ARE SOULS IMMORTAL?
BY JOHN MILLER
THIRD EDITION.
PRINCETON, NEW JERSEY:
EVANGELICAL REFORM PUBLICATION COMPANY,
1887.
PREFACE
The sole object of this book is to show that the immortality of the soul is not taught in God's holy word. The impulse to conceive of such a book was not given by science, but was bred of texts of Scripture. The author was not studying Materialism; and indeed denies that philosophy can determine whether the soul is or is, not Immortal. That will appear. To illustrate his helplessness in these respects take this sentence, “So man lies down, and rises not: till the heavens be no more, they shall not awake, nor be raised out of their sleep.” (Job 14:12); or this, “In that very day his thoughts perish.” (Psalm 146:5); or Paul's very unobserved passage, “These all, having been attested by faith, received not the promise, God, out of reference to us, having looked to the future for the some-thing better, that they without us should not be made perfect “(Hebrews 11: 39, 40).
The manner of a book, however, needs a preface, as well as the matter. The naked denial of the immortality of the soul, without the gentleness of a careful definition, would needlessly shock people: and to mark upon our gate, “The Soul not Immortal,” when we wish to admit the guest, and lay before his candour something entirely different from what he would at first sight suppose, would be anything but skilful.
There are two questions: Will the soul be immortal? and, Is the soul immortal now? To say “The Soul is not Immortal;” would needlessly jar upon the former. The immortality of the soul is one of our sweetest ideas. All the ecstasies of faith are wrapped “up in the very expression. It has grown hallowed. “And though “The Soul not Immortal “is really the correct title for the belief that it dies between death and judgment, yet we must really not turn faith too suddenly even out of a heathen temple. Our doctrine is, that man dies at death: that the body is mortal, and that the soul is mortal: that the body will live again, and that the soul will live again: that the body will live forever, and that the soul will live forever: and therefore keeping them together, that the whole man will die, sleep, rise, live again, and be immortal.
This doctrine is taught in Scripture, and does not touch a fibre of the tree of grace. It touches fatally the errors of the Papacy. It is this literalness of the soul's not being immortal, to which we ask the attention of the church; and we beg her to perceive, that this is all that we attempt to teach, and that if she considers this a wreck, we have fallen on it over our charts and compass, and not by peering to the land for the decoy lights of a false Materialism.
John Miller.
Princeton, New Jersey, August 6th, 1876.
CONTENTS
PART A
THE SOUL NOT IMMORTAL
CHAPTER 1 The Doctrine Stated
CHAPTER 2 The Doctrine Abhorrent to the Views of Christendom.
CHAPTER 3 The Doctrine Abhorrent to Certain Corrupt Forms of Faith
CHAPTER 4 The Doctrine Abhorrent to Certain Prevalent Superstitions
CHAPTER 5 The Doctrine, if True, Important
CHAPTER 6 The Doctrine, if Untrue, Unimportant
CHAPTER 7 Order of Discussion
PART B
THE IMMORTALITY OF THE SOUL NOT IN REASON
CHAPTER 1 Can Reason be Unmistakable?
CHAPTER 2 Reasons in Favour of the Immortality of the Soul
CHAPTER 3 Reasons against the Immortality of the Soul
CHAPTER 4 A Providence in this Discussion
PART C
THE IMMORTALITY OF THE SOUL NOT IN SCRIPTURE
CHAPTER 1 Can Scripture be Unmistakable?
CHAPTER 2 The Fourteenth Chapter of Job
CHAPTER 3 The Fifteenth Chapter of First Corinthians.
CHAPTER 4 The Two Adverse Passages.
CHAPTER 5 The Spirits in Prison
CHAPTER 6 What might we Expect of Scripture?
CHAPTER 7 The Whole Man, Body
CHAPTER 8 The Whole Man Dead
CHAPTER 9 The Whole Man Buried
CHAPTER 10 The Whole Man Raised from the Dead
CHAPTER 11 The Whole of Man, Soul
CHAPTER 12 Spirit
THE IMMORTALITY OF THE SOUL A RELIC OF PAGANISM
THE SOUL NOT IMMORTAL.
CHAPTER 1
The Doctrine Stated.
He who wishes to propound a doctrine, and has in view any conscientious object, will discover it to be discreet not to define as far as he is able, but only so far as his conscientious object obliges him to do.
It is like ship-building. The packet has to meet the billows. The wily draughtsman will curve its lines as crank as he dare. If he satisfies the great need of carrying the freight, he will make the resistance of the sea the slightest possible.
We have our own theory of the soul, and that theory will incontinently appear as we complete our book. But that theory is not necessary to our purpose. We think it is hinted at in the word of God; but it is not vital. And as we wish the greatest number of adherents, it is obviously discreet to define as little as will barely meet our end.
We may mention for example three hypotheses:
First, the hypothesis of those who think that thought is an attribute of matter. They think that Abraham is nothing but carbon and phosphorus and other elements, and that Abraham's faith will physically follow when these are felicitously combined. We scout anything so rude as this; but still, let us not exclude its advocates. We find in the word of God that the soul dies. These men think so. Let us not haggle at the specific form, since in essential we agree, that Abraham passes from life when his body is struck with dissolution.
Again, there is another school. They would treat matter like the orders of Masonry. They would speak of different endowments. First there are the brute molecules. Then a different endowment makes them grow, and we have the bean stalk; or a different endowment makes them feel, and we have the calf or the elephant. Incident to this feeling is thought, and it is the direct gift of the Most High. Then we have another endowment that is necessary to man. The question whether these endowments are simply matter would be answered by asking, What do you call matter?
It would soon be found that these men think matter itself an endowment; that is, that it moves and acts; that it is forceful, and is all in motion; and therefore that matter is not life, because life is an additional gift of motion; and that life is not thought, because thought is another dose, so to speak, from the same Efficiency; and that, therefore, thought is not life, yet added, and inseparable from it; and life is not matter, the doctrine of this school being, that the first dust of earth is a divine efficiency, and then life another, and then thought another, and then conscience more; all bred of God, and yet dependant back the one upon the other; dust having this supremacy, that it appears to abide, the conscience and the thought and the life following the fortunes of the dust, so that when that is disorganized, its endowments fail, and the bean-growth and the calf-life and Abraham's faith perish and become extinct together. This is another theory. We might subdivide with lesser shades, but we will deal generically.
We will give now another. It is that of the Soul-Sleepers whom Calvin attacked. They had not reached modern notions of the restlessness of matter. Boscovitch had not lived. They were ready to admit substantial spirit. They therefore thought matter one thing, and soul another. I mean in essence. And reasoning just as we do, I mean from Scripture, they argued out a common history; that is, admitting that the soul had essence, and the body also, and that they existed permanently, they affirmed a participated lot, and that the soul sank into unconsciousness the moment it was driven forth from the refuge of the body.
Now we will enforce neither of these theories. We believe the second; with the added proviso, however, of appeal to the unknowable. There is more than can be possibly conceived in both soul and body. When we speak of efficiency therefore, we are merely giving our last idea, and when we say that thought is but an added efficiency, it is rather giving an apology for a truth. We only mean that the mind, as a separate substance, has not a thing to show for itself in the world's analogies.
Behold, therefore, our doctrine. It is not to be encompassed by any one of these theories. We believe that Scripture inclines to one of them; and we may be often tempted to use its language. But if we do, we are earnest to warn our readers that it is illustrative rather than enjoined. The whole doctrine that we plead for is, that the soul dies at death.
If Abraham lie in the grave, Abraham will think and act again no sooner than I. It was so with Christ. These simple inferences will shed light over all our purposes of teaching. When our Saviour died, He was out of being, unconscious, till the day He rose again. There is abundant sense in His descending into hell (hades). Adam is still extinct; and if the judgment should be after millions of years, you and I will wait for it. My brother who dies to-night, sinks into his original nothingness, with nothing to show for it that he be raised again, except his dust that is sleeping in the grave, and his spirit, if you choose to think so, existing in its dreamless essence.
We take in all the consequences. But we consider it honouring our Master to believe that our life is hid with Christ in God; that our souls, if they rest, rest as in John's vision (Revelation 6:9) under the altar of our blessed Redeemer; that we have a life in court; that justice will call up the lost (John 5:29); that the thousands of years that intervene shall be to us as they are to the Lord but as one day (2 Peter 3:8); and “that He which raised up the Lord Jesus shall raise up us also by Jesus and shall present us with you “(2 Corinthians 4:14).
The Doctrine Abhorrent to the Views of Christendom.
THE view of the immortality of the soul in which we have been brought up is, that the soul is independent of the body. I mean by that that it lives with it on earth, but that it will soar away from it when the body arrives at dissolution. This pictures two essences, the one divisible and organized into life; the other one; and this one essence incapable of death, and held back from sleep by the necessities of its being.
Now arrayed about this queen-cell, as though it were the centre of the hive, will be all the faith of nearly all believers. I cannot attack it without injury. It is not a vital doctrine. In fact it is a very incredible doctrine, if we think of it as a new thing as it would first strike us when we heard it for the first time promulgated, that there is a floating spirit that is nested in us like a bird, and which a bullet crushing our brain would set flying at once as we scare an eaglet from his rock! But I may impair half the catechism, suspect the covenant of grace, doubt the atonement, deny the imputation of Adam's sin, and advance a creed that will shake all the doctrines of the Gospel, and it will not meet so sharp a recoil as a denial of existence between death and Judgment.
Now why is this?
There is something startling in the scenic vividness with which these things are offered; as though there had been historic search, and as though men had come back as from Spain or Palestine and reported the things that are to be witnessed. Death, a weird spectre in itself, is made more startling; for we tell men without a moment's hesitation that dear friends whom they have lost will be in their embrace the next moment. We shrink not from sending messages to them. And we let the brother launch out into the dark with as strong a conviction as we can make that he is going among friends, and that a message to Christ Himself would reach Him the next hour, warm from the lips of those who stand round the bed. Of course such scenic certainties are not to be displaced like colder thinking.
And the people's literature! What hope is there that we can bend the current of universal thought? and what comfort can there be, through one lifetime at least, for any school who shall so thwart common speech as that Shakespeare shall have to be emended on every page, or allowed for, at least, in beautiful but obsolete conceits, where he permits himself to travel in the customary path in speaking of immortality?
4. Warning, too, what must become of that? How can we afford to relax anything, and to give up the idea that the sinner will go down quick into hell?
5. It is precisely here that the fifth difficulty will appear most pressing. 'How can you imagine that you are right when the whole world is so continually against you? Almost anything can be thrown in doubt; but when man, with singular harmony, has almost every where adopted this doctrine of the disembodied state, why do you disturb the preaching to the impenitent?'
6. Particularly, as men will say, ' If this doctrine be not true, how can we be sure of anything? If a teaching can lie quiet a thousand years, and then the Bible itself be suddenly found to undo it then what next?' This is indeed our sad circumstance. We find the Bible squarely denying immortality. Almost the whole of our race squarely assert it. Quixote and his wind-mills will in spite of ourselves heave into view nay Hobbes, and his bad scepticism. What are we to do? We have kept these Scriptures long enough for motives of prudence. May we repress them altogether? We think deliberately not. Though the church is in one sense infallible; that is, has never been deserted by the doctrines of the truth, yet in single ones it has; in Christ's time, as to His temporal reign; in Paul's time, as to salvation being for the Jews; in Calvin's time, as to the use of the sword; and in Cranmer's time, as to the right of kings; and though it seems baseless to say so, yet we believe that scores of errors are sleeping unwatched under the cloak of Christendom.
Let each man light his farthing candle. If it be a folly, it will go out. If it be a shame, it will be his. If it be a mischief, it will not be to the Church; for all things will work together for her good. If it have a particle of truth, it will help even the light of the sun. And if it be fetid error, it will help the triumph of truth; for truth, like a horse's hoof upon the pavement, is kept only healthy by being beaten to the earth, and made ceaselessly to put in practice its wonderful defences.
The Doctrine Abhorrent to Certain Corrupt Forms of Faith.
The doctrine that souls live in a disembodied state has been made the vehicle of the chief curses of the Papacy.
This doctrine builds itself upon the fact of immortality. If we were mortal like the body, Purgatory would be a phantom like the spirit. Rome takes the passage, “Went and preached unto the spirits in prison “(1 Peter 3:19), a passage that we shall explain hereafter; or she takes the passage, “For this cause was the gospel preached also to them that are dead” (1 Peter 4:6); or the passage, “Else what shall they do which are baptized for the dead, if the dead rise not”? (1 Corinthians 15:29), and building equally upon the general belief that we are immortal, they erect the great fabric of purgatorial devotion.
2. There comes in logically Prayer to the Saints.
4. Then Masses for the dead:
5. Then direct gifts to pray the departed out of Purgatory:
6. Then Indulgences:
7. Of course Canonization of Saints:
8. And then, lastly, Mariolatry, with all its accursed rites, preferring a sinner to the Almighty.
Of course Papists would abhor our work more poisonously than the tender believer. Protestants are not affected by what we advocate. The doctrines of grace, like the works of a scratched watch, are not entered. But Romanism would be struck with death. Grant the infallibility of the Popes, and the scores of them who have pronounced for Purgatory become testifiers against the system.
