out, "O wretched man that I am! who shall deliver me from the body of this (spiritual) death?" This conflict between flesh and spirit-between the lower passions as demoralized by sin and error and the nobler moral sense and reason (vovs)—may be more severe, at crucial moments, in a personality like Paul than in persons of inferior spiritual insight and emotionality. The tremendous struggle depicted in Rom. vii, 14-24, is personally known in full experience only by those gifted natures who have been exceptionally "strengthened with power through the Spirit in the inward man. to apprehend with all the saints what is the breadth and length and height and depth, and to know the love of Christ which passeth knowledge" (Eph. iii, 16-19), but all real saints in Christ Jesus must needs know something of its searching discipline. And thus it is by a power of spiritual insight that one who has been freed from the slavery of "the law of sin and of death" perceives the real nature of that fleshly bondage. Only when one has experienced the saving power of "the Spirit of life in Christ Jesus" (Rom. viii, 2) can he truly apprehend the fearful nature of sin.

The "sin in the flesh," "flesh of sin," "mind of the flesh," and such like terms are, accordingly, with Paul, a special and peculiar designation of the corrupt nature of depraved men, especially the lower passions of selfishness, evil desire, and perverse habits of life. In Eph. ii, 1, 3, he speaks of men in this sinful state as being "dead through trespasses and sins," and "living in the lusts of the flesh, doing the desires of the flesh and of the mind, and being by nature (púo) children of wrath"; that is, subject by reason of their fleshly sinful nature to the wrath of the all-holy and righteous God. In the inmost center of man's self-conscious being two opposite forces are often seen to clash. "The flesh lusteth against the Spirit and the Spirit against the flesh; for these are contrary the one to the other" (Gal. v, 17). The man who gives himself over to the "lusts of the flesh" and to the practice of the "works of the flesh" becomes the "bond servant of sin," and is "brought into captivity under the law of sin which is in his members." Such a deplorable slavery is in its worst aspect a union of all that is high and noble in man with a "body of death."

10. Pauline Rabbinism. The extent of Paul's rabbinical training is evident from his epistles, and from his own testimony as recorded in the Acts. He was "a Hebrew of the Hebrews," "a Pharisee and the son of a Pharisee," trained after the straitest sect, "brought up at the feet of Gamaliel, instructed according to the strict manner of the law of the fathers," and, as he affirms

in Gal. i, 14, "I advanced in the Jews' religion beyond many of mine own age among my countrymen, being more exceedingly zealous for the traditions of my fathers." His rabbinical habits of thought appear in numerous allusions and expositions, as when he builds an argument on the singular of the word "seed" (Gal. iii, 16), puts an allegorical construction on the story of Hagar and Sarah (iv, 22-26), speaks of the rock which "followed" the fathers as related in the Targum of Num. xxi, 16-20 (1 Cor. x, 4), and gives the names of Jannes and Jambres (2 Tim. iii, 8), which appear nowhere in the Scriptures, but are found in one of the Targums at Exod. vii, 11. His doctrine of sin and death as connecting with Adam, in Rom. v, 12-19, has evident logical and historical connection with the beliefs which appear in the apocryphal literature of the later Judaism. But this peculiar feature of Paul's character and teaching is not to be deemed any disparagement, but rather a distinguishing excellency. For this apostle did not follow slavishly in the steps of any human master. He imparted a deeper and more spiritual significance to the current Jewish thought of his time which he found occasion to utilize. If in Rom. v, 12-19, he offers an ideal conception of the solidarity of the race in sin and in redemption, in Rom. vii, 7-24, he sets forth the real psychological origin of sin in every man and the reason of its universality.'

1See Henry St. John Thackeray, The Relation of St. Paul to Contemporary Jewish Thought. London, 1900. Also F. R. Tennant, The Origin and Propagation of Sin. Cambridge, 1902.

CHAPTER IV

THE PENAL CONSEQUENCES OF SIN

1. Physical Death as Penalty. The dreadful results of evildoing are set forth in the Scriptures in a variety of ways. One of the first to be noticed is that which appears in connection with the Edenic story of the first transgression: "In the day thou eatest thereof thou shalt surely die" (Gen. ii, 17; iii, 3). The death here contemplated is generally understood to be the dissolution of the human body and its return to the dust of the earth; and this seems to have been the thought of the author of Gen. iii, as the language of verse 19 clearly implies. This belief has also been strengthened by our familiarity with the solemn sanction of the death-penalty for capital crime, as found in the books of the Law (Gen. ix, 6; Exod. xxi, 12, 15; Lev. xx, 2, 9; Num. xxxv, 16, 21; Deut. xiii, 9; xvii, 6). So far as physical death is thus adjudged as a righteous penalty for criminal deeds, it is of the nature of capital punishment, and finds its justification in the heinous character of the crime and the rights and exigencies of civil government. The safety of the community and of the state requires that the dangerous offender be put out of the way, and a sound jurisprudence may determine the form and measure of penalty to be exacted.

