The first thought that astonishes the mind when the Scriptures are consulted on this great question, by one who has taken for granted that they teach endless torture, for any part of the human family, is
THE SILENCE OF GOD.
The Almighty Father of the human family would not fall, at the very beginning of human history, to announce to his children the penalty of sin. To conceal such a doom as that of endless torment from any would be cruel treachery towards those whom he had created, and who would have the right to know all the consequences of disobedience. And yet only limited consequences—temporal punishments—were threatened at the announcement of the law to Adam, or when the penalty of their sin was referred to, in the history of the earliest transgressors. If endless punishment were true, it would be stated as the threatened penalty of the original sin.
ADAM'S PUNISHMENT.
But Adam was neither before nor afterward told that he had incurred or should receive endless wo.
Here is the law, and its penalty:
And the Lord God took the man and put him into the Garden of Eden to dress it and keep it. And the Lord God commanded the man, saying, Of every tree of the garden thou mayest freely cut; but of the tree of knowledge of good and evil, thou shalt not eat of it: for in the day that thou eatest thereof thou shalt surely die. Gen. ii: 15—17.
Adam died as the penalty of his sin. How? This threatened death is not (1.) of the body, for physical dissolution was the natural result of physical organization, and the death threatened was to be