The pence that built St. Peter's were for a mistake. Indulgence had a theatre the whole dream of which was a fable. Purgatory aimed at that which was the dust of sepulchres. Mary was sleeping in her grave. And masses for the dead, and intoned prayers, and millions of consecrated gold, were lavished upon that which is as senseless as a clod, or upon saints whose regular watch was about as precious as of the vanes above their resting place.
The Doctrine Abhorrent to Certain Prevalent Superstitions.
Nor would what we are convinced of be less fatal to certain prevalent superstitions.
* We do not doubt that the witch summoned Samuel; and we do not deny that among the endless juggles of necromancy, the devil may have been allowed to work occasional miracle: but if our doctrine be proved, of course ghosts as ghosts must disappear from the imaginations of men.
2. Of course all ghost stories would become child's reading at once.
3. And, thirdly, all Schleiermacherism and Swedenborgian conceit, and spiritual-body dogma which seems to be coming up again with renewed vigour in our day, a doctrine that would give Dives an actual “tongue “(Luke 16:24) the day he was buried, all this would have to be disowned at once; and we must teach the doctrine, not that a finer frame sails off from this at the moment of dissolution, but that all life extinguishes itself in dying, and that the gracious gospel truth is, “that all that are in the graves shall hear his voice, and shall come forth, they that have done good unto the resurrection of life; and they that have done evil, unto the resurrection of damnation “(John 5:28, 29).
The Doctrine, if True, Important.
So that the doctrine, if true, is important.
We wish we could present it as it lies in our mind. We wish we could present it better than it lies in our mind. For the doctrine is of so radical a nature, that so full a book as the Bible ought to determine whether we have a separate soul or not. We wish we could exhaust the evidence, and like some fine judge in the Supreme Court, lay the testimony on both sides so deftly that the case could be determined,
I do not know that the polarity of the magnet raises bread or cooks victuals. I do not know. It may operate in these things: but I cannot see it.
I do not see that the immortality of the soul does much for our Saviour's doctrine. But I do see that its not being immortal corrects a host of errors.
I do not see that my soul's perishing at death obscures redemption, or affects in the least degree inability, the soul's depravity, the saints' perseverance, imputation, expiation, or any of the decrees of grace.
But I do see that if you will “hide me in the grave” (Job 14:13), I sleep over the time, that the Papist has polluted with his myths. And as I see nothing but resurrection in the Bible, I am determined to strike at immortality; and who knows that this seton in the neck of the Church, viz., a disembodied spirit, may not be the thread that has gathered through the ages much of the corruption of the church, and, poor figment as it is, that it may not be the will of the Master that it may finally be pulled away,, with all the foulness that it has gathered through the ages of its history?
2. But not only would Spiritualism and Popery and Swedenborgian conceits perish if the spirit did, but we foresee another triumph, with a miserable Scientism.
The studious are periling the doctrine that man can think without a body. We deny that they can settle it; but they can throw probabilities forward that can beguile many an unstable soul. The scalpel has certainly moved nearer to the facts; and consumption of material cells has actually been seen in every pulse of thinking.
What a strange Providence it would be if men should taunt the Christian and say, Look now at your doctrine of immortality, and as in the instance of Galileo's globe, should rear amazing probabilities against our thinking, if, as in late geologic revelations they could so fortify their analogies as to make it well nigh certain that a man cannot think without a brain, how marvellous, just as the last battering ram boomed, and the enemy were shouting our discomfiture, if the Bible should appear, as in the instance of the Mosaic attack, nestled in another camp, divine Providence having shed fresh light upon the word of truth, and men having arisen who found in the Book itself that priceless proof, I mean unknown agreements with the facts in nature!
The Doctrine, if Untrue, Unimportant.
On the other hand the doctrine, if untrue, could work but little mischief. The most serious evil that could possibly arise from it is that which has been already alluded to in the unsettling of Scripture.
Men would say, How can we be sure of anything doctrinal? But bating this, which I confess should be an occasion of misgiving, the promulger would be as innocent as a child. For let us trace consequences. Where would the belief impugn orthodoxy? Suppose a soul, sinking into death, supposes that it will wake again only for the judgment. Does that affect the Gospel? Suppose the whole world goes to sleep thus universally convinced. Suppose they fare differently, and the whole turns out to be a mistake; where will it affect salvation?
When a soul is garnered in the grave, atonement and pardon, justification and all the forensic doctrines both of grace and penalty, are safe no matter when we rise. The feat of living disembodied could not help any of the promises. The times and the seasons God might safely keep in His own power. And that a soul cannot sleep at death would be as vain a principle of ethics as that a man could not sleep over night for that it would destroy his responsible identity to break the thread of his thought as between night and morning.
We work, therefore, with a less troubled conscience. If we mistake, the gospel is untouched. If we do not, we pull down, as far as men accept our reasoning, shameless conceits, which have grown venerable in age; and which have so dazed the Church; and which have made our Protestant tribe but a slender part of it.
Order of Discussion.
To keep paramount the fact that Scripture suggested all that we are writing, we intended to put Scripture first, and indeed all our book was to be chiefly under this head, “THE IMMORTALITY OF THE SOUL NOT IN SCRIPTURE.” But as a mere mechanical device we changed this for the convenience of the reader. It being altogether unnatural to complete a work like this, and say not one word about the philosophical question, we devised a short space for that: but observing that there it would be that by the necessities of the case we would be driven to the closest definition, we saw the advantage of arranging that first.
Will the reader, therefore, understand our policy? Scripture is our whole appeal. Our resort to reason is chiefly to show that reason never could resolve the difficulty. That will be our very thesis. But in bringing that out we will have to define our being immortal very accurately. To avoid doing that twice, we find it mechanically better to fix an order of discussion that shall place reason first. Let it be under a sort of protest. This is a book entirely bred of texts of Scripture. And that we cannot put them first and all the time, is a grief to us; and is only submitted to, to avoid that hateful thing in any writing, a striking twice unnecessarily upon the same descriptions.
A clear idea, therefore, of all that we mean to teach will be reached best in the outset under the heading, THE IMMORTALITY OF THE SOUL NOT IN REASON. Then will follow the main body of the work, THE IMMORTALITY OF THE SOUL NOT IN SCRIPTURE. And then, to anticipate the retort, How did the world come so universally to believe the opposite, we shall consider as our last head, THE IMMORTALITY OF THE SOUL A RELIC OF PAGANISM.
CHAPTER 2
Can Reason be Unmistakable?
I say, analogies; for if the dog lives, then the chalk cliff lives, and there has been a survival from the whole coast of England. If the dog lives, then the coral lives, or at least the coral worm; and whole continents must account for their immortal builders. If the dog lives, then lime mountains and whole Saharas of calcareous plain, and ribs of provinces that have dropped some day shell by shell under pressure of the sea, are the charnel houses of existing spirits. And the grasshoppers with their drumming hordes, the horsemen of the prophet, outweighing in tremendous mass the mammals of half a province, and preying on each other as plant devours plant, are nevertheless, all distinguishably in life, and continuously kept; for the analogy that would spare the dog, would crowd us with immortals in a way that would make the Hindoo doctrine of Transmigration a delightful relief from the nightmare of an impossible arithmetic.
4. But deny the dog, and where is your analogy for the man?
Now we drop at once to the right level when we say, that the immortality of man must depend solely upon Scripture.
The salt effloresces, and melts. The bean grows, and withers into dust. The dog dies, and that is all of him. Now if a man survives, it must be by a special gift; for it is surely out of analogy with the whole creation.
Let us show what the Bible will have to do, by proceeding in order:
Add to this that the scalpel of the student increases this analogy; and the torch of the chemist, in fact the search of the metaphysician. The leaning of modern thought advances sensation. The body is asserting a wider scope. And when we find that its tissues actually exhaust themselves in thought, and that its brain-substance and nerves actually telegraph thought we cannot tell how, but with appreciable physical results, the analogy between the dog and the man is actually growing greater all the time, so long as we confine ourselves to facts other than those which we gather from the pages of the Bible.
4. Besides, analogy is the whole of argument. Why is this not more insisted on? Butler's Analogy is in fact Butler's attempt at every possible reasoning. There is an immediate consciousness; but this is no field for reasoning whatever. Accepting immediate consciousness, all that we build upon it is its analogies; and as few people will be so hardy as to say that we are conscious of immortality, we will ignore those who do,* and then the analogy as to the soul is the one determinate test of all that we are to believe.
5. But Scripture! What are we to do with Scripture? Let us recapitulate. 1. We have shown that the analogy is against our being immortal. 2. We have shown that that analogy is very strong. 3. We have shown that it is growing stronger under modern light. 4. And we have shown that analogy is our only expedient of reasoning. We would seem therefore to have settled the whole question at a blow.
* We have no choice. It is impossible to reason about consciousness. If a man says, I am conscious I am immortal, what can we say? We can only remind him that he is declaring that he is conscious today of his existence to-morrow!
But then, fortunately for man, there are higher analogies. We have higher consciousnesses. And on those consciousnesses are built higher foundations of reasoning. There are analogies of testimony; and when those analogies carry me to the receipt of the Bible, I weigh it with other analogies still, namely, with my conscious moral light, and with my chief experimental impressions. The scalpel may deceive me. So may the Bible. They are both by analogy. But my poor reason is so much more helped in the region of revelation; that is, to express it critically, so much more able to use the stepping-stones of my more certain forms of consciousness, that my whole appeal is to the Bible. I think it in the very highest degree unlikely that the soul is immortal: but show me that it is, out of the Bible, and the unlikelihood are all the other way. Let me be thoroughly understood here. All the analogies of earth are in favour of my being mortal.
This we shall attempt to prove. Analogy, moreover, must decide the fact. Analogy, however, is not infallible. And as there are higher analogies for man which furnish the base for a revelation, these are- the ones that must end the appeal. We will bring out the others; but it will be like race-horses which we expect to be out-stripped. It is only the fact that the Bible has taught me that I am mortal, that emboldens me to premise the proof, that reason is of the same idea.
CHAPTER 3
Reasons in Favor of the Immortality of the Soul.
To give reasons against immortality in their clearest shape, it will be wise to exhibit first those that appear to be in its favour.
To do this, it will take too much time to exhibit all the forms of immortality, and to fit the proof to the specific nature of the doctrine as each man may choose to hold it.
Some are supernaturalists. They hold that the body now-a-days is necessary to thought, but that when we die, the soul is supernaturally lifted and set off upon an independent being.
Some are naturalists, and believe with the great herd that the body and soul are distinct existences.
Some are materialists, and get their immortality like the arrangement of a Chinese box, one body inside of another. And some are transmigrationists.
It is not necessary that we should go over all the list.
Some arguments suit one form better than another. But it will suffice if we exhibit all in gross. The doctrine is, that consciousness survives death. Before we oppose it, it will become us to make the very fairest exhibition of the arguments that have been thought to make it good.
1. And in the first place it has been said that thought is so different from extension or, to talk more comprehensively, that color and shape and motion and all the more usual attributes of body are so different from consciousness, that we cannot conceive of one of them as the attribute of the same substance as the other. This, in fact, is the old triumphant demonstration. Matter has gross particles and brute traits; mind has the attribute of intelligence. The perishing of one, therefore, is nothing, satisfactory at least, as to any decay of the other; nay, Butler would hold, leaves room under the light of analogy for a higher spiritual being.
Now what is this reasoning exactly?
If it be, that thought is different from motion, and that therefore the thinking thing and the moving thing must be different substances, that proves too much, for color and sound are different, and yet the one harp breeds both of them.
If it means that they are so different, and in fact so very and essentially different, that will not answer; for so are other attributes. Light, for example, is entirely different from hardness; and so are polarity and attractive force. What is the exact gist of the argumentation? It will not do to say, Where attributes differ substances differ; for attraction through millions of miles, and extension through an inch or through a yard, are unimaginable as to their accord; and yet who would deny them as attributes of the same materiality?
II. Let us, therefore, change that argument a little. It is not that they are stark different traits, but that we cannot produce both by laying molecules together. We grant that color is different from force, but we can arrange for both of them. All the subtler attributes of body, and even those that impress sense, as for example light and fragrance, we can produce by laying molecules together; but we cannot produce thought. We cannot conceive of thought as born in a solution, or produced out of a mass, however subtle the ingredients that we dispose together.
Now what is the exact logic?
Conceiving things we throw out of the scale at once. We do not suppose it was intended. We cannot conceive of gravity. We cannot conceive of smell. We do not suppose that any one will shut out as an attribute of matter anything because of what we can or what we cannot conceive.
Unless the want of conception is at such an extreme that the language employed is positively without idea. In that case of course faith in anything would be, in terms, perfectly absurd.
