Notice, for further elucidation of the Apostle’s conception, how he sacrifices the verbal correctness of his antithesis in order to get to the real opposition.  What is the opposite of Sin?  Righteousness.  Why does he not say, then, that ’as Sin hath reigned unto death, even so might Righteousness reign unto life’?  Why?  Because it is not man, or anything in man, that can be the true antagonist of, and victor over, the regnant Sin of humanity; but God Himself comes into the field, and only He is the foe that Sin dreads.  That is to say, the only hope for a sin-tyrannised world is in the out-throb of the love of the great heart of God.  For, notice the weapon with which He fights man’s transgression, if I may vary the figure for a moment.  It is only subordinately punishment, or law, or threatening, or the revelation of the wickedness of the transgression.  All these have their places, but they are secondary places.  The thing that will conquer a world’s wickedness is nothing else but the manifested love of God.  Only the patient shining down of the sun will ever melt the icebergs that float in all our hearts.  And wonderful and blessed it is to think that, in whatsoever aspects man’s sin may have been an interruption and a contradiction of the divine purpose, out of the evil has come a good; that the more obdurate and universal the rebellion, the more has it evoked a deeper and more wondrous tenderness.  The blacker the thundercloud, the brighter glows the rainbow that is flung across it.  So these two front each other, the one settled in her established throne—­

‘Fierce as ten furies, terrible as hell—­’

the other coming on her adventurous errand to conquer the world to herself, and to banish the foul tyranny under which men groan.  ’Sin hath reigned.’  Grace is on her way to her dominion.

II.  Notice the gifts of these two Queens to their subjects.

‘Sin hath reigned in death’ (as the accurate translation has it); ‘Grace reigns unto eternal life.’  The one has established her dominion, and its results are wrought out, her reign is, as it were, a reign in a cemetery; and her subjects are dead.  If you want a modern instance to illustrate an ancient saw, think of Armenia.  There is a reign whose gifts to its subjects are death.  Sin reigns, says Paul, and for proof points to the fact that men die.

Now, I am not going to enter into the question here, and now, whether physical death passes over mankind because of the fact of transgression.  I do not suppose that this is so.  But I ask you to remember that when the Bible says that ’Death passed upon all men, for all have sinned,’ it does not merely mean the physical fact of dissolution, but it means that fact along with the accompaniments of it, and the forerunners of it, in men’s consciences.  ’The sting of death is sin,’ says Paul, in another place.  By which he implies, I presume, that, if it were not for the fact of alienation from God and opposition to His holy will, men might lie down and die as placidly as an animal does, and might strip themselves for it ’as for a bed, that longing they’d been sick for.’  No doubt, there was death in the world long before there were men in it.  No doubt, also, the complex whole phenomenon gets its terror from the fact of men’s sin.