In the Book of Wisdom II, 23, 24, we read: "God created man
incorruptible . . . but by the envy of the devil, death came
into the world." And St. Paul, Rom. V:12, speaks most
plainly: "through one man sin entered into the world and
through sin death, and thus death has passed into all
men." That death would follow only as a consequence of sin
is evident from the very threat of God to Adam: "In what day
soever thou shalt eat of it, thou shalt die the death" (Gen.
II:17). Even the necessity of wearisome labor for the
maintenance of life is a consequence of our first parents'
Campbell cites parallels to the Genesis episode in the Garden of Eden in Oriental religions, with a view toward showing that there was a factor of concurrent development in the ways primitive cultures sought to explain the presence of death amid life. In the traditional Christian view, however, the ultimate hope for man's fate in such a universe lies in the soul, which will be entitled to salvati
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