When, therefore, it is asked what death it was with which God threatened our first parents if they should transgress the commandment they had received from Him, and should fail to preserve their obedience,--whether it was the death of soul, or of body, or of the whole man, or that which is called second death,--we must answer, It is all.For the first consists of two; the second is the complete death, which consists of all.For, as the whole earth consists of many lands, and the Church universal of many churches, so death universal consists of all deaths.The first consists of two, one of the body, and another of the soul.So that the first death is a death of the whole man, since the soul without God and without the body suffers punishment for a time:
but the second is when the soul, without God but with the body, suffers punishment everlasting.When, therefore, God said to that first man whom he had placed in Paradise, referring to the forbidden fruit," In the day that thou eatest thereof thou shalt surely die,"(1) that threatening included not only the first part of the first death, by which the soul is deprived of God; nor only the subsequent part of the first death, by which the body is deprived of the soul; nor only the whole first death itself, by which the soul is punished in separation from God and from the body;--but it includes whatever of death there is, even to that final death which is called second, and to which none is subsequent.
CHAP.13.--WHAT WAS THE FIRST PUNISHMENT OF THE TRANSGRESSION OF OURFIRST
PARENTS?
For, as soon as our first parents had transgressed the commandment, divine grace forsook them, and they were confounded at their own wickedness; and therefore they took fig-leaves (which were possibly the first that came to hand in their troubled state of mind), and covered their shame; for though their members remained the same, they had shame now where they had none before.They experienced a new motion of their flesh, which had become disobedient to them, in strict retribution of their own disobedience to God.For the soul, revelling in its own liberty, and scorning to serve God, was itself deprived of the command it had formerly maintained over the body.And because it had willfully deserted its superior Lord, it no longer held its own inferior servant; neither could it hold the flesh subject, as it would always have been able to do had it remained itself subject to God.Then began the flesh to lust against the Spirit,(2) in which strife we are born, deriving from the first transgression a seed of death, and bearing in our members, and in our vitiated nature, the contest or even victory of the flesh.
CHAP.14.--IN WHAT STATE MAN WAS MADE BY GOD, AND INTO WHAT ESTATE HEFELL BY THE
CHOICE OF HIS OWN WILL.
For God, the author of natures, not of vices, created man upright; but man, being of his own will corrupted, and justly condemned, begot corrupted and condemned children.For we all were in that one man, since we all were that one man, who fell into sin by the woman who was made from him before the sin.For not yet was the particular form created and distributed to us, in which we as individuals were to live, but already the seminal nature was there from which we were to be propagated;and this being vitiated by sin, and bound by the chain of death, and justly condemned, man could not be born of man in any other state.And thus, from the bad use of free will, there originated the whole train of evil,which, with its concatenation of miseries, convoys the human race from its depraved origin, as from a corrupt root, on to the destruction of the second death, which has no end, those only being excepted who are freed by the grace of God.
CHAP.15.--THAT ADAM IN HIS SIN FORSOOK GOD ERE GOD FORSOOK HIM, ANDTHAT HIS
FALLING AWAY FROMGOD WAS THE FIRSTDEATH OF THE SOUL.
It may perhaps be supposed that because God said, "Ye shall die the death,"(3) and not "deaths," we should understand only that death which occurs when the soul is deserted by God, who is its life; for it was not deserted by God, and so deserted Him, but deserted Him, and so was deserted by Him.For its own will was the originator of its evil, as God was the originator of its motions towards good, both in making it when it was not, and in remaking it when it had fallen and perished.But though we suppose that God meant only this death, and that the words, "In the day ye eat of it ye shall die the death," should be understood as meaning, "In the day ye desert me in disobedience, Iwill desert you in justice," yet assuredly in this death the other deaths also were threatened, which were its inevitable consequence.
For in the first stirring of the disobedient motion which was felt in the flesh of the disobedient soul, and which caused our first parents to cover their shame, one death indeed is experienced, that, namely, which occurs when God forsakes the soul.
