Is death punishment? If so, when a death is inflicted from which there is to be no release, that punishment is eternal or everlasting. Then the application of this scripture to the view we hold is very apparent. The heathen, to reconcile themselves to what they supposed to be their inevitable fate, used to argue that death was no evil. But when they looked forward into the endless future of which that death deprived them, they were obliged to reverse their former decision and acknowledge that death was an _endless injury_.--_Cicero, Tusc. Disp._ i., 47. Why is the sentence of death in our courts of justice reckoned as the most severe and greatest punishment? It is not because the pain involved is greater; for the scourge, the rack, the pillory, and many kinds of minor punishment, inflict more pain upon the petty offender than decapitation or hanging inflicts upon the murderer. But it is reckoned the greatest because it is the most lasting; and its length is estimated by the life the person would have enjoyed, if it had not been inflicted. It has deprived him of every hour of that life he would have had but for this punishment; and hence the punishment is considered as co-existent with the period of his natural life. Augustine says:-- “The laws do not estimate the punishment of a criminal by the brief period during which he is being put to death, but by their removing him forever from the company of living men.”--_De. civ. Dei, xxi._, 11. The same reasoning applies to the future life as readily as to the present. By the terrible infliction of the second death, the sinner is deprived of all the bright and ceaseless years of everlasting life. The loss of every moment, hour, and year, of this life, is a punishment; and, as the life is eternal, the loss, or the punishment, is eternal also. “There is here no straining of argument to make out a case. The argument is one which man’s judgment has in every age approved as just.” The original sustains the same idea. The word for punishment is _kolasis_; and this is defined, “a curtailing, a pruning.” The idea of cutting off is here prominent. The righteous go into everlasting life, but the wicked, into an everlasting state in which they are curtailed or cut off. Cut off from what? Not from happiness; for that is not the subject of discourse; but from life, as expressly stated in reference to the righteous. “The wages of sin is death; but the gift of God is eternal life through Jesus Christ our Lord.” And since the life given to man through Christ, is eternal life, it follows that the loss of it inflicted as a punishment, is eternal punishment.