way of illustrating these two kinds of pun- 
 ishment, I may refer you to the Antedeluvians and 
 Sodomites, both judicially and administratively de- 
 stroyed. The judgments were arbitrary and tem- 
 porary, but now they suffer retribution proper. 
 This comes to them through the laws of their 
 mind, and must be as durable as the mind itself. 
 
 This is the worm that dieth not, the unquench- 
 able fire, the vengeance of eternal fire.
 
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