The return to dust is here made a subsequent event, to be preceded by a period of wearing toil. And being finally overcome by the labors and ills of life, the person addressed was to return again to the dust from which he was taken. With Adam, this process commenced on the very day he transgressed, and the penalty threatened, which covered all this work from beginning to end, was executed in full when this process was fully completed in Adam’s death, nine hundred and thirty years thereafter. Two things are connected together in the penalty affixed to Adam’s disobedience. These are the words, day and die: In the _day_ thou eatest, thou shalt _die_. The dying, whatever view we take of it, must include temporal or literal death. But this was not accomplished on that very day. Therefore, to find a death which was inflicted on that literal day, a figurative sense is given to the word die, and it is claimed that a spiritual death was that day wrought upon Adam. But we inquire, If either of these terms, day or die, are to be taken figuratively, why not let the dying be literal, and the day be figurative, especially since the sentence which God pronounced upon Adam, when he came up for trial, shows that literal death, and that only, was intended in the penalty? The use of the word day in such a sense, meaning an indefinite period of time, is of frequent occurrence in the Scriptures. An instance in point occurs in 1 Kings 2:36-46. King Solomon bound Shimei by an oath to remain in Jerusalem, under the sentence that on the day he went out in any direction, he should be slain. After three years, two of his servants ran away to Gath, and he went after them. It was then told Solomon that Shimei had been to Gath and returned. Solomon sent for him, reminded him of the conditions on which his life was suspended, and the oath he had broken, and then commanded the executioner to put him to death. Gath was some twenty-five miles from Jerusalem. That Shimei could go there and get his servants, return, be sent for by Solomon, and be tried and executed, all on the same day, is a supposition by no means probable, even if it is possible. Yet in his death the sentence was fulfilled, that on the day he went out he should be slain. Because on the very day he passed out of the city, the only condition that held back the execution of the sentence was removed, and he was virtually a dead man. So with Adam. He was immediately cut off from the tree of life, his source of physical vitality. So much was executed on that very day. Death was then his inevitable portion, to be accomplished within the limits of that period covered by the word, day. We are very well aware of the method adopted to evade the conclusion which naturally follows from the language of the sentence in Gen. 3:19. This, it is claimed, was spoken only of the body, not of the soul. The poetry of Longfellow,