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untold misery on mankind. Now there are many, especially in our day, who do not see the hand
of God in all this, and do not regard these calamities as a part of the penalty of sin. And yet that
is exactly what they are in a general sense. However, it will not be safe to particularize, and to
interpret them as special punishments for some grievous sins committed by those who live in
the stricken areas. Neither will it be wise to ridicule the idea of such a causal connection as
existed in the case of the Cities of the Plain (Sodom and Gomorrah), which were destroyed by
fire from heaven. We should always bear in mind that there is a collective responsibility, and
that there are always sufficient reasons why God should visit cities, districts or nations with dire
calamities. It is rather a wonder that He does not more often visit them in His wrath and in His
sore displeasure. It is always well to bear in mind what Jesus once said to the Jews who brought
to Him the report of a calamity which had befallen certain Galileans, and evidently intimated
that these Galileans must have been very sinful: “Think ye that these Galileans were sinners
above all the Galileans, because they have suffered these things? I tell you, Nay: but except ye
repent, ye shall all in like manner perish. Or those eighteen, upon whom the tower in Siloam
fell, and killed them, think ye that they were offenders above all the men that dwell in
Jerusalem? I tell you you, Nay: but, except ye repent, ye shall all likewise perish.” Luke 13:2-5.
3. PHYSICAL DEATH.
The separation of body and soul is also a part of the penalty of sin. That
the Lord had this in mind also in the threatened penalty is quite evident from the explication of
it in the words, “dust thou art, and unto dust thou shalt return,” Gen. 3:19. It also appears from
the whole argument of Paul in Rom. 5:12-21 and in I Cor. 15:12-23. The position of the Church
has always been that death in the full sense of the word, including physical death, is not only
the consequence but the penalty of sin. The wages of sin is death. Pelagianism denied this
connection, but the North African General Synod of Carthage (418) pronounced an anathema
against any man who says “that Adam, the first man, was created mortal, so that whether he
sinned or not he would have died, not as the wages of sin, but through the necessity of nature.”
Socinians and Rationalists continued the Pelagian error, and in even more recent times it was
reproduced in the systems of those Kantian, Hegelian, or Ritschlian theologians who virtually
make sin a necessary moment in man’s moral and spiritual development. Their views found
support in present day natural science, which regards physical death as a natural phenomenon
of the human organism. Man’s physical constitution is such that he necessarily dies. But this
view does not commend itself in view of the fact that man’s physical organism is renewed every
seven years, and that comparatively few people die in old age and from complete exhaustion.
By far the greater number of them die as the result of sickness and accidents. It is also contrary
to the fact that man does not feel that death is something natural, but fears it as an unnatural
separation of that which belongs together.