2. Physical Death as Universal Law. But physical death as a fixed and universal fact, and the dissolution of man's body consequent thereupon, are not to be regarded as the penalty of sin. For the law of decay and dissolution, as truly as that of birth and growth, is part and parcel of the divine order stamped upon the nature of all living organisms, both animal and vegetable. Ages before man appeared on earth this law was working in all bodies endowed with life, and there is no sufficient reason to suppose that, if sin had never entered into the world, man would have been any exception to this universal law. Physical death at times takes on many a form of aggravated pain by reason of the sins of the sufferer against his own body, but in and of itself it need not be regarded as an evil or as a necessary result of sin. The annual growths of the harvest, the century-living oaks of the wood, the fish of the sea, the fowl of the air, and the beasts and cattle of the field have each a normal lifetime. Man has his

either by some This universal

"three-score years and ten." But all alike fall untimely stroke or else by slow decay and death. law of death does not appear to rest on any law of sin, and there is no good reason to burden Christian theology with such a needless dogma. What we call physical death may be only the terminal crisis of transition into a higher form of organic being. This is suggested in John xii, 24: "Except a grain of wheat fall into the earth and die, it abideth by itself alone; but if it die, it beareth much fruit." Similarly 1 Cor. xv, 36: "That which thou thyself sowest is not quickened except it die." As new organic form is given to that which is sown, and each new seed has a body of its own, so it would seem that a law of physical death is a natural and necessary factor in the production of a new phase of life.

3. Physical Evils not a Penalty for Sin. It should be observed, furthermore, that physical evils, such as plagues, pestilences, famines, earthquakes, and awful calamities, are no longer to be regarded, as they once were, the penal consequences of man's original sin. They may, however, be viewed, as the Hebrew prophets suggest, as the occasional judgments of God upon wicked men and nations because of their evil-doings. So Jehovah speaks, in Ezek. xiv, 21, of his "four sore judgments upon Jerusalem, the sword, and the famine, and the noisome beasts, and the pestilence." The language of Gen. iii, 17, 18, implies that the growth of thorns and thistles is an evidence that the ground from which they spring is cursed because of man's sin, and, according to Jer. xii, 4, the land mourns, and the herbs of the whole country wither, and the beasts and the birds are consumed, because of the wickedness of them that dwell therein. But all such scriptures are easily explained without the assumption that such evils are in themselves a necessary penal consequence of human sinfulness. God often employs them for penal purposes, and a personal consciousness of guilt may recognize the penal visitation and confess that it was justly deserved. There is also the notable concept of Paul, expressed in Rom. viii, 19-22, that the whole creation is subjected to a bondage of corruption, and of painful groaning and travail. But there is no intimation that this subjection is of a penal character, or that it contains and carries with it any element of guilt. On the other hand, the main doctrine of the book of Job is that a righteous and innocent man may be subjected to appalling calamities and sorrow for other reasons than for personal sin. Also the words of Jesus, in Luke xiii, 1-5, condemned the error of those who supposed that the Galileans, whose blood Pilate mingled with their sacrifices, must needs have been sinners above all the

Galileans because they suffered so horribly. Nor were they to suppose that the eighteen men on whom the tower in Siloam fell were offenders above all others then dwelling in Jerusalem. Still more explicit is the teaching of John ix, 1-3, where, in direct answer to a question that assumed as a matter of course that such a calamity as being born blind must needs be the penalty of some previous sin, our Lord declared that the misfortune of the blind man was not a punishment of his own sin or of that of his parents, but was somehow designed to manifest the works of God. How far and in what ways the sufferings and the evils of the natural world subserve the purposes of infinite Wisdom we do not presume to tell. So many of his ways are past finding out. But it is obvious from the Scriptures that many personal afflictions have their place and reasons in God's purposes of good will to men, and that "our light affliction, which is for the moment, worketh for us more and more exceedingly an eternal weight of glory" (2 Cor. iv, 17; comp. Rom. viii, 18, 28; 1 Pet. i, 6; Heb. xii, 5-13).

4. New Testament Doctrine of Death. The death which in the New Testament is represented as the penalty of sin is the alienation of the soul of man from fellowship with God. It is a disruption and ruin wrought in the spiritual nature of man, and a consequent demoralization of the image of God within him. Thus, according to James i, 15, "lust, when it hath conceived, beareth sin; and the sin, when it is fullgrown, bringeth forth death." Hence it is that "he who converteth a sinner from the error of his way shall save a soul from death" (James v, 20). But such conversion does not save any one from physical death. Paul's teaching is to the same effect. He affirms that "the mind of the flesh is death" (Rom. viii, 6). This poóvnua, mind, is the habitual thought and purpose of a man prostituted to vile passions of the lower nature; it holds him in "enmity against God," so that the sinful passions work through the members of the body and result in spiritual death (Rom. vii, 5). Even the commandment of God which is holy and designed to train our spiritual nature in the ways of life, proves rather a minister of death; and sin, in demonstration of its own destructive nature and exceeding sinfulness, so works according to a law deep-laid in the nature of man as to result in his spiritual death (Rom. vii, 9-14). In this way "the law of sin" becomes also a "law of death." For sin, "reigning in the mortal body" (Rom. vi, 12), employs its members as "weapons of unrighteousness," subjects the whole person to miserable slavery, and pays the allowance (opúvia) of such an abject soldier: "The wages of sin is death" (ver. 23). And