On the other hand, our antagonist would not care for the debate if he caught sight of it as a mere question of language. The Nottoway, when it joins the Meherrin River, drops the name of Nottoway, and is called the Chowan. Who would not resent it with disgust if he were entangled a whole day in a debate whether the Meherrin poured its waters into Albemarle Sound? This is a very important remark. If, as it is reasonable to think, matter is called matter in its earlier and grosser exhibitions, to say that matter does not think is simply to say that thought is not a phenomenon that conferred its name. Give it other efficiencies, or let it take in other effluents as the Chowan does, and then it becomes soul, the only question being whether this is an impossible condition of the case; and now the argument that would assert that it is, is nakedly this, that we can put together molecules and produce color, and that we can put together molecules and produce sound and smell, and so of all those things that we are accustomed to call material attributes, but we cannot put together molecules and produce thought. This is the fairest statement for our adversary that we can possibly achieve.
And it amounts to nothing.
The argument sternly given is that something cannot produce thought. We should be fools if we did not insist that the argument should be positive.
But now something cannot produce life. We are insane or else that answer is articulately complete.
I put molecules into a glass vase, and cannot arrange them into intelligence. But I put molecules into a glass vase, and cannot arrange them into a bean-stalk. The man who says that the bean-stalk is not simply matter is making a vegetable spirit. The man who says that a man is not simply matter is making a human spirit; and thereby he is either changing a name like the Meherrin river, or he is building upon Scripture. This argument from what we can make is no better for the soul of man than for Igdrasil or a spectre of the cedars.
Remember, we are dealing with but a single argument. There are a whole list yet. We are simply saying that thought as the prerogative of men is no more demonstrative of a separate essence, than the cunning of a bean, of some separate sprite that floats away when it withers upon the ground.
Our opponent demonstrates, and with apparent aspect of being exact, that spirit cannot perish with the body, because spirit is conscious of being one, whereas body is seen to be atomic, and its separate parts can die by being separated from each other.
We might contest the premise. We might utterly deny that the soul was conscious of being one. We might say that consciousness to-day is separate from my consciousness yesterday. We might show that their weaving into one was a beautiful provision of the Creator; and peremptorily challenge the farfetched statement that the soul is imperishable because it is one, and that the fact that it is one is boldly deducible from unitary consciousness.
Let all that pass however.
The argument is, that the soul is imperishable because it is indissoluble; and that it is indissoluble because it is one; and that it is seen to be one by the fact of a single consciousness.
But now I ask, Has not a worm a single consciousness? What shall we venture to say about it? When we prick it, has it as many pains as it has rings in its length? or does it wince under a unitary consciousness much as we do? But I cut it in two, and each part lives! Now how is this? I leave it in the sand, and to-morrow there are two perfect worms. How about the argument for an immortal spirit? Nay, going to higher life: I take a zebra, or an ox; and by the prick of a spear do I inflict one consciousness or two? and if I effect but one consciousness, then has he not one soul, and when his atoms separate, does not some unity float away, from this imperishable fact of his being but one existence?
IV. Fourthly, the soul is independent.
We treat each reason in the list with absolute precision.
Abraham, it is said, was born an infant. Twenty years afterward he had twenty times as much weight, and his body had not a single particle of the substance that it possessed at the beginning. Then he lost an arm, let us suppose. His mind, which has been conscious from the first, is absolutely identical under all this history. Let us suppose him to be dying. The change may mount up, and may reach even to his forehead, and yet he is talking calmly to his friends, and his mind imperturbably waits for the falling to pieces of a tabernacle.
The argument then is this: Mind demonstrates itself to be different, because it continues the same when every atom has been changed that was in the body; when part of the body has been cut off by the knife; and when the mists of death are gathering upon its more sensuous vision.
But honestly, is not the argument, made strictly emphatic, most positively the other way? The growth from infancy to age, is not that in the bean and in the conscious ox? and is not the life of the bean and the consciousness of the ox kept unitary under this entire change? If I cut off a limb does not analogy explain everything that happens? Is it not known that we have vital parts? Suppose we cut off the head! We are unwilling that arguments should be used that would prejudice a cause in court; and never have understood why men admit such reasoning in their gravest interests. If I hammer my head, does my thought go right on as before? and if I cut off my leg, is not that known in its very nature as to the result, and never expected, from its analogy with brutes, to interfere with my more conscious living?
I die: and what happens? Why exactly that dying of thought which if the brain could be revealed would lie patent under the eye of the physician. Why will men venture such reasoning? I sit up and talk to my friends; but does not my body sit up? and is not my brain at work just in proportion to my consciousness? I confess that thought is driven to its citadel; but if my limbs are all cold, and a feathery pulse scarce lingers below my forehead, what of that? Is it not rigidly the case that thought is no more strong in me than my brain, and that there is a rallying there just in proportion to my remaining vision?
We complain of such things. The facts are obviously on our side. And yet Bishop Butler himself argues, that because a man is sensible just up to the margin of the sepulchre, he is, beyond it; when Butler himself would admit that there is a stir in his brain precisely in proportion to the amount that remains of thinking.
Why not give up this argument avowedly and at once? The soul is not independent of the body. On the contrary, whatever else may be said, its dependence is complete. A blow renders it insensible. Infancy exhibits it as feeble. Age makes it that way again. Sickness deadens it. Death fades it, up to the very portals of dissolution. And what makes this Butlerian argument singularly insincere is, that all these circumstances are known to enfeeble the brain-action just in proportion to the decay of consciousness.
The argument means that what the soul longs for it must have. And the basis of this persuasion is not that we are conscious that such must be the fact, but that, reasoning from analogy, such must be the arrangement of the Most High. But then unfortunately this does not seem to be the case. Lost men desire happiness.
And if it be said, We are speaking of a normal condition: man in his natural state has that which he is born to long after, we discover a difficulty here. Man in his innocent state may have that which he is born to desire, but surely we are not to infer how lone and how much. It would seem unlikely that there should be no air for a bird; but it does not follow because a bird desires endlessly to live, that therefore it is to be gratified. The bug desires endlessly to destroy my vines. Now it seems natural that it should get some vines to destroy; but that it should be pleased endlessly has no warrant of analogous fact.
VI. The argument grows stronger if it moves on to the sixth place, and builds itself upon an expectation founded on considerations of justice. Here indeed have been the strongest argumentations.
Nor will we pause to weaken them by still interjecting the brute.
The brute has conscience. “The brute has some appearance at least of a moral part. Is there to be no retribution for the brute? Why should the bad brute steal away to death? And why should the good brute have nothing different? Why should the deformed brute do naught but suffer? And why should the drunkard's brute be beaten and tortured into dissolution? We have our theory of these things; and it reconciles their total disappearance from life. And it does not impair justice. The argument from justice we consider quite unanswerable. Let us define what it is.
B. F. has gone to his grave with a physique so perfect that he has had a perpetual holiday. There are no bands in his death, but his strength is firm.
He is not in trouble as other men, neither is he plagued like other men. Therefore pride compasses him about as a chain; violence covers him as a garment. His eyes stand out with fatness; he has more than heart can wish. Now this man dies, and is buried; and there is another man who is just the opposite. All day long has he been plagued, and chastened every moment. Suppose this latter to be scrupulously honest; nay tenderly benevolent, and scrupulously kind and upright, and pestered with the regret of not having done his full duty to men Now the argument is this; that this good man with the black and mephitic temperament, and this bad man, all joyous and full of life, if they die so, must have an immortality: else there is no justice on the part of our Creator.
The argument is a sound one.
But now look at the folly. It undertakes to show that to be immortal we must survive the sepulchre. That is; a glorious judgment is not enough, and a resurrection at the last day. It is not enough that there should be an absolute account, and that B. F. shall confront it in the day of God. It is not enough that there should be an absolute forensic quest, and, after that, an eternal retribution; but justice must be satisfied in their exact thought, viz., a continuance of our being when we close our history.
I say, Here is no particle of proof. Justice is justice. Justice may be done at last, just as well as in the beginning. Justice has waited long periods of years. And though justice is a capital proof that the soul will be immortal, it is no proof that it is immortal now; or that it must begin its recompenses as a floating spirit.
I ask, Where is the justice of punishing me after the unconscious sleep of yester night? One day is with the Lord as a thousand years; and an utter unconsciousness is as bad in foro judicice as a break in being. Where is the virtue of my brute particles that they should keep me responsible over night, and deliver me with required identity to the judgment of the morning? These are puerile difficulties. Moreover there are much heavier ones. If lapse of time make against justice, what of the infant of today responsible for the sin in Eden? If the Creationist account is to be respected, that each infant soul is newly brought into being, where is the justice of that soul being guilty for federated guilt, and I not for my own, because dead for some thousands of years?
I live by the Almighty. If He relaxes when I come to my burial, and “takes to Himself His spirit and His breath” (Job 34:14, 15), what difference does it make, if He breathes on again at the sound of the Trumpet, and wakes the same life after buried years?
VIII. But, says the opponent, it will lessen the terror of death. On the contrary! A lady, walking in her house, is struck by a part of a cornice, and is carried stunned to her bed. She was just giving an order to a servant to bring her some sugar. Her skull is dented in upon her brain, and she lies unconscious for two weeks. At the end of that time the difficulty is discovered, and she is suddenly restored to life. The sight of the girl seems to continue her unbroken consciousness, and she repeats her order, “Mary, bring me the sugar!”
Now this settles the preaching difficulty. Once let it become sure, that the soul does not survive the body; and let it become familiarly the belief that the whole man reappears at judgment, and the interval between will give no difficulty. Between death and judgment there is positively no consciousness. The stride may be a millennium of centuries: to me it will be nothing. What use for a disembodied state, if I lie down to-night upon my bed, and in an instant, seemingly, ascend to judgment?
IX. But it may be urged, atheists will take heart. Say what we will of a resurrection at last, infidels will have their foot upon us. Once dismiss sinners wholly out of life, and men will take the risk of being brought into it again.
And this really, it will be urged, is the dangerous aspect of the innovation. When reason wrote over a necropolis, “Death is an eternal sleep,” she used essentially the same arguments that we have set up. And men will shudder. They will say, Is there to be no rest? If immortality is unseated, then Scripture! Then Jesus! Nay, a resurrection at all! What may not be unsettled? And if a man entirely dies, and his existence is ashes of the tomb, then sceptics who have carried their notions thus far, will easily trample the last remaining legend.
Now I grant all this: and I shiver myself lest perchance I am doing mischief. But the like was menaced when Galileo upset the universe. Is it not true that the actual ought to conquer? If it be so, that immortality is a dream of Pagans, and that it is the revelation of the word of God that we die and are raised again, is not the offence the fault of the original heretic? I confess that scandal is created. And if any one asks eagerly, What uprooting will be next? I am unable to answer. But if it be a just uprooting, who dares say, It is a mistake? Heavenly truth is not to be kept in countenance by mouldy error. And if it is a false uprooting, men deserve it. In every age truth has suffered when hoary errors have come thundering to the ground. But who will say, Keep the errors that we may save the truth? Count over the follies of the past; the right to persecute; the divinity that hedges the throne of kings; the astronomic blunders of the church; or the geologic errors with which this century began; and who will say, Better keep all these than disturb religion? or who would hesitate himself to overthrow such things as these, even though he knew it would be followed by disorder in more genuine believing?
These are the arguments therefore, that are to be given for the immortality of the soul. There is no charm in them. There is no ghostly privilege that is to hem them about as though they were a particle more venerable than the mind concedes. They are to be tried as one lawyer tries another when he appears in court. And as they are in a very heavy case, they are to be better arguments than the most (a thing which seems to be forgotten), and are to have just that attribute of precision and force of which all these seem to be strangely destitute.
CHAPTER 4
Reasons Against the Immortality of the Soul.
Now the most determined advocates of our being immortal do not pretend to say that we are not dependent upon the Most High. There may be infidel naturalists that may make us eternal; or Spinozists that may trace us back to the everlasting; but square religionists there are none who do not say that we live in the Almighty (Acts 17:28); and who do not hold that, along with an immortal hope, we must have a concurring Power, else we would vanish any moment under entire annihilation. Then we are not properly immortal in any manner. Then it is a question of Will. The most pious maintainer of the immortality of the soul will confess that we are not immortal in ourselves, but that it is a mere inquiry as to the will of the Almighty.
It is true there is an immortality second to the very highest, and the idea may be urged that this is all that is necessary in the instance of our race. There is an imperishableness of matter, for example. It is not absolute, and it does not exempt matter from being dependent on the Most High. It does not forbid the thought that if He were to withdraw his hand it would be annihilated. And yet practically it does not forbid the thought that it is imperishable. There is the same sum of matter now, say the learned, that there was in the beginning, and by the conservation of forces all will continue to exist through the myriad of years.
It may or may not be the case; but grant it; whether it may or not, it only may by the will of the Almighty.
