Another question presents itself. Can perfection, or that which is perfect, fall? If either man or angels were created pure, perfect, holy, and in the image and likeness of God, how can such a being fall? It seems to me that it would be just as possible for God himself to fall. The very fact of the fall,--if such a fact exists or ever existed,--of either man or angel, is in itself conclusive proof of some moral imperfection or weakness somewhere. That man is morally imperfect is freely conceded. In plain words, he is a sinner. But was he ever otherwise? The farther back we trace him the worse he appears on the general average. All the Bible outside of this one story in Genesis, as well as all history attests this fact. Then may it not be a fact, that while man is a sinner, he always has been so; that he never fell, for he had been nowhere (morally) to fall from but always has been and still is morally imperfect and incomplete, but ever striving onward and upward? But supposing this story of the fall to be true, what was the penalty for it,--physical death, as we have seen, or eternal spiritual death, or both? After all the preaching and writing about eternal death, damnation, hell-fire and brimstone as a result of Adam's sin, I could not find any such doctrine taught in the story of the fall, nor anywhere else in the Old Testament, and but very vaguely, if at all, in the New. The story in Genesis cannot be construed by any reasonable rules of interpretation to mean or involve any other punishment on Adam or his posterity, for his sin, beyond physical death. "Dust thou art and unto dust shalt thou return" is the final climax of the penalty. There is no hint, so far as I can understand it, of immortality or any future life. There is not the remotest hint of it in this story. All the punishments for sin from Adam to Noah, and long afterwards, culminated and ended, so far as Genesis is concerned, in physical death. The Hebrew Hades, Sheol and Gehena, were creations of a much later period.