Page:The Last Judgement and Second Coming of the Lord Illustrated.djvu/134

 To suppose that death would not have come into the world, if man had remained in his integrity, is to suppose that the animals would have been immortal, and that vegetation could never have decayed. These things have not offended any law of their creation, and yet they die. Is it supposed that men were to see death seizing upon the thousand objects by which they were surrounded, and yet themselves be free from its approach? If natural death came to man through his transgression, how did it reach the beasts, who have always obeyed the endowments of their nature? Death reigned in the world myriads of years before man came upon the scene of being: this is proved by fossil remains which geological investigations have discovered; and decay and death are unavoidable attendants upon all physical organization.

Although, then, sin could not have been the origin of the separation of the soul from the body, and produced that result which we now call death, yet sin is that perversion of the original design of creation which has rendered this separation a fearful and a painful experience. It was sin, and its consequent ignorance, which gave origin to all those diseases and sufferings by which death is now frequently attended and brought about; it is sin which has induced all those states in which men have been led to fear it, and to regard it as an evil. The separation is not an evil, considered in itself; if it were, then the spirits of just men are not made perfect, because they must be experiencing that separation as an imperfection in their condition. But this cannot be maintained. It is the sufferings which now attend this separation, that render the approach of death so painful, and which cause it to be regarded as an evil. It is the breaking-up of the terrestrial attachments of men which makes them dread it. If they were pure and inno-