And turn the question as we may, we come back at last to Scripture. If we resort to reason, it is as to the analogy of God's will, If we continue to think after death, it must be because God wills it. And if He wills it, it must be for some final cause. Now I can see the final cause for matter. Derange it, and you derange the cosmos. Diminish its volume, and you leave me nothing on which I can rely. But I can see no such cause as to mind. Continue that, and you bewilder me with difficulty. The snail and the stork and the elephant must all keep continuously on, and in the increment of life must submerge rather than uphold the cosmos.
The sole question however is, as to the will of the Almighty.
II. And our second argument shall be as to the analogy of that will.
Rehearsing what we have long ago declared, life when it goes out of the animal and the plant, goes out altogether. There is no soul of the cabbage or of the oak. If there be a soul of the lion, men ought to be willing to declare it. But. if it be the prevalent opinion of believers that souls are the appanage of man, then the analogy of brutes should be confessed, and it should be admitted as a region of difficulty in respect to the whole opinion.
Men should deal fairly too in respect to our own analogies. The whole courses of our lives proclaim our dependence on the body. We are weak in infancy. Our thoughts are feeble and small when our bodies are. All through life we have just as much thought as we have action in our brain. If a blow stun us, we sleep. If sickness steal our faculty, it slackens and grows dim. If age deaden, we are imbruted that much. Death puts a crown to the analogy. And unless thought actually flashes up by some bold manoeuvre of the blood by which it rallies in its citadel, it is diminished as life is; and makes a sort of chicane of helplessness, if it springs into strength at the acme of most apparent impotence.
Analogy, therefore, most distinctly teaches that it is the will of our Maker that our mind should perish with the body.
But mark a difficulty. What might seem to be an overwhelming triumph is lessened, we are willing to admit, by a peculiar appeal. Analogy it might be frankly confessed would be almost perfect; but then how much remains of it when we have admitted one grand and wonderful exception? Plants die, and brutes die, and so we might seem to leap to the conclusion man dies. But then it seems that in every important way man does not die. What is there worth in the analogy if it is admitted that man is an exception after all? It is proclaimed that justly we must live again. It is confessed that we shall live immortal after a final day. What is left of the analogy, therefore? In other words, if man is a great exception to the brutes, why plead the instance of the brutes as any check to his being an entire immortal?
Now this would do grandly if there were any proof that he was, drawn from God's holy word. The fact of a resurrection would shed a great light on man that would justify a faith in any cognate wonder. But surely it could not originate it. The failure of an analogy in one respect would be a queer proof of origine that it must fail in another. The doctrine that man must rise might be an argument that brutes must rise, or that plants might live again in the garden of the blest; but we do protest against an analogy that would declare that because man must rise by miracle under the archangel's trump that therefore he must never have gone into the grave, or that his spirit at least has lived immortal.
III. Therefore we advance boldly to a third point. While we admit that man is a great exception, and that his being raised to immortality at the last puts a great gulf of dissimilarity between him and the brute creation; while his grafting into Christ and his entitlement as to the Holy Ghost makes it almost profane to think of him as dying like the ox and ass, yet in the rush of such grand conceptions, it is not necessary that there should follow all manner of possible conceits. It is quietly said that we shall rise again. Unless it is also said that there shall be nothing to rise but the dust of the sepulchre, it spoils things to mix the exaltation at the last with the imagined idea that we are to be continuously immortal.
But it will be said, anything else makes necessary a miracle.
Let us notice where we stand.
Our third argument is that the mortality of the soul makes the simplest eschatology.
We have admitted that resurrection makes a vast exception for our race, but we have argued that that does not involve an original immortality. We are now reaching the argument that it is most natural it should not, but that the simplest eschatology would follow unconsciousness at death.
But says the present difficulty, then there must be miracle. Now no believer in the Bible disowns miracle; but the real gist of the challenge is that it must be constant miracle. The whole dependence of a man for life must be that he shall be raised up in the end totally, body and soul, as when originally created. If a man can live along; if he can have some identity of existence and continuousness of life; if nature can be pleaded as originally designing him and unchangeably continuing him in conscious being, then he reappears more naturally. But to lay the total weight of our immortality upon a supernatural re-creation at the last, shocks belief; and is out of the province of miracle; for miracle does no such permanent feats, but is only invoked for rare interferences in nature.
Now two things have gotten mixed. The warning is (1) that the whole thing is too incredible, or else the warning is (2) that there can be no permanent miracle.
Consider both.
(1) Ideas have moved around till we who teach a mortality like brutes are considered fatally credulous because we teach a total resurrection. That seems strange. We might challenge the reasoning that is built simply on the incredible.
But let that pass.
We simply sketch the circumstances.
One theory is that there is a total resurrection at the last. We hold that a great miracle. The other theory is that there is a partial resurrection at the last. Is that much less? But then in addition to this the arguer for the soul's immortality preaches another wonder. He believes in disembodied existence. That is, I believe that I die just as I am born, totally and like a brute (Ecclesiastes 3:19); and that the one great promise is that I shall rise again.
He believes most that is wonderful in my being raised, and believes also in a floating life different and in exile from the body. Which believes the most? And which, if both doctrines were stated now for the first, would he fight against with the most doubt, and get his mind to grasp and cover with the higher conviction of helplessness?
We believe most baldly that if we are to live again, as we confidently believe we are, we can get our eschatological conceit most easily through a restoration at the last, rather than through two strange wanderings, the wandering of thought altogether away from its base, and the wandering of it back to reclaim and vivify what is mortal.
(2) Then as to miracle. The difficulty pretended is, that it would be permanent miracle. But pray what was our creation at the beginning? The difficulty is that it is making miracle not casual but by law. A whole race are to come back to life, both wicked and just, under the supernatural. But men forget! How did we all come to life? And where is there anything more permanently supernatural in the resurrection of the whole, than in the creation of the whole originally? And then further; how is the resurrection of the body a whit less chronically miracle than the resurrection of the whole man, body and soul, at the judgment of the last day?
IV. Besides; the analogy of the universe! we are greatly assisted by that. The wandering of disembodied mind, and that the dead should go on to think! that is out of the line of the universal cosmos. But that, like the sowing of the dragon's teeth, there should spring up a whole harvest of inhabitants, that has the prestige of the past. I mean by that, earth bears marks of having been peopled again and again. If she is to be again destroyed; if the heavens being on fire are to be dissolved, and the elements to melt with fervent heat, and then we, according to His promise, are to look for new heavens and a new earth (2 Peter 3: 13), it is in the analogy of the past that the earth should people itself at a stroke: and that it should people itself with man, I mean call up the millions of the past, is all that is special in the thing to be supposed. Earth, having been peopled often before, I mean with animals, is now repeopled with man; man having been formed on it as one pair by the miracle of the past, and now formed; all his buried millions lifted back into existence; a beautiful planet re-covered with homes; not now as in the common instance of creatures for the first time created, but of the just preceding race; a people degenerate by sin, but some re-generate; all of them to be brought back again to life, and some of them to be made gloriously perfect, body and spirit, in a Divine Redeemer.
I know this is denied; but I am willing to take with me what still remains as the great body of earnest thinkers.
I know not how it affects other minds, but when I read of the spectroscope, soda and carbon and ferruginous vapours and hydrogen and other terrestrial matters seem messengers to me from other stars. They speak of universal body, just as loudly to my ear as anything ever spoke of universal mind. It may be fancy; but they beckon to me as from other seats. I see a universe; of some spirits perhaps, as of angels and principalities of a ministering race; but of great worlds of men, with phosphorus in their brains, like Newton and like Locke; and, like Newton when he rises from his grave, men with weight upon their feet, and with light upon their eyes, and food upon every bough to repair the exhaustion of their living; men who have never seen corruption (Acts 13:7; Romans 8: 21) like us, but who have escaped it by holy living; yet who are nevertheless models of embodied life; rather than of that floating immortality which we are looking for after our dissolution. At least, this much we teach; that the analogies of our own planet lead us to think that its whole repeopling (the wicked having been sent somewhere else) will be by sinners newly raised, their whole life brought up at once from the sepulchre, the race as a race created as much as if it were a new race, like any new fauna for a resurrected province; and that the only difference from the past is, that in this instance it is not a new race, but one kept reckoned for in the rolls of court; with a life hid with Christ in God (Colossians 3:3 ); brought back to conscious memory of their acts; and brought up as actually the same as if they had been sleeping but two minutes in their sepulchre.
Our fourth reason therefore, is, that a total planting of a race, I mean of body and soul at once, and that probably as the history of other planets, is the analogy of the cosmos; with the exception that in this instance of man, there is the metempsychosis across the centuries of a lost but remembered being.
V. Now the last reason! We rejoice that the soul is mortal because it is the more solemn way to preach salvation to the perishing.
By the old plan I told men that they would be disembodied. How long was that to last? Why possibly for ages. Well, what are we to suffer there? Remorse. Well what is remorse? For my part I do not believe that the ungodly man can be brought to tremble before psychical suffering. Then whereto serves immortality? For our part we boldly declare that it breaks the fall that the impenitent is inclined to hazard. But tell a man that he is dust. Tell him that he will rise again. Tell him that it may be to-morrow. Convince him, as you easily may, that though it be after millenniums, yet to him it will be at once; and you bring upon his soul all the weight of an immediate torment. Tell him that he will die; tell him that he will be buried; tell him that his soul will live; tell him it will float in some dark Gehenna; tell him according to this doctrine that it will be without the body, and without corporeal pain, and he will increase his ventures. The longer you count the period, the better he will be pleased with this idea of disembodied perdition.
It is true it may be an evil to unseat this doctrine of immortality; just as it is an evil to unseat any doctrine that has reigned supreme, and that has struck its roots far into the thinking of mankind. Moreover it may have answered an end, just as one error balances another, as will be seen in the next chapter. But this end it is for God to aim at, not man. We have no right to play .at bowls with the errors of the church. The times of ignorance God winks at (Acts 17:30); or, to correct a very wicked translation, God overlooks or oversees. God watches error to observe its exigent times. And we verily believe the knell has tolled for immortality. This grave mistake can no longer prevent a graver. And to teach men now that they entirely die, and that when they rise from the dead they entirely rise; and that if millions of ages pass it will be to them unconscious, bids fair to be the higher method of alarm; for millions of ages disembodied they might be inclined to risk, but immediate torment they shrink from as inflicted in the body.
CHAPTER 5
A Providence in this Discussion.
We do not pretend to imagine that God could create error. “He is the Father of lights” (James 1:17), “and in him is no darkness at all” (1 John 1: 5). It is dangerous to talk in any way different from this. “Lot no man say, when he is tempted, I am tempted of God; for God cannot be tempted of evil, neither tempts He any man “(James 1:13).
Yet, though God could not engender the idea of immortality if it were not true, yet He could permit it to continue, if thereby he could rein in other follies more dangerous to man. God did not create the folly that salvation was of the Jews; I mean, ritualistically, and by the blood of Abraham. Christ did not create the folly of a temporal reign. We see how by both these mistakes the Jews and Christ's earliest disciples could be rallied and kept together.
God did not teach the divinity of kings. Christ did not order religious persecution. And so the power of the Pope, and absolution by the priests, and infallibility of the church (like the union of Church and State, and like State education in our day), have been made in dark ages, like a hard bridle upon a horse, to stifle with forged claims more brutal and more dangerous heresies.
But the time comes for a release.
Now I can see, in respect to the doctrine of immortality, men were brutish. It might suit half civilized children to imagine ghosts; for men might “err, not knowing the Scripture and the power of God.” But let the whole world awaken; let the true relation of God to the cosmos be distinctly understood; let the light that modern science sheds upon the text “In him we live and move and have our being” (Acts 17:28), enter and prevail, and we can see that ghosts are not necessary to transmit our identity before the Law; that we can die to-night and rise ages afterward, and yet continue responsibly one; that one day with the Lord is as a thousand years; and that an hour's sleep is just as fatal to our continuing the same, as unnumbered centuries before our resurrection, The man, therefore, in this period of the world, who, at the suggestion of Scripture, and in fidelity to its claims, can overthrow the doctrine of immortality, may be doing a most timely service under the Providence of Heaven.
Pharaoh and his chariots were so cheaply destroyed, because they had been led by Providence so featly into the trough of the sea. God by wonderful Providences has assembled the corruptions of Christendom within the same sea-walls. Those wretched abominations for the dead, purgatory and the worship of the saints, masses and the multiplication of prayers for our departed friends, indulgences, and all the horrid wickedness as to Mary the Mother of God, all sink at once with this doctrine of immortality. It is a glorious overthrow. And if Miriam is to dance upon the rocks, we see no nobler chance for it than after this very history of ours, where God has borne with Anti-Christ, and hardened the Popish heart, and gathered its main conceits into this narrow bottom beyond the grave, and then buried all at a blow by filling up the bed itself under the gulfing waters.
