The Biblical Conception of Sin 19 idea that until the soul is quickened by Divine grace it is incapable, not of thinking upon the subject of religion, or reading the Word of God, or of praying, or of exercising faith, but of doing anything spiritually good or religiously saving, of securing their legal justification before a Holy God, or of bringing about their spiritual regeneration. When Scrip ture further asserts that the unbeliever shall not see life (John 3:36) , and that the wicked shall go away into everlasting punishment (Matt. 25:46) , it assuredly does not suggest that on entering the other world the unsaved on earth will have another opportunity of accepting salvation (Second Probation), or that extinction of being will be their lot (Annihilation), or that all mankind will eventually attain salvation (Universal- ism). (On these three modern substitutes for the doctrine of future punishment see next section.) Meanwhile it suffices to observe that the words just quoted seem to teach that the penalty of sin continues beyond the grave. Granting that the words of Christ about the worm that never dies and the fire that shall not be quenched are figurative, they unquestion ably signify that the figures stand for some terrible calamity,— on the one hand, loss of happiness, separation from the source of life, exclusion from blessedness, and, on the other, access of misery, suffering, wretchedness, woe, which will be realized by the wicked as the due reward of their impenitent and dis obedient lives, and which no revolving years will relieve. The pendulum of the great clock of eternity, as it swings through the ages, will seem to be ever saying: “He that is unjust, let him be unjust still, and he that is filthy, let him be filthy still; he that is righteous, let him be righteous still, and he that is holy, let him be holy still.”
V. THE REMOVAL OF SIN
Heinous and culpable as sin is, it is not left in Scripture for the contemplation of readers in all the nakedness of its
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