TJ What is meant by the death of the soul, human thought can not understand ; because we know not what man loses when he loses heaven. The two great elements of the death of the soul are the absence of all that constitutes life and the presence of everything that constitutes despair. There is for ever present to the soul the consciousness of this its twofold misery. The death of the soul does not deprive it of its consciousness — it is ever conscious, ever sensitive, ever active. It is " dead," indeed, as the Apostle states, " in trespasses and sin " — dead to all influences of spiritual joy and peace, dead to all enjoyments of eternal bliss in heaven, dead to all love to God and things holy and Divine. There is no living joy in such a soul, no active love, no calming peace, no animating hope. Like the Dead Sea, nothing pure, good, lovely, healthful, lives in it, moves over it, grows around it ; it is a bleak, bare, stagnant, desolate pool of bitter sorrow, barren of every delight, and breeding only the noxious exhalations of a miasma, which ever wraps the soul as in the winding sheet of eternal death.1
T[ The soul that sins dies, not because God utters a sentence of death and inflicts a positive punishment, but by and from the very nature of sin, and in consequence of the ordinary and necessary processes of a well and wisely-ordered world. The " death " of a man or a nation is not from a Divine fiat, and due to the issue of an irresistible edict ; it is the inevitable outcome of conscious and intelligent acts on the part of men and nations, and is directly and immediately due to their choice of deeds in a world formed for the perpetuity and eternal reproductiveness of goodness and the sure, if slow, decay and disappearance of wrong. God is love, love of righteousness which is man's highest and most enduring welfare, and therefore
1 W. B. Stevens, Sermms, 25,
EZEKIEL xvm. 4, 27 189
No action whether foul or fair,
Is ever done, but it leaves somewhere
A record, written by fingers ghostly,
As a blessing or a curse, and mostly
In the greater weakness or greater strength
Of the acts which follow it, till at length
The wrongs of ages are redressed,
And the justice of God made manifest ! l
4. There is a yet deeper thought about sin. It is not only a disease of human nature ; it is also a transgression of God's eternal law of right. While the conception of a creditor who will have payment to the last farthing is utterly alien from the belief in a God of love, the very idea of God requires a vindication of the law of right. It is this that makes men feel that mere forgiveness of sins, the mere treating sin as if it were not, is an impossible thing. God cannot relax the moral law. He did not create it ; it is eternal as Himself. Eight is right not because God makes it so, but because the moral law is the revelation of God's eternal nature. Every sin, in its degree, separates from God. This is the unvarying note of sin. But separation from God, even a partial separation, or estrangement, has an immediate reflex action upon man. To turn from God is not only to reject His love, it is by that very rejection to degrade human nature. Hence the first act of sin is rightly called a fall, and the expulsion from Eden was the symbol of that change which sin had wrought in man.
Tf A first point in the Christian doctrine of sin is that sin does not arise as part of the necessary order of the universe, but has its origin or spring in personal will, revolting against God and goodness. Apart from special texts, sin is everywhere represented in Scripture as originating in voluntary disobedience on the part of man, as unfaithfulness to better knowledge, as wilful choosing of evil rather than of good — all flesh " corrupting " its way upon the earth. Only on this ground is sin something that God can judge and punish. Sin, as originating in a law-defying egoism, is a principle of God-negation. It cannot cohere with love to God, trust in Him, or enjoyment in His presence. The possibility of a spiritual communion is dissolved. The "love of the world," with its new ruling principles, " the lust of the flesh, and the lust of the eyes, and the vain-glory of life," excludes the " love of the Father." It is easy to see the stamp of egoism which rests on all life in
1 John Clifford, Daily Strength/or Daily Living, 277.
i9o THE DEATH OF THE SOUL
separation from God. Self-centred enjoyment, self-centred culture, self-centred morality, self-centred science, self-centred religion even (Worship of Humanity) — such are among the world's ideals. John Foster remarks somewhere that men are as afraid to let God touch any of their schemes as they are of the touch of fire. It is the old Stoic avrdpxua, self -sufficiency, not without a certain noble- ness where men had nothing else, but sin in its renunciation of de- pendence on God. Existence on such a basis is doomed to futility.1