There is no life in Hades in which Mary can appear. And then masses for the unreturning lost, and alms gifts, and invocations, have all been wasted upon myths; and, what is now very timely, the infallibility which has been just decreed, cuts off the retreat of Rome, and gives its assembled multitude an entire overthrow.
3. And so of the heathen field. A recanting of our ideas of immortality makes men not only better teachers, and better polemics, but it makes them, let me say also in the third place, better missionaries.
Immortality, we verily believe, is a Pagan myth. The systems we oppose are therefore all full of wandering spirits. Legends of the past crowd on us pictures of continual Transmigration. We are to cut up such systems. How can we do it better than by one clear message of a blessed resurrection? Paul accentuates this. And not only does he exaggerate our rising, beyond what we could conceive as natural if it were the mere resurrection of the body, but he is eternally harping upon “that day” Every thing is to happen on “that day.” And, in a way that would be utterly unnatural if it were the mere date of the rising of the body, he makes it the great day of redemption itself, and seals the spirit for it as though that were the day of universal restoration. We can make the best missionaries therefore, on this plea that we are mortal.
4. And lastly, the best philosophers.
Savants are undoubtedly worsting this pretence of spirits. They are very wicked: and many of them are ghastly atheists; at least they are attempting to believe that there is no personal account, and no personal judge to hold those terrible Assizes beyond the grave. We know that we are in wretched company, till Christians join us, so long as we teach the doctrine that the soul is not immortal.
And yet, as all reasoning from nature is built on a system of what is like, it is not likely and philosophers are making this incontestably to appear that there is a soul, separate from the body, that can go on, in analogy with facts, to thought and reason after we are laid in the sepulchre.
We have taken pains to say, This is not certitude; but it fixes an analogy: and this analogy is ever growing. It is burrowing nearer the seat of life. In ways that are vital in other search, the phosphorus is tracing itself right up to thought; and the cellular decay to exertion in its mental part; till we can only say this: You have proved your position subject to appeal. You have settled the cosmic proof, viz., the analogy of fact. We can overrule you by the Bible. You are decidedly the best philosophers, and I who follow you am the best theologian thereby, unless we are overthrown by Scripture.
There are higher analogies, that leave with Scripture the final appeal. But if Scripture itself suggests our being mortal, then the game is up. He is the best philosopher for Christ who catches the indications of the times, and brings the dicta of the Word into the earliest consistence with God's Providence in the discoveries of science.
Our next step, therefore, is into the citadel. But one word now!
Men will say, We object. The whole thing is a chicane. The Bible is a nose of wax. Free thought has had great triumphs, and has fairly upset the positions of the word of God; and priests have patched up the break. This is what you are now bent to do. We unsettled Job and Isaiah, and Galileo showed the monks that the earth moved round the sun. The gravest exegetes silenced us by the Holy Word. And yet when we broke our path, and the opposition of the Popes was carried down by the inevitable facts of Science, presto, there was a shuffle of the text. The oracle now told no such thing!
And it has been repeated as to the age of the planet. The Bible now is at one with the geologists. Give the Doctors time, infidels declare, and Lyell and Darwin and Huxley and the very demonstrations of sight may break down the old wall of Scripture; and a new wall is there behind it. Therefore it is of no use. The ghostly hierarchy maintains its place as by a new revelation. One word now before we proceed, and our enemies themselves shall judge.
I beg to know whether this is a fair view scientifically considered. I beg to know whether the Bible ever did teach that the sun rose and set. I beg to know whether it did not hint the contrary (Job 26:1) before moderns found it out. I beg to know whether the way we searched our Bibles was not as these men searched nature, stupidly and ill; and whether the fault was not with Science that they did not post the world quicker, and through it the Popes, with the true way to read and understand the blessed revelation. I beg to know it: and also more, whether the Bible ever did teach the new-ness of our planet; whether when Doctors said so, they were not mistaken; whether the very first text of Moses does not throw creation back unmeasurable depths; whether the Chaos of the second verse has any scriptural date; whether the texts that follow have found any geology so agreed on and explained as would carry a case against them of any judicial strength; and whether the whole fight with Science has not given Scripture some of its very finest proofs, and could at all be spared from the very first chamber of exoteric evidences.
If this be so, come on with us again. We are going again into one of these escapades of Revelation. She can afford to have them. The church has stoutly asserted immortality. Free thought has chased it, as it thinks, by glass and scalpel out of the range of possible subsistence. It thunders away at the wall of Scripture. And we are beginning to believe that there will happen again the old experience, that just as the rams' horns (less blessed than those of Joshua) have blown their last blast, and the shout has gone up, and the wall of the beleaguered city has fallen to the ground, another, better wall will be seen behind it, and the Bible be found disowning the first, and showing its unaltered page to prove that it never built it.
CHAPTER 6
Can Scripture be Unmistakable?
If Scripture afford us a direct text in favour of a doctrine, we cannot trust it. This arises from the infirmities of language. If it says, “This is my body,” it is in favour of transubstantiation: if it says, “Except ye eat the flesh of the Son of Man,” it adds proof further: but such are the liberties of speech, that we cannot take such texts out of the category of an engaging rhetoric, until we find them braced up and warrantably supported by all the analogy of the words of Scripture.
When, therefore, the Bible says, “Baptism doth now save us; “or when it says, “Ye ought also to wash one another's feet; “or when it says, “Salute one another with a holy kiss;” “Rise and wash away thy sins;“ “Lest I myself become a cast away;“ “Whosesoever sins ye remit they are remitted; “or “whatsoever ye bind on earth shall be bound in heaven, “we are not to run off at once and pronounce gravely what each of these texts seem to teach, but wait till we have compared. I cannot take the text, “In that very day his thoughts perish,” and deny the doctrine of immortality on the faith of that single passage.
But what dare I do?
Here is an Indian box. It is built of bark. I wish to fit on the cover. It is built of striped bark; and if I take the lid and fit it on in a certain fashion, I can know that I am doing right if all the stripes beautifully and simply and in a perfect way agree. That is what I would call fitting it unmistakably. But if I take it off, and put it on differently, and some of the stripes refuse to match, I turn it back at once. The fact that some of them tally does not satisfy me the least. The agreement of all of them if I fix it on the other way, carries conviction at a blow; and I can perfectly understand why a few of the stripes match by a happy accident, or by any cause you choose to state, when I set it differently.
Moreover if a tool has been at work to make the lid match the box when it is set on wrong, it only makes it disgust me the more, and only makes me more comfortably convinced when I see it fixed the other way and matched in every direction.
Now this is what I call making Scripture unmistakable. Scripture may not be absolutely unmistakable even then. But it may be practically so if I take a doctrine like immortality and it practically won't fit. You may quote me a text or two, and it shall be like the imagined fitting of the box. If I turn it round the other way and all the texts fit, and there is an easy fitting each one in its place, the effect ought to be decisive. There is an easy falling into place that carries with it unmistakable evidence that all has gone well.
Now as to the tool making it fit, we see that in immortality. The world has been steeped in that thought hundreds of years. It tampers with the word of God without knowing what it is setting wrong. We see this in all the translations of the Bible. Where the Bible says “God formed man dust of the ground “(Genesis 2: 7), it puts in Italics, and says, “God formed man of the dust of the ground.” Where the Bible says, “Let the waters bring forth the moving creature that hath a living soul “(Genesis 1: 24), it relegates the disagreeing stripe into the margin, and translates it “that hath life.” Where the Bible says, “He shall come at no dead soul “(Numbers 6: 6), it attempts an honest relief again, and translates, “at no dead body.” Now this is what I would show by the Indian box. The doctrine that we are not immortal would tally easily with all real language. But the world has been setting on the lid the wrong fashion; and this mark of the tool is one of the most striking evidences that could at all be calculated.
Let me add now a further number of examples. The Bible says, “And he that smites the soul of a beast shall make it good, soul for soul “(Leviticus 24:18). Our translation has it, “And he that kills a beast shall make it good, beast for beast.” Ecclesiastes says, “For that which befalls the sons of men befalls beasts; even one thing befalls them: as the one dies, so dies the other; yea they have all one spirit “(Ecclesiastes 3:19). The translation has it “Yea they have all one breath.” The next sentence is, “All go into one place: all are of the dust and all turn to dust again. Who knows a spirit of man that goes upward, and a spirit of the beast that goes downward to the earth? “King James no longer translates “breath,” but gives the word, as usual, “spirit,” though it is precisely the same word; but now puts in the definite article, which gives just the opposite sense; “Who knows the spirit of man “as though there were such an essence, and it went upward “Who knows the spirit of man that goes upward, and the spirit of the beast that goes downward to the earth?”
Again, other instances. The apostle says, “Seeing we have lying around us so great a cloud of witnesses “(Hebrews 12: 1). King James gives it to us, “Seeing we are compassed about with so great a cloud of witnesses.” The verse just before is prejudiced worse. The original makes it, “These all, having been attested by faith, received not the promise; God on our account having looked forward to the something better, that they without us should not be made perfect “(Hebrews 11: 39, 40). King James' men quite erase all that, “These all, having obtained a good report through faith, received not the promise: God having provided some better thing for us, that they without us should not be made perfect.” Once more, in Leviticus, “For the soul of the flesh is in the blood, and I have given it to you upon the altar to make an atonement for your souls “(Leviticus 17: 11). Our version has it, “The life of the flesh is in the blood,” just sponging out altogether the antithesis of the beast's soul with the man's soul.
And further; “Therefore I said unto the children of Israel, No soul of you shall eat blood; neither shall the stranger that sojourns among you eat blood. And whatsoever man there be of the children of Israel, or of the strangers that sojourn among you, which hunts and catches any beast or fowl that may be eaten, he shall even pour out the blood thereof, and cover it with dust.” Now observe again, “for it is the soul of all flesh. Its blood is in its soul; therefore I said unto the children of Israel, Ye shall eat the blood of no manner of flesh; for the soul of all flesh, that is its blood; whosoever eats it shall be cut off” (Leviticus 7:12-14). Our English by a sort of instinct turns it all round to what is orthodox, “For it is the life of all flesh; the blood of it is for the life thereof.” The likening of every creature's “soul” is utterly sponged out. “For the life of all flesh is the blood thereof: whosoever eats of it shall be cut off.”
Now, touching with a light finger any one such apparent prejudice, we are disposed to lay a strong accent upon it when it is one of many. And when it becomes almost a mannerism of exegetes, and their work is full of this turning aside of thought, the proof becomes overwhelming. It is stronger than Paley's coincidences in the Horae Paulinae, because, equally unconscious, it is greater in numerical extent, and recurring with the punctuality of light when any passage seems unfriendly to immortality.
CHAPTER 7
The Fourteenth Chapter of Job.
Our first impulse was to deal with the elementary evidences of the Bible; for instance, to take the words, body, soul and spirit, and the phenomena of death, burial and resurrection, and see by a collation of the passages whether each of these things seemed to include all the man; or whether there was a separation of him under the names, and a separation of him also under these destined changes.
We mean to do all this yet.
But we remembered that such laboured work gives the air of after-thought and special pleading; and that when it was done, there would be a sense of advantage taken; and that while we were fresh, it would be better to bring forward the more important Scriptures, and treat them in a more common fashion; that there might be no complaint that we had cooked up a set of solvents by which any passage might be made nought, and by which the strongest testimonies might be turned aside into the support of heresy.
We shall treat five passages therefore first, two of them witnesses for us, and three of them assumed to be the other way. We shall consider them in their simplest sense; and keeping religiously away all appearance of refining upon their drift, we shall show that the whole five match easily with us; and that only three appear to do so under the opposing theory.
The first is that beautiful passage of the Book of Job so often read on occasions of burial. It is the language of Job himself (Chapter 14). “Man that is born of a woman is of few days and full of trouble.” Before we go on we need not anticipate a difficulty about Job being inspired, or stop to show that each text is, in view of the difficulty that the prevailing drift of these debates was in many points mistaken. Our readers will adjust all that. The men that will denounce our doctrine are not those that will be dissatisfied about the patriarch Job. We will treat this beautiful poem as though, in the required light, the word of God; and will run the risk of any one rejecting it for want of inspiration. Now let us read its testimonies:
“He comes forth like a flower, and is cut down; he moves across also like a shadow, and does not stand. And is it really on such a one that thou dost open thine eyes? and. wilt thou bring me into judgment with thee? Oh that the clean might be put apart from the unclean that they be not one. Seeing his days are determined, the number of his months are with thee, thou hast appointed his bounds that he cannot pass; look away from him and he will cease, so as to rejoice as a hireling in his day.” Now this ceasing is on a par with all the testimonies of the inspired word as to the end of man. It is not that my body will cease, but the whole man: and this testimony is not a thing that we stop to accentuate as from this single text, but in all the Bible.
It is not the body that dies, or is buried, or rises again, but it is Abraham, or Christ. And in this sentence of Job the ceasing is peculiar. “Look away from him, and he will cease.” It is one of those passages that present in the strongest light the dynamic theory of our being.
