The Conservative Reformation and Its Theology - Saint Mary ...

then must it be in ours. Death is so tenaciously allied to sin that only God
can separate them.
3. Nor is the moral mystery of this fact so deep relatively as it is often
regarded. Death, even eternal death, as the endurance of suffering, is not
essentially so fearful a thing as sin. It would be more in keeping with
divine holiness to permit suffering in the highest degree than to permit sin
in the least degree. Suffering is the removal of a lesser good than that
which sin removes, and the bringing in of a lesser evil than that which sin
brings in. Those, therefore, who admit that the natural consequence of
Adam's sin was, that sin entered the world, and fixed itself there by God's
permission, admit a far greater mystery even than would be involved in the
doctrine that God would allow suffering to enter an unfallen world. It
would not so sorely test our a priori anticipation in regard to God to know
that He allowed suffering in an innocent world, as to know that He allows
a race to lose its moral innocence.
If we had been told that in one of the stars above us the people are
innocent, but that suffering is there; and that in another, sin came in (by
God's permission) to destroy the innocence of its people, the former
statement would not shock our moral sense, or create the same difficulty of
harmonizing the fact with God's spotless holiness and love of what is best
as the latter would. But the case is even stronger, vastly stronger, than this
supposition would imply, for the difficulty that presses us is not that
suffering exists apart from sin, but that God, having allowed sin to enter
the world, allowed the penalty of death to follow that sin.
Furthermore, if it were a doctrine of the Bible that the race is actually
lost forever because of original sin, the mystery of the loss would be a less
mystery than that of the permission of sin. Those who admit the existence
and perpetuation of original sin, admit therefore a mystery greater than the
doctrine of the absolute loss of this sinful race in consequence of original
sin would be. Here, as in all other mysteries of Revelation, Rationalism,
touching with its plausible, but weak hand, the less mystery is compelled
to acknowledge the greater.