f round of observation and experience, gives, as we ave seen, the rationale of this fact, and brings it into line with tlie revelation of the gospel. There are two points on which it is necessary to add a few concluding remarks.
(1) St. Paul, following Gn 2" and 3»», states that death came through sin (Ro 5'""). It is tolerably plain that by ' death ' he means physical death, aJthough it has been interpreted of the death of the soul (see Sanday, in luc). And he here seems to come into collision with natural science, which teaches that death must have been known upon the earth long before the human species appeared. For ages before the creation or evolution of man, death in the case of the lower animals must have been a necessary concomitant and condition of life. It is not apparent, however, that this touches St. Paul's argument ; for he is speaking of the death of Tnan. And in the case oi man it may well be that had he remained faithful to the law of his being, as communicated to him by his Creator, death would have had no dominion over him. As has been said already, of the condition of primeval man we have little information j it was so utterly nnlike anything of which we have e.xperience that confident statements would be out of place. But, at all events, the death of a being made in the image of God is a phenomenon of an order entirely diirerent from the death of a beast. Death is the portion of the latter ; it is part of the divine intention for him. Not so, lor man. For him there is a further destiny in store. And his sin, as it involves alienation from God, involves the withdrawal of that higher life which has been the assurance of immortality. We do not assert of Adam the non posse mori, but the posse non mori, as long as his fellowship ^vith God, the source of life, was unbroken. But sin reduced him to the state of a lower animal, and thus man became the prey of death. It may well be that, as has been surmised by many of the profoundest of Christian philosophers, there is some intimate connexion be- tween moral evil and physical decay for a composite being such as Scripture represents man to be. And in the I'all of Adam his whole race were thus involved ; death passed upon them, not indeed as a punishment for something which a remote an- cestor had done, but as the inevitable consequence of the sin of the head of the race. Thev inherit a degraded nature, which is subject to the laws of
Shysical dissolution as is the nature of a beast, iut ' man's^normal condition, according to the OT, is not mortality, with the possibility of attaining immortality by a later gift ; but life in God's fellow- ship, with the possibility of losing it and falling into a condition of an existence which is not life.' It is not by any means clear that it is within the power of natural science to negative this view.
(2) What may prove a more serious ditliculty arises in connexion with the origin of the human race from a single pair, which seems to be jircsup- po.-ied in St. Paul's exposition of the panillelisni between Adam and Christ. True, the unity of the race is not disproved by science ; and it is believed by many on purely scientific grounds to l>e more
Srobable than the hj-pothe.sis that mankind are escended from several pairs. But if the latter doctrine should comiiianil at any time the assent of the scientific world, it would be necessary to * Salmond, Chrittian Doctrine af ImmorUUity, p. 220.
modify in gome degree what has been gaid. Thi.'i article has been written on the a.ssumption that there is nothing contradictory to science in the doctrine of the unity of the human race an descended from common parents. This is cer- tainly the doctrine expounded by St. Paul. But it is a matter which comes \s'ithin the province of science; and should it ever be disproved, it would be necessary to admit that the apostle was n.sing an illustration not scientifically apt in all respects. It must be observed, however, that in essentials nothing would have to be changed. The great truths, that sin began with the beginning oF our race, that its baneful influence has been trans- mitted from generation to generation, that it is a.s widespread as mankind itself, that it cannot be eradicated without a gift of grace, are unallected whether ' Adam ' be taken as the name of a single individual, or as a term descriptive of the fore f.ithers of the human species. The universality of sin is a sufficient indication that human nature has been corrupted at its base, whether by the fall of one or ot several ; and it would still remain true that ' as in Adam all die, so in Christ shall all be made alive.' So much it has been deemed necessary to say, although at present the balance cf evidence seems distinctly to favour the doctrine that mankind are descended from one common stock, and so to confirm the analogy drawn out by St. Paul. See also Adam, Atonement, Justifi- cation, Heredity, Paradise, Sacrifice, Sin.