But now comes the main thought, “There is hope of a tree, if it be cut down, that it will sprout again, and that the tender branch thereof will not cease. Though the root thereof wax old in the earth, and the stock thereof die in the ground; yet through the scent of water it will bud, and bring forth boughs like a plant. But the strong man dies, and is down; yea the common man gives up the spirit, and where is he? The waters roll up (evaporate) from the sea, and the river wastes, and dries; and man lies down and rises not: TILL THE HEAVENS BE NO MORE THEY SHALL NOT AWAKE, NOR BE RAISED OUT OF THEIR SLEEP.”
Now why is this testimony not quoted? The Bible has been ransacked for the other view, and slender asseverances insisted upon; but this square statement seems for nought. And if you carry it now, as we suggest it, and offer it to some friend, and ask, What are we to make of this passage? He will cast himself at once upon the tide of his preconceived opinions. This ceasing, he will say, is the ceasing of the body. This sleep is the slumber of the body. And this waking and being raised up when the heavens are no more, he will tell you with a zest that will be a solvent for anything from Scripture, is the mere rehabilitating of our ashes from the grave, and the mere incarnating of the saint after an age among the blessed.
But now go on with the passage. “Oh that thou would hide me in the grave, that thou would keep me secret till thy wrath be passed, that thou would appoint me a set time and remember me. If a man die, shall he live again?” What would be a natural reply to this, if it meant a death all over? Why certainly that he would have to wait. If the heavens be no more before he awake or be raised out of his sleep, he would naturally say that he must lie dead till he is called. And this is exactly what he does say. “If a man die shall he live again? All the days of my appointed time will I wait, till my change come. Thou shalt call, and I will answer thee. Thou wilt pine after the work of thine hands.”
We count this strong argument. But if it is doubted, let us at least modestly ask that it be one stripe in our Indian casket. It fits solidly and well; and the rest of the chapter refers to second childhood. We cannot stop to sift it, but it is very striking. It is quoted by Papists for purgatory, but it refers to an old man. “His flesh upon him shall have pain, and his soul shall mourn over itself.” His decay shall be like slow washings. “As the very mountain crumbling wastes down, and the rock wears by age out of its very place; as the waters wear the stones, and as its floods carry oft the dust of the earth, so thou destroys the hope of man. Thou bears perpetually upon him, and he moves lower; thou alters his looks, and sends him further down. His sons grow great, and lie has no knowledge; or grow small, and he understands nothing about them. Only his flesh upon him shall have pain, and his soul shall mourn over itself.”
We must dismiss this passage. We beg that it may be treated fairly. There are four others that must be considered in their turn.
CHAPTER 8
The Fifteenth Chapter of First Corinthians.
If any candid exegete were asked, what is the most detailed passage in the word of God on the subject of the resurrection, he would probably point to the fifteenth chapter of First Corinthians. Nobody can challenge us, therefore, for choosing that as an authority; and, in doing so, we have an instinct which forbids laboured criticism of any sort, and claims as decisive the inevitable drift of the apostle, whatever may be our difference about minor difficulties.
In the first place there can be no question at all about the subject that the apostle is talking about. It is our rising; and, by a happy fixing of his sense, not a survival of the soul, but a resurrection of the believer, whatever that means, at the final day. This appears before he has finished a paragraph. “For I delivered unto you first of all that which I also received, how that Christ died for our sins according to the Scriptures; and that he was buried; and that he rose again the third day according to the Scriptures“ (1 Corinthians 15: 3, 4). This is his setting out. And now he binds the chapter to this beginning, by the most un-severed bonds. For he says, “If Christ be preached that he rose from the dead, how say some among you that there is no resurrection of the dead?” A resurrection, therefore, from an actual tomb, and on an actual day, and of an actual buried mortal, is the resurrection talked of all through this celebrated passage.
Now for the question, Was it of the body merely, or of the whole man? We shall pretermit the evidence taken from the general expressions. That we shall deal with by itself (see future chapters). The Bible never speaks of the resurrection of the body. It speaks of the man rising again. This is one of the stripes of the box that is never noticed. Listen to this very opening of the subject; “Now if Christ be preached that he rose from the dead “(verse 12). Let us not distract ourselves however. We wish, for the present, only the bold and more sweeping proof that the apostle has in his mind a resurrection from a total death; and not a resurrection of the body to rejoin a soul that has been all the time immortal.
Observe his reasoning: “Then they also which are fallen asleep in Christ are perished” (verse 18). Again, “If in this life only we have hope in Christ, we are of all men most miserable “(verse 19). Again, “Why stand we in jeopardy every hour? I protest by your rejoicing which I have in Christ Jesus our Lord, I die daily. If after the manner of men I have fought with beasts at Ephesus, what advantage is it to me if the dead rise not? “Now observe this argument all the way along. If the dead rise not, those asleep in Christ have perished! Just think of the ungrateful heresy! And yet these are hard drawn lines of argument. Observe them again. “If in this life only we have hope in Christ!” Why Paul must be beside himself! According to our friends, hope never vanishes. The soul lives right on. Paul is reigning this very blissful moment; and yet, like a child crying for the moon, he has to remember that he was of all men most miserable because he could not have the matter of the body!
Now I do not deny for a moment the advantage of such a having; nor do I challenge the philosophy, nor the philology, nor the cosmogony, nor the theological probabilities of thought, that make the body very necessary to the soul. On the contrary that is our great hinging fact. But we say, When Paul sums up, “Let us eat and drink for to-morrow we die” (verse 32), and makes that the alternative of there being no resurrection at the last; when he says, “If after the manner of men I have fought with beasts at Ephesus, what advantage it me if the dead rise not;” and when he says, “Then they which are fallen asleep in Christ are perished,” he is not thinking that they do “immediately pass into glory.” If he does, he is the very heel of ratiocinators. We do beg a square treatment of this proof. Paul never could have believed that he was the possessor of an immortal spirit, if he made in this life only his hope toward God, and the alternative, “To-morrow we die,” if debarred only of a bodily resurrection.
There is a text, “Else what shall they do that are baptized for the dead” (verse 29). It would not really affect us logically, no matter what might be its superstitious interpretation. Let us give the whole of it. “What shall they do that are baptized for the dead, if the dead rise not at all? Why are they then baptized for the dead? “If it were an old observance, as most commentators think, it would not decide our question; because, if it were a living friend getting himself baptized in behalf of a dead friend (as most people think it was), for the reason that that dead friend believed in Christ, and yet for some cause omitted baptism, it would not show that that friend existed in the spirit, or was living somewhere in a disembodied state, but would only show that he needed baptism, leaving the whole question as to when or where, precisely as it would be without the passage.
But as the passage is a strange one, and might seem to disturb the smoothness of the chapter, and as its superstitious readings have been associated always with an intermediate state, we beg to suggest what is most simple. And though our solution is a new one, it is all the more fair; for it offers itself, without any prejudice in its defence, solely upon the evidences in the words of Scripture.
The Apostle, having appealed to the analogies of doctrine for his position, viz. to Adam, and to Christ, and to the victory of Christ over death, appeals next to ordinance, and to their own usages as Christians. And he appeals to baptism as one of the most comprehensive of ordinances, and a good type of all the rest. He says, “Else what shall they do who are baptized for the dead, if the dead rise not? “The superstitious solutions to which men have seemed driven, have all originated in limiting the meanings of the preposition which is translated “for.” That word in the Greek has all the ambiguities of which it is capable in the English. It is a word therefore that can mean as. We say in English, “I shall run for governor: “or we say, “Hang him for a thief; “or we say, “Trust him for a perjured villain.” This, therefore, is a rendering that is possible with the apostle (see Thucyd. 1,141). We take it as the solution of the passage. Paul means, In all those ordinances that recognize man as “dead,” what are you imagining? Why are you baptized as being dead, if the dead rise not? Your ritual images of death, are they not hopeful with the light of resurrection? This is his meaning. And it gets rid of all puerile conceits? There is no trace of a baptism for dead persons: and when at length such usages appeared, it was like the Chinaman imitating to the very patch. It was a usance built on this text. And it was like washing one another's feet (John 13:14), like the kiss of Sandeman (Romans 16:16), and like regeneration in baptism (John 3:5), a running into the ground of the words of Scripture.
So much for this little sermon of an intermediate state. The words of the chapter, in all other respects, present a solid front against our immortality.
CHAPTER 9
The Two Adverse Passages
By far the most serious passages against our doctrine are those in the fifth chapter of Second Corinthians, and in the first chapter of Philippians. One speaks of being absent from the body and being present with the Lord (2 Corinthians 5:8), and the other of departing and being with Christ which is far better (Philippians 1:23).
We are bound as honest men to say that if they were really just as they are translated, we would not be moved by these single passages away from that vast array of proof that crowds the Word. We would neglect them, even if we could not explain them; just as we would neglect the passage, “This is my body,” even if we could not expound it so as to yield to the enormous mass that presses against its being taken as it is.
If we thought these passages were to be translated as they stand, we would say that for all practical purposes they were true, because we do depart and be with Christ, the ages that might come between being quite unconscious nothings in our path to our Redeemer.
But fortunately for our prejudiced position, it does not ask from us such a boldness. The passages correct themselves; and we desire to show how the same apostle that wrote the chapter in First Corinthians, could write these also, and yet be steeped in the idea that we pass into an unconscious state, and that the soul is not immortal.
And lest it should be imagined, as a matter of course, that we must begin now a destructive criticism, and do that which men are too prone to do, viz., abate at all hazards an antagonist revelation, we state what the most prejudiced will be arrested by, viz., that the world's ablest evangelical commentators have expressed their wonder that their favourite doctrine of immortality should be so strangely left out from these very passages, which seemed most to teach it.
For example, Lange; “It may be alleged that the intermediate state between death and the resurrection is entirely lost sight of in the Apostle's mind, inasmuch as we know that he looked upon it as altogether temporary, and hence that the perfection to be obtained after the resurrection was the absorbing object of his attention in this passage” (2 Corinthians 5:1). Dr. Hodge argues that the “building” here spoken of is evidently to be entered upon at death: therefore he denies that it is the body, and argues that it must be heaven itself (see Com.). Ellicott on the other passage would evidently qualify the right to “dogmatic deductions in reference to the intermediate state” (see his Com. Philippians 1:23).
But in Lange such a reserve is much more pronounced: “There is no thought here of an intermediate state” (see Lange on same verse): and in Alford on Second Corinthians the omission is apologized for, “A difficulty has been raised by some commentators respecting the intermediate disembodied state, how the apostle here regards it, or whether he regards it at all. The intermediate state, though lightly passed over, as not belonging to the subject, is evidently in the mind of St. Paul” (see Alford, 2 Corinthians 5:1). Could there be a stronger argument? The two passages which are the chief resort of theologians who would teach the doctrine of our immortality, are found under the most scholarly hands to be so disturbing to the commentators as to their own ground of an intermediate state, that they have constantly to be apologizing for Paul for seeming to teach the very opposite idea.
And now as to the passages themselves. That in the Second Epistle to the Corinthians begins to speak, in the fourth chapter, of our outward man perishing, and our inward man being renewed day by day (4:16). This sentence is certainly far from encouraging our separating a soul from a body; or our making either the outward or the inward stand clear the one from the other as literally flesh and spirit. But whatever cannot be distinguished there, cannot be distinguished certainly in the texts that follow. “For our light affliction, which is but for a moment, works for us a far more exceeding and eternal weight of glory; while we look not at the things which are seen, but at the things which are not seen: for the things which are seen are temporal; but the things which are not seen are eternal. For we know that if our earthly house of this tabernacle were dissolved, we have a building of God, an house not made with hands, eternal in the heavens”
Now let us suggest three theories. A physicist, when he cannot unravel facts, suggests a theory. That is the triumphant theory which takes in all the facts. Such is really the way to study a passage: it is, to take up all the theories that different minds may suggest. That is the meaning of the passage which accords with the word of God, and embraces as a consistent whole the circle of its texts, (1) The first theory we reject. It is, that “our house of this tabernacle” means, nakedly and without any distinction in the least, the intelligent man, or the intelligent soul. We waste our thinking upon such a folly. The thought of a house, or, as we go further on, the thought of a garment, must have an eye to something that is covered; and, therefore, that the soul dies with the body in such a way as that the figure of a house has no force, is corrected by the very language. The theory, therefore, that would make all this mean that the house is the soul and the soul is the house, would be absurd past the possibilities. Paul, in speaking of the earthly house of this our tabernacle being dissolved, must be speaking of something that admits this idea of shelter.
Who would wonder at this as to a brute?
Now if I may speak of a brute as having his “tabernacle” in the body; and if I may speak of his soul as departing, when it does not travel one inch from the ashes of his tomb, why may I not do the same in respect to man? particularly if the whole stage is cleared, and there are no preconceived ideas to curtail the scope of this bolder and freer employment of the image?
