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1. It is asked whether the soul is immortal or not.

I assert that it is mortal, and deny that there is in any dead man any existence which can be affected by either pain or pleasure. For if the soul goes on living in a dead man, it were better to die than to live. Hence it is a fact that when Cato of Utica had read On the Immortality of the Soul by Plato, he took his own life (46 BC). But God threatens man, not the body.

Soul means life, and is also used in the sense of true or eternal life. So Matthew 10 says that men may be able to take your life in a certain sense, but cannot deprive you of life completely, which God is able to do. He is able to kill the soul which men cannot. For whoever is thrown into Gehenna loses his life eternally, and his punishment is complete and final.

It is to be noted, however, that Christ and his apostles to some extent accommodated themselves to opinons of men popular at the time, as in the parable of the rich man and Lazarus (Luke 16). For that someone should be in hell and tortured, another to be in the bosom of Abraham, etc., are obviously fictitious and similar to those stories which the poets tell about Ixion, Sisyphus and Tantalus.

2. Is there such a thing as "original sin"?

There is none, because Scripture never uses the term "original" of sin in the sense of something from the beginning of mankind. Theologians perspiringly exert themselves to describe what this "original" sin is, and there is not one of them who can teach what such sin is. It is incumbent on those professing this doctrine to demonstrate what original sin is and why people carried it over from the sin of Adam; but they are not able to do so. For in the enumeration of' those things that God

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wished to be punishments of Adam's sin, no mention is made of transmission of original sin. Before he sinned it was said (Genesis 2:17) "by death thou shalt die"; after he sinned it was said (Genesis 3:19) "thou shalt cultivate the soil until thou shalt return to dust",. They say: "The sin of Adam was imparted to all of his posterity". This, however, is denied, because Scripture never asserts it. This, of course is certain, that the descendants of Adam suffer the consequences of Adam's sin. But this does not happen because the sin of Adam is somehow imparted to all of his posterity, but rather that the judgment concerning us is the same if we ourselves sin, for we are born of Adam. Thus, if in war a nobleman is taken captive and from this is made a slave, all his descendants are so regarded. There is a certain difference between ours and Adam's sin in that Adam was created innocent, whereas our parents inherited a nature prone to sin. The Liberty of acting freely is corrupted not from the imputation of Adam's sin, but from the habit of long duration of doing evil. Ecclesiastes 7:29: "God made man upright, but he brought upon himself many difficulties". 243