not that condition have affected his experience, and ought not a discovery of that fact to be the issue of his labours to ascertain his true relation to the universe?  Why does it seem a thing incredible to us that man should be really, actually dead:  dead in such a sense as truly to affect his being, and determine his whole state?  Why have we been using words which affirm him dead in our religious speech, and feel startled at finding them proved true in another sphere of inquiry?

It is indeed true—­it is a thing to be taken as a fundamental truth in reading the Bible—­that in a certain sense man is dead, and is to be made alive; and the analogy which obtains between natural death and what in theological language is called spiritual death, is in several respects so close and accurate that we feel that it is something more than a strong figure when the New Testament says such things as ’You hath he quickened who were dead in trespasses and sins.’  But it tends only to confusion to seek to identify things so thoroughly different as natural and spiritual death.  It is trifling with a man to say to him ‘You are dead!’ and having thus startled him, to go on to explain that you mean spiritually dead.  ‘Oh,’ he will reply, ’I grant you that I may be dead in that sense, and possibly that is the more important sense, but it is not the sense in which words are commonly understood.’  I can see, of course, various points of analogy between ordinary death and spiritual death.  Does ordinary death render a man insensible to the presence of material things?  Then spiritual death renders him heedless of spiritual realities, of the presence of God, of the value of salvation, of the closeness of eternity.  Does natural death appear in utter helplessness and powerlessness?  So does spiritual death render a man incapable of spiritual action and exertion.  Has natural death its essence in the entire separation it makes between dead and living?  So has spiritual death its essence in the separation of the soul from God.  But, after all, these things do but show an analogy between natural death and spiritual:  they do not show that the things are one; they do not show that in the strict unfigurative use of terms man’s spiritual condition is one of death.  They show that man’s spiritual condition is very like death; that is all.  It is so like as quite to justify the assertion in Scripture:  it is not so identical as to justify the introduction of a new philosophical phrase.  It is perfectly true that Christianity is described in Scripture as a means for bringing men from death to life; but it is also described, with equal meaning, as a means for bringing men from darkness to light.  And it is easy to trace the analogy between man’s spiritual condition and the condition of one in darkness—­between man’s redeemed condition and the condition of one in light; but surely it would be childish to announce, as a philosophical discovery, that all men are blind, because they cannot see their true interests and the things that most concern them.  They are not blind in the ordinary sense, though they may be blind in a higher; neither are they dead in the ordinary sense, though they may be in a higher.  And only confusion, and a sense of being misled and trifled with, can follow from the pushing figure into fact and trying to identify the two.