For example, when Peter says, “Knowing that shortly I must put off this my tabernacle;” if we were positively advertised that we had no surviving consciousness, we would have no revolting at any violence in the figure; but would simply understand that, as in the instance of the plant, the whole concentrated life was thought of as under the shelter of the body.
Now our argument is that the passage in Corinthians is more after this theory (3) than after the other (2).
Paul says, “We know that if our earthly house of this tabernacle were dissolved, we have” what? An immortal consciousness? Noticeably not: but just what we would have if our life went out at death, and went in again at the resurrection. It is not even said, We shall have. But just as if there were no conscious experience between one tabernacle and another, “We have.”
And now notice other points. If the soul perishes at death; that is, if life goes out altogether, and the soul is but the appanage of the body, the man never has an absolutely holy life till the resurrection. Consequently that resurrection is very great, and the soul, if it perishes at death, not simply gets back its body at the last, but gets its earliest perfection. This corresponds with Paul speaking so much of “that day.” In fact it unravels the puzzle of so much talk about the resurrection of the dead. If the soul dies out at death, it does not come in at our rising after ages of grace, but it comes in fresh from the ashes of the sepulchre; and therefore a great step upward is made, a great grace is given, on the morning of the resurrection. The soul that went out sighing, comes up a glorious inheritor. And, therefore, “the day of redemption,” as that day of new life is scripturally called (Ephesians 4: 30), is a most significant account; seeing that the soul, if our scheme be true, has never experienced before felicity or purity of being.
Now I beg that in this light the chapter before us be considered. If it be merely the dust that rises; see what exaggerated language. “A building of God! “And then comes a sentence that occurs twice before in the Bible.
Circumcision is implied to be not “made with hands.” (Ephesians 2:11; Colossians 2:11). The expression evidently means that which does not spring from preliminary causes. A circumcision not made with hands means a purifying of the heart, out of the course and without the efficiency of nature. So Christ was not made with hands (Mark 14:58) when, as a temple, he was destroyed one day, and raised up another. These things rise like an exhalation, without that preliminary cause the absence of which is made a cavil against our doctrine. So then, when this house is said to be “not made with hands,” it is too grave a statement, along particularly with so many other that we notice, to be applied merely to the waking of the body; and means that total rising, that new creation at the last, which makes a new man so utterly, that the cavil has already been noticed that it destroys our accountability in the reckoning.
Paul actually explains what it means. He says, “Christ being come an high priest of good things to come, by a greater and more perfect tabernacle, not made with hands, that is to say, not of this building “(e. v. Hebrews 9:11.) We. spring eagerly after the Greek, and this unveils itself “Not made with hands, that is to say, not of this creation.” What a noble text for Huxley! He may carry back evolution as far as he please. There come at last things “not MADE WITH HANDS, THAT IS TO SAY, NOT OF THIS CREATION.” Adam and Eve were such things, as to any previous universe. The widow's “oil” was such a thing, when it welled up to pay her debts
(1 Kings 17:14). The twelve baskets full of fragments were such things (Matthew 14:20). They were “not of this creation.” And the raised sinner will be such a thing, a something “not made with hands eternal in the heavens”
(2 Corinthians 5:1).
Now, notice other words. It is a house “from heaven” (verse 2): nay, it is a house “in the heavens” (verse 1). Surely this is strong language for our dust. Again, no mention is made of spirit. Paul is comforting himself for death, and not a word is said about the years when he is in the sepulchre. He strikes right across the flood, and sets his comfort in the resurrection. He vests nothing in being disembodied. His commentators notice that. But he has now two pictures which seem to me well nigh decisive; one that he longs to be “clothed upon.” The meaning in the third verse is a little clouded. Let me translate it strictly. “Earnestly desiring to be clothed upon with our house which is from heaven, if so be that we may be found clothed, not naked. For we that are in this tabernacle do groan being burdened; not for that we would be un-clothed, but clothed upon, that mortality might be swallowed up of life” (vs. 2-4). Now it may do very well to say that Paul shrunk from being disembodied; but why? If that was our nature; if that was our well understood gift; if to be disembodied was to be for the first time perfect, and to be for a long time happy; and resurrection was after that, thousands of years, it was impossible that Paul should labour to disgust the pious, and breed a fever for immediate resurrection; and should call that being clothed upon; and should put it in the strong shape of “mortality” being “swallowed up of life” (verse 4); and what is still more incredible, say that “he that hath wrought us for the self-same thing is God” (verse 5), as though they really should escape being disembodied, and as though they really should be clothed upon, and escape the long millenniums of an unclothed but rapturous felicity. Now all this is dangerously incredible.
And we add to it the other sentence. Paul speaks of the “earnest of the Spirit” (verse 5). Why did he need the earnest of the Spirit for a mere carnal rising? It seems that this is the strongest consideration that has been mentioned. If he was to rise as a total penitent, buried sinful and rising perfect, then the earnest of the Spirit is significant as showing him the proof that he had been sealed for that better resurrection. But that he was to be happy for thousands of years, and that the whole thing talked of was the mere resurrection of flesh, makes the whole comfort seem ridiculous. He was not to be clothed upon; he was not wrought for the self-same thing; he was not to escape being unclothed; and he was not to realize the earnest of the Spirit in any mere waking of the body, till ages after his admission into paradise.
And now the critical sentence! (verse 8).
Let me premise: Paul seems to bend all feeling toward the tenth verse, which like many another closing announcement in the Bible (see Matthew 18:14, 35; 20:16; 14:11), seems to be the pith of all that has been declared. He says, “We must all appear before the judgment seat of Christ.” This seems to live in his memory as the great background of every picture. When therefore he says, “We walk by faith, not by sight” (verse 7), we understand him as we do in the fourth chapter (verse 18), “While we look not at the things which are seen, but at the things which are not seen.” Paul was doing this very thing when he uttered the sixth verse, “Therefore we are always confident;” that is, Living, we keep up our confidence more like other men, but dying, we have these pictures before us, “While we are at home in the body, we are absent from the Lord” (verse 6). And it is just here he puts in that sentence, “For we walk by faith, not by sight” (verse 7). And then comes the great text, “We are confident I say and willing rather to be absent from the body, and to be present with the Lord” (verse 8). Now, in the first place, if this means, when absent from the body like life out of a bean stalk he was immediately present with the Almighty, is it not strange he should be so shy of saying so all through the rest of the context? This was the very state he seemed to fly from, to call it unclothed to speak of it as naked to beg concerning it that it may be clothed upon, and to long to skip over it, that in the language of the context “mortality might be swallowed up of life.”
But, second, behold now the language. Suppose Paul had really believed as we do. Suppose he had thought about this intervening period, and too carefully to be willing to throw haze over it in the structure of his speech. Suppose he was bent upon the rising at the last, but not so as to forget the sleeping in the sepulchre, how would he manage? Why, exceedingly well by using a very preposition that is employed in his text: he says not, “absent from the body and present WITH the Lord” (the very expression that makes the passage in Philippians more formidable, for there he does say, “depart and be with Christ”), but he says “towards the Lord,” or on the way to Him, or as pertaining to Him (“things pertaining to God,” as the word is translated, Hebrews 5:1); and under all the circumstances of the passage it gives the most undoubted right to insist upon the difference, as such; smooth with all the other peculiarities that have been before us. “We are confident I say and willing, rather to be away from home as to the body, and at home in the direction of the Lord.” For, mark you, he has just said, “We walk by faith, not by sight” (verse 7). And then to show how this prognostic of his is really the home in which he is living in the direction of his Master, he puts it beyond doubt: “For, we must all be manifested” that is the expression. It is not the mere word “appear” (R. V.). It is, “We must all be manifested.” And how can that be if we have been known as saints for thousands and thousands of years? “We must all be manifested,” that is at our rising again; “that every one may receive by the body” why not by the soul, and long ago at our death? “that every one may receive by the body things according to what he hath done, whether it be good or bad” (verse 10).
“Knowing therefore the terror of the Lord” (verse 11). Disembodied states he builds no warning upon at all.
Now we appeal to all the fair-minded, whether the passage, thus winnowed, does not fall from its high estate; and whether it must not cease to be one of the two great pillars of our immortality.
But let us look at the other passage (Philippians 1). Paul is speaking of the same subject, viz., his death: only he is speaking of it with even more discrimination. He is speaking of it in view of the great doctrine that God loves the church; and he is pressing it into a corollary that is seldom thought of, and is never noticed in the exposition of his epistle. It is the corollary that, as God withholds nothing from the church, he would not withhold Paul from the church, if his living or dying could be useful to its kingdom.
This then was the crisis with Paul. If it was best, he would live: if it was best, he would die. And this best meant, best for the church. “To me to live is Christ, and to die gain” (verse 21). That is, If 1 live, it will be that Christ needed me, and worked in me, and actually was I, for a living gracious up-building of some of his people. And if I die, it will be because it was gain for somebody that I die. This was his doctrine; and he pursues it strikingly from the beginning. “That in nothing I shall be ashamed” (verse 21). He alludes to so unpromising a thing even as his bonds (verse 13); and says that all his things were falling out “rather unto the furtherance of the gospel” (verse 12). He showed how his bonds had done good; that they were manifest as for Christ in all the palace. He said, some had waxed bold by them (verse 14). And then he speaks of actual sin in preachers; as for example preaching Christ of contention; and boldly cries that even that will be overruled; uttering that eloquent passage, “Nevertheless, Christ is preached; and I therein do rejoice, yea and will rejoice” (verse 18). “For,” says he, “this shall happen to me for salvation,” that is for the general salvation; and how? For any merit in wicked men? No; but “through your prayer, and the supply of the Spirit of Jesus Christ” (verse 19). And then he announces his “earnest expectation and hope that in nothing shall [he] be ashamed; but that with all boldness, as always, so now also, Christ shall be magnified in [his] body whether it be by life or by death” (verse 20).
And now it is on this plot that we are to begin the consideration of the passage. We will translate literally.
We have already considered the next verse. “For to me to live is Christ, and to die gain” (verse 21). “But if to live in the flesh that is to me to be fruit of labour and what I shall choose, I do not declare it” (for the best reason in the world, because he does not know it), his meaning being that if living was the most useful, it would be what he would choose to do, and what he actually would do, for he chose to do that which would be most useful, and what he chose to do therefore would be accomplished, for that would be accomplished which would be most useful, only he could not tell whether it would be life or death.
“For I am held back “(he goes on) “from either” (that is, on account of the above entire uncertainty), “having the desire, as to the departing, to be also with Christ, which is the far better thing” (that is, with all the certainty that, if that turns out to be the lot, it will be the useful lot, on the principle already announced, and then “also' the happy lot, making it “far better”); “nevertheless to abide in the flesh, in case that be the more necessary for you. And once made sure of that” (viz., that to abide is more necessary for you), “I know that I shall abide, and continue with you all for your furtherance and joy of faith” (22-25). This last has been missed by everybody. The reading has been “Having this confidence.” Paul would then say, “Having this confidence, I know that I shall abide.” In the next sentence he would make it stronger. He would imply that he will come to them again. Whereas the whole thing is conditioned on his knowing that it would be for their good. The fact is he never did come to them again, so most people believe; and it is only on the rendering that we propose (and see warrant for it, in English as well as in Greek, in the use of the participle) that the passage can be redeemed from the most pitiable confounding on the part of the apostle of his own confession of entire ignorance (verse 22).
Conybeare and Howson teach a different idea; but the evidences are, to say the very least, obscure; and they do not in the least relieve the difficulty of their making Paul to say that he had “confidence“ in a thing which he had said a moment before that he knew nothing about.
Regarding this, therefore, as the whole drift of Paul, and considering him as alive with the thought that what was best for them that was the thing that was to override his murderers, can we give emphasis to the side thought, having the “desire, as to departing, to be also with Christ, “to make it determinate of the fact that when we depart we shall be immediately with Christ, and that in the sense of his conscious kingdom?
I think no fair mind can say that we can.
And luckily, we can appeal to precedents. Take the passage in Corinthians (2 Corinthians 5:1). Our opponents read, “If this earthly house is dissolved, we have” the verb is in the present. Of course the inference must be that the heavenly house follows immediately. Does any one reason in that way? We are said in Scripture to sleep in Jesus (1 Thessalonians 4:14). And we are said in the Confession to have our “bodies still united to Christ.“
Is there association with Christ in our very dust when it has been scattered, and shall Paul be impeached of carelessness when in the rush of a quite different thought he speaks of being happy in death, when it has been determined on high that that will be most useful to the cause, and when there is but an unconscious interval between death and the resurrection?
Samuel says, “Why hast thou disquieted me to bring me up?“ (1 Samuel 28:15). We take it that, but for this disquieting, the dead saint would have been dreamless in decay, and like the flash of the cable line, he was fleeting across the centuries, having departed to be with Christ with none but an unconscious interval.
CHAPTER 10
The Spirits in Prison.
Whatever may have been the meaning of Peter in the last part of the third chapter of his earlier Epistle, the vast majority of commentators believe that it alludes to an actual visit of Christ, and therefore that it sets at rest the question of our spirits.
