III. This whole discussion of the connection of natural with moral evil sums itself up in the consideration of one special problem, in which the contending views may be said to be brought to a distinct and decisive issue--I mean the relation of sin to death. Is human death--that crowning evil, which carries so many other sorrows in its train--the result of sin. or is it not? Here, again, it is hardly necessary for me to say, there is a direct contradiction between the Biblical and the "modern" view, and it is for us very carefully to inquire whether the Pauline statement, "Through one man sin entered into the world, and death through sin; and so death passed unto all men, for that all have sinned,"1 enters into the essence of the Christian view, or whether, as some seem to think, it is an excrescence which may be stripped off.

Now, so far from regarding this relation of human death to sin as a mere accident of the Christian view, which may be dropped without detriment to its substance, I am disposed to look on it as a truth most fundamental and vital--organically connected with the entire Christian system. Its importance comes out most clearly when we consider it in the light of the Christian doctrine of Redemption. The Bible, as we shall immediately see, knows nothing of an abstract immortality of the soul, as the schools speak of it; nor is its Redemption a Redemption of the soul only, but of the body as well. It is a Redemption of man in his whole complex personality--body and soul together. It was in the body that Christ rose from the dead; in the body that He has ascended to heaven; in the body that He lives and reigns there for evermore. It is His promise that, if He lives, we shall live also;2 and this promise includes a pledge of the resurrection of the body. The truth which underlies this is, that death for man is an effect of sin. It did not lie in the Creator's original design for man that he should die,--that these two component parts of his nature, body and soul, should ever be violently disrupted and severed, as death now severs them. Death is an abnormal fact in the history of the race; and Redemption is, among other things, the undoing of this evil, and the restoration of man to his normal completeness as a personal being.

That man was originally a mortal being neither follows from the fact of death as a law of the animal creation, nor from its present universality. It is, no doubt, an essential part of the modern anti-Christian view, that man is a dying creature, and always has been. This goes with the view that man is simply an evolution from the animal, and falls under the same law of death as the rest of the animal creation. But I have shown some reasons for not admitting the premiss,1 and therefore I cannot assent to the conclusion. There is not a word in the Bible to indicate that in its view death entered the animal world as a consequence of the sin of man. But, with the advent of man upon the scene, there was, as remarked in an earlier part of the Lecture, the introduction of something new. There now appeared at the head of creation a moral and spiritual being--a being made in God's image--a rational and accountable being--a being for the first time capable of moral life, and bearing within him infinite possibilities of progress and happiness; and it does not follow that because mere animals are subject to a law of death, a being of this kind must be. More than this, it is the distinction of man from the animals that he is immortal, and they are not. He bears in his nature the various evidences that he has a destiny stretching out far into the future--into eternity; and many even, who hold that death is not a consequence of sin, do not dispute that his soul is immortal. But here is the difficulty in which such a view is involved. The soul is not the whole of the man. It is a false view of the constitution of human nature to regard the body as a mere appendage to the soul, or to suppose that the human being can be equally complete whether he has his body, or is deprived of it. This is not the Biblical view, nor, I venture to say, is it the view to which the facts of modern psychology and physiology point. If anything is evident, it is that soul and body are made for each other, that the perfect life for man is a corporeal one; that he is not pure spirit, but incorporated spirit. The soul is capable of separation from the body; but in that state it is in an imperfect and mutilated condition. Thus it is always represented in the Bible, and heathen feeling coincides with this view in its representations of the cheerless, sunless, joyless, ghost-like state of Hades. If, then, it is held that man was naturally constituted for immortality, how can it be maintained, with any show of consistency, that he stood originally under a law of death? That the animal should die is natural. But for the rational, moral agent, death is something unnatural--abnormal; the violent rupture, or separation, or tearing apart, so to speak, of two parts of his nature which, in the Creator's design, were never intended to be sundered. There is, therefore, profound truth in the Biblical representation, "In the day that thou eatest thereof thou shalt surely die"--"Dust thou art, and unto dust thou shalt return."1 Some other way of leaving the world, no doubt, there would have been--some Enoch or Elijah-like translation, or gradual transformation of a lower corporeity into a higher, but not death as we know it.2

The true Biblical doctrine of immortality, then, I think, includes the following points:--

1. It rests on the Biblical doctrine of human nature. According to the Bible, and according to fact, man is a compound being--not, like God and the angels, a pure spirit, but an embodied spirit, a being made up of body and of soul. The soul, it is true, is the higher part of human nature, the seat of personality, and of mental, moral, and spiritual life. Yet it is intended and adapted for life in the body, and body and soul together make the man--the complete human being.

2. It was no part of the Creator's design for man in his ideal constitution that body and soul should ever be separated. The immortality man was to enjoy was an immortality in which the body was to have its share. This is the profound truth in the teaching of the Bible when it says that, as respects man, death is the result of sin. Had sin not entered we must suppose that man--the complete man--would have enjoyed immortality; even his body, its energies replenished from vital forces from within, being exempt from decay, or at least not decaying till a new and more spiritual tenement for the soul had been prepared. With the entrance of sin, and departure of holiness from the soul, this condition ceased, and the body sank, as part of general nature, under the law of death.

3. The soul in separation from the body is in a state of imperfection and mutilation. When a human being loses one of his limbs, we regard him as a mutilated being. Were he to lose all his limbs, we would regard him as worse mutilated still. So, when the soul is entirely denuded of its body, though consciousness and memory yet remain, it must still be regarded--and in the Bible is regarded--as subsisting in an imperfect condition, a condition of enfeebled life, diminished powers, restricted capacities of action--a state, in short, of deprivation. The man whose life is hid with Christ in God will no doubt with that life retain the blessedness that belongs to it even in the state of separation from the body--he will "be with Christ, which is far better";1 but it is still true that so long as he remains in that disembodied state, he wants part of himself, and cannot be perfectly blessed, as he will be after his body, in renewed and glorified form, is restored to him.

4. The last point, therefore, in the Biblical doctrine is, that true immortality is through Redemption, and that this Redemption embraces the Resurrection of the body.2 It is a complete Redemption, a Redemption of man in his whole personality, and not simply of a part of man. This is a subject which will be considered afterwards. It is enough for the present to have shown that the Biblical doctrines of man's nature, of the connection of sin and death, of Redemption, and of the true immortality, cohere together and form a unity--are of a piece.