Recollecting thus the scope and the connexion of the passage, let us listen to its wording. [Sidenote: Ver. 12.] =On this account,= on account of the aspects of our justification and reconciliation "through our Lord Jesus Christ" which he has just presented, it is[75] =just as through one man sin entered into the world,= the world of man, =and, through sin, death, and so to all men death travelled,= διῆλθε, penetrated, pervaded, =inasmuch as all sinned;= the Race sinning in its Head, the Nature in its representative Bearer. The facts of human life and death shew that sin _did_ thus pervade the race, as to liability, and as to penalty: [Sidenote: Ver. 13.] =For until law came sin was in the world;= it was present all along, in the ages previous to the great Legislation. =But sin is not imputed,= is not put down as debt for penalty, =where law does not exist,= where in no sense is there statute to be obeyed or broken, whether that statute takes articulate expression or not.[76] [Sidenote: Ver. 14.] =But death became king (ἐβασίλευσεν), from Adam down to Moses, even over those who did not sin on the model of the transgression of Adam--who is= (in the present tense of the plan of God) =pattern of the Coming One.= He argues from the fact of death, and from its universality, which implies a universality of liability, of guilt. According to the Scriptures, death is essentially _penal_ in the case of man, who was created not to die but to live. How that purpose would have been fulfilled if "the image of God" had not sinned against Him, we do not know. We need not think that the fulfilment would have violated any natural process; higher processes might have governed the case, in perfect harmony with the surroundings of terrestrial life, till perhaps that life was transfigured, as by a necessary development, into the celestial and immortal. But however, the record _does_ connect, for man, the fact of death with the fact of sin, offence, transgression. And the fact of death is universal, and so has been from the first. And thus it includes generations most remote from the knowledge of a revealed _code_. And it includes individuals most incapable of a conscious act of transgression such as Adam's was; it includes the heathen, and the infant, and the imbecile. Therefore wherever there is human nature, since Adam fell, there is sin, in its form of guilt. And therefore, in some sense which perhaps only the supreme Theologian Himself fully knows, but which we can follow a little way, all men offended in the First Man--so favourably conditioned, so gently tested. The guilt contracted by him is possessed also by them. And thus is he "the pattern of the Coming One."