Million Book Collection - The Fishers of Men Ministries

THE FIRST AND THE SECOND MAN.79was the deepest, the light of the restoration isbrightest; and where the sentence was most severe,the grace most wonderful. But to deny thefirst Adam would entail the loss of the Second ;and he who declines the inheritance of the fatherstripped and wounded cannot enter into the Bodyof the Word made flesh.But thirdly, as in that terrible corruption ofheathenism, wherein immorality was based onfalse * worship, we saw the body of Adam run outthrough time and space into the most afflicting>rm which evil can assume in the individual andsocial life of man, so in that Body which is ruledby the Divine Headship we see the counterpart,the triumph of grace, individual man taken outof that state of fallen nature, and invested with amembership answering to the dignity of the Head.The one great Christian people, the Kingdom ofChrist, stands over against that kingdom of violence,disorder, impurity, and false worship. Asthere is a unity of the fallen Adam, a force of evilwhich impact only gives, so much more is there aunity of the Second Adam, which is not a collec-tion of individuals, but a Body with its Head. Thefirst unity consists in the reasonable soul, informingthe flesh which was moulded once for all fromthe clay and descended to the whole race ; andthe race so descending was polluted by a commonuilt, on which, as an ever-fertile root, grew thewhole trunk of man's personal sins, of falsehood,