VI.--But once more, and for the last time, the biologist will reply, 'You are not going to get off so easily. The fact of physical death is inextricably interwoven into the structural growth of the world long before men appeared. But Christianity regards it as a mere consequence of human sin.' This is not the case. Long before science {233} had investigated the early history of life on our globe, Christian teachers both in East and in West--St. Augustine as well as St. Athanasius--had taught that death is the law of physical nature, that it had been in the world before man, and that 'man was by nature mortal,' because, as being animal, he was subject to death. How, then, do they interpret the language of Scripture? In this way: They hold that if man had been true to his spiritual nature, the supernatural life, the life in God, would have blunted the forces of corruption, and lifted him into a higher and immortal state. Certainly, in some sense, death, as we know it, for man, is regarded, especially in the New Testament, as the penalty of sin. But then what do we mean by death? If sin is said to have introduced human death, Christ is constantly said to have abolished it. 'This is the bread that cometh down from heaven, that a man may eat thereof and not die.' 'Whosoever believeth on me shall never die.' 'Christ Jesus abolished death.' Sin, then, we may suppose, only introduced death in some sense such as that in which Christ abolished it. Christ has not abolished the physical transition from this world to the invisible world, but He has robbed it of its terror, its sting, its misery. Apart from sin we may suppose man would not have died; that is, he would never have had that horrible experience which he has called death. There would have been only some transition full of a glorious hope from one state of being to another. We are again in the region of conjecture. All that I am here interested in asserting is that Christianity never has held to the position that human sin first introduced death _into the world_. What it has taught is that _human_ death, as men have known it, with its horror and its misery, has represented not God's intention for man, but the curse of sin. {234}