sanctification, our holiness; if we will speak lies, when God's law
for us is that we should speak truth; if we will bear hatred and
ill-will, when God's law for us is, Love as brothers,--you all
sprang from one father, Adam,--you were all redeemed by one brother,
Jesus Christ; if we will try to live as if there was no God, when
God's law for us is, that a man can live like a man only by faith
and trust in God;--then we shall DIE, if we break God's laws
according to which he intended man to live. Thus it was with Adam;
God intended him to obey God, to learn every thing from God. He
chose to disobey God, to try and know something of himself, by
getting the knowledge of good and evil; and so death passed on him.
He became an unnatural man, a BAD man, more or less, and so he
became a dead man; and death came into the world, that time at
least, by sin, by breaking the law by which man was meant to be a
man. As the beasts will die if you give them unnatural food, or in
any way prevent their following the laws which God has made for
them, so man dies, of necessity. All the world cannot help his
dying, because he breaks the laws which God has made for him.

And how does he die? The text tells us, God takes away his breath,
and turns His face from him. In His presence, it is written, is
life. The moment He withdraws his Spirit, the Spirit of life, from
any thing, body or soul, then it dies. It was by SIN came death--by
man's becoming unfit for the Spirit of God.

Therefore the body is dead because of sin, says St. Paul, doomed to
die, carrying about in it the seeds of death from the very moment it
is born. Death has truly passed upon all men!

Most sad; and yet there is hope, and more than hope, there is