Let me beg however one favour.
We are so unfortunate as to have our particular reading. It differs seriously from every other. We can hardly discuss this passage without giving it in full. And yet it makes one feel singularly foolish, when shoals of expositions have been given, to attempt to fight our battle with one which no mortal has ever honoured by so much as conceiving in the study of the passage.
The favour is this.
It would be awkward to confront the chapter without letting our thought run in the lines of our entire belief. But there are great features of our quieted me to bring me down? but, Why hast thou disquieted me to bring me up? These are the smaller stripes, which nevertheless all fit perfectly in the Indian casket of belief, which have the main polemic value, which could be imprinted on other theories.
For example the “prison.” We do not believe it is the grave at all, but only our impenitence. And “spirits! “We do not believe they are the dead at all, but all the impenitent. These points could be admitted into other readings. We will, therefore, go boldly into all our theory, believing that while the ninety and nine may reject our comments as a whole, they may be struck with them in part; or at least that we may show that we are helpless to meet this passage at all, seeing that we have grown committed to a sense which none other of the students in the case could think of or venture to defend.
Now for a beginning, we utterly deny the reading in the eighteenth verse (1 Peter 3), “being put to death in the flesh, but quickened in the Spirit.” That would allude to the crucifixion, and refer only to that date, and fix the epoch of Christ's setting out, or departing, to the day of his resurrection: and though we might go on with what remains, even if we gave this its usual significance, yet we prefer to make it all complete. This sentence does not refer to the crucifixion or to the rising again, but a word Is employed which has been singularly lost sight of in its beautiful determinations as to the passage.
That word means “made a dead man.”
Paul says, “For thy sakes are we killed all the day long “(Romans 8:36), meaning, “as good as dead men.” Christ also uses this word, “The brother shall deliver up the brother to death, and the father the child: and the children shall rise up against their parents, and cause them to be put to death “(Matthew 10: 21), meaning, give them over to death. So the Pharisees; “They sought false witness against Jesus to put him to death.” It never means killing literally. And though it occurs eleven times in the Bible (Matthew 10: 21; 26: 59, 27: 1; Mark 13:12; 14:55, Luke 21: 16; Romans 7: 4; 8:13; 8: 36; 2 Corinthians 6: 9, 1 Peter 3:18), it always means delivered over to death, and never in any actual sense killed at the time.
Now we believe that this whole passage means that Jesus Christ was as good -as dead as to the flesh; that is, would have succumbed to temptation like any other man (see Hebrews 5:7); but that he was made the living Saviour that he was, by the Spirit; and that, in the Spirit, long before he was made flesh at all, he set out and preached to the spirits in pris- on; that is, as the Great Prophet God, preached to poor sinners.
And how general this was, appears by the next expression, “Who at any time were disobedient.” (That is the meaning of the particle in numerous passages, I Corinthians 9:7; Ephesians 5:29.) And yet though he has preached in this way in the Spirit even before and after his incarnation, yet the chance for each mortal man was but “once.” Notice how he brings in the case of Noah. “When once the long-suffering of God waited.” This means to characterize all the impenitent that ever lived. They are waited for but once. In the rush of speaking Peter brings in a favourite case. Syntactically he trespasses a little, for it is the way with these apostles (Romans 1:7; Ephesians 3:1); but trespasses with method. He does not say, “when once the long suffering of God waited in the days of Noah” (R. V.), but “in days of Noah,” flinging, in his excitement, before their minds a certain case before the flood: “They did eat; they drank; they married wives, they were given in marriage “(Matthew 24:38); and thus, like Christ himself, making the instance of Noah a fine warning to our whole impenitence.
Let us recapitulate the Apostle therefore. Even Christ is quickened in the Spirit. In the Spirit, before and since his incarnation, he has preached to imprisoned sinners. They are the men who at any time have been disobedient. And God has waited for them “once,” viz., in their single life-time, in days of Noah. And having thrown that picture before the eye, he notes the likeness. They were like Noah as to an ark. They were like Noah as to the number saved. There was a resemblance really in the more shadowy emblem of the “water.” Let us go over it on these points, hiding a little the eruptive rhetoric of the Apostle. “Long suffering,” great and patient, and yet critical, viz., “in days of Noah”: and yet in Noachic days in other respects, that an ark was a preparing sadly alike equally in another respect, that so few were saved; in Noah's case, only “eight;“ and sadly alike too in this, that the very waters that wrecked the earth saved the ark, and that the very death that destroys the people saves us, when inflicted upon Christ, and raises us again through his blessed quickening.
It may be imagined, if it seem necessary, that this interpretation of ours is aside from the possibilities of the passage; but here is precisely where we will press the difficulties of every other. It will be seen that we make the words a mere continuance of the didactic gospel of the apostle.
We deny everything ghostly. The spirits are merely the impenitent. The preaching is merely the usual work of the Divine Prophet, for sinners. The waiting is merely the gospel respite. And Noah with his days of crisis, the ark and the eight souls and salvation by water, all mere pictures, examples for the race, because actual instances of a divine redemption.
If any one says that he cannot admit this sense, then choose one that is preferable. A capital way to strip this passage of mistake is to demand its unravelment. Tell what your meaning is. If you say, It is Christ preaching in Noah, I say, No, for by your theory it was at the time of his resurrection. If you say, It was Christ preaching after he was risen, I say, No, for it was at the time of Noah. If you say, It was Christ preaching to the dead; I say Why then speak of Noah? And if you say, as many do, It was Christ preaching to dead antediluvians in Hades, I ask, Why? And I beg you to give a consistent account of what message he could bring; and whether you dare distinctly to assume that there is yet mercy for the perished after they have rejected it, and when for two thousand years they have cursed in the bitterness of perdition.
This is the treatment that seems to be fair. We give a meaning, and it is consistent with the common gospel. We expound it, and bring it into strict connection with the text. If it be denied, we have a right to demand another. If that be given, we have a right to insist upon it, and make it the final appeal. Now of all the expositions of this passage we beg to be informed of one that can so stand its own ground under the difficulties that it presents, as to be an unblushing arbiter in a question like immortality.
CHAPTER 11
What Might We Expect of Scripture?
ACCUSED, as we naturally must be found to be, of trying to fit Scripture to a preconceived infidelity, of course it will be infinitely just to expect of the old faith that it shall purge itself of that suspicion too; not bringing in a theory to be tried, but finding its theory obtruded upon its belief by the plain announcements of the Holy Word.
More especially is this to be the case because the doctrine that they teach has at least three very bold annunciations.
In the first place, it announces two separate essences so independent in the nature of man that if one lies dead upon the earth, the other lives on perpetually. It must be like a bat in a cavern, astonishing every body by the skill with which it grazes what it meets, if the Bible can utter so many books full of human histories, and yet not speak in the most pronounced way of the soul and of the body if the theory of what they are is not to be brought to it to be tried, but actually to be carved out of it by its distinct expressions.
In the second place, if the soul is to be perfect at death, that is to say if the Christian at that date is immediately to pass into glory; and if therefore the hour of death is the most important time of life in the one respect of giving us our first enjoyment of absolute blessedness, it is impossible that such a bold faith should be gotten from a certain writing, and the writing give it so languidly forth that it shall seem brought to it from without, rather than like a clear bold fact taught by it as its own revelation. Let us think of this carefully. Here is a wonderful faith, opposing all the analogies of our animal existence.
It is to cover the whole ground of centuries. It is to apply perhaps to-morrow, bringing us into the presence of our Maker, and describing our first joy, which is to last with us through unnumbered ages. And here is the book out of which this faith is to be gathered. I say, It must abound in it. If we are to get it from no other source whatever, then the exegetes who merely show that it is not contradicted, show nothing. It pretends to come from no other source. If the Bible does not reek with immortality, the design has failed. It is not a doctrine like infant baptism. It must be the great imagination of our lives; and that the Bible, speaking of our interests, should be like the bat flying through the cavern, avoiding these interests, and grazing when we should think it impossible these main pillars of the place, would really defy belief, especially as it is not a doctrine that we are to get from abroad, but to get solely and just as it is from divine revelation.
In the third place, if resurrection is taught, the whole temper of the teaching must be different, if it be a merely bodily resurrection, from that which must be expected if the whole man is raised from the darkness of death. We insist upon this. If life has never gone out, resurrection is a mere secondary thing, bringing back to us at best the matter of our frames.
If we have been living centuries in heaven, we shall show, when we come to array the passages, that they speak far too little of death, and far too much of our rising; that this comparative test is decisive: we might explain away many other things, but that the Bible should harp so little upon our glory, and so much upon our return to flesh; speak so often of the vivification of our dust, and so scarcely or not at all of what befalls whole millenniums before, is shockingly impossible; and the expressions that we shall heap up of “redemption” (Ephesians 4:30), and “glory” (Colossians 3: 4), and “parousia” (2 Peter 3: 4), and surprise (Matthew 25:37), and remorse (Luke 13: 28), and disappointment (Matthew 7:22), which we shall pile together as of the last day; and the thinness and nothings that we shall exhibit upon our real coming to glory, as our adversaries would teach, present in our view an overwhelming form of argument; offer the stripes in the Indian casket all awry; and obtrude the one theory of the two under such singular straits, as to make the one ground of its strength the prejudices and preconceptions of the heathen.
And now, as to the other theory. If the Bible teach it, we should expect such things as these:
We should expect many a passage in the Bible to speak as though man were nothing but body. If the one thing and the other thing were constitutionally inseparable, we should expect the Bible also to speak as though man were nothing but soul. If the soul and the body were indissolubly mixed, we should expect many a passage to speak of them interchangeably, with but little apparent care to separate them in the less vital passages.
On the other hand we should expect them to be separated. Just as the life is separated from the beanstalk, though the life is the bean-stalk numerically or qua essentia; just as the soul is separated from the carrion (Ecclesiastes 3:18-21), though the carrion was the soul such and so far as that nothing floated away from the carrion but the power of the Almighty, so the soul can be separated from the body. And now the immortal soul having been abandoned, there is room to talk of these separateness. The life did not survive the bean-stalk: nevertheless it was additional to it in such a sense that the matter for a thousand years in just such proportion would not have produced the bean-stalk; and the life was additional and a new efficiency, and a new dose if you please above that which had been given in the efficiencies of matter.
And so the brutes. We may count three things, matter, life and soul. Matter may have every particle there, and not have life; and soul may infuse every particle of matter, and yet never be the progeny of material molecules. It may be an additional and divine efficiency.
So when we climb to man, there are four things to think of. Let us look at this very narrowly. If there are four, why say two? In other words if the usus loquendi of man justifies his speaking of his body and of his life, and then separately of his soul, and then separately of his spirit, for these last are really spoken of as pitted against each other in certain pas- sages (1 Corinthians 15:44-46), why may not soul and body be treated similarly? Why should the Bible speak of soul and spirit, and yet they be regarded as inter-terminally mixed, and yet not speak of soul and body without the suggestion of an independent essence?
To return, therefore, to the matter of theory. If there be a theory of a certain kind, what may be expected of the Bible if it embrace it? If there be a theory for example like this, that man has a body, but that the particles of that body would never give themselves life by being laid together; that man has life, and therefore that life is additional to the mere endowment of matter: moreover that man has thought, and as thought is not life as life belongs to a bean, therefore man has soul also, a still higher gift, but still intermixed (for that the theory must be), as it is in the instances of brutes, with the life and with the efficiencies of matter: and lastly, that man has spirit, the Bible must comply with all these seeming: and if spirit be the abode of conscience; that is, if it be reason as a whole and mind as a whole, but reason where it has broken down, and mind where it has been specially injured under our fall from God, the Bible will be found especially obsequious to all these changes of thought. It will speak of man sometimes as all body. It will speak of man sometimes as all soul. It will speak of life and soul by terms that are interchangeable together. It will speak of man as dust. It will speak of him just as confidently as spirit. It will speak of Abraham as a dead body.
It will speak of a carcase in the wilderness as a dead soul. It will be careful to mix expressions, so as to forbid superstitiousness. Nevertheless it will feel free to distinguish, and that, in bold instances, ad unguent. “Fear not them that kill the body, and are not able to kill the soul.” And yet it will do the same thing as to the spirit.
Trusting that no one will imagine that the spirit is a separate essence, it boldly pits it against the soul. It speaks of a “soul-body” and a “spirit-body” (1 Corinthians 15:44), when all that it means is, that the body is at last to have a spirit, that is, a spirit thoroughly infused by the grace of conscientious living.
Now our task in the chapters that remain is in this way laid open. We are intending to show that the soul is not immortal: that it is not immortal, or the Bible would speak more of its independent being; that it is not glorious at death, or the Scriptures would erect there its flaming bonfires; that it is not acquaint with bliss at the resurrection, or it would not be surprised so; and that that cannot be the date of the mere retaking of the body, or it would not be such a red-lettered date, so redolent of bliss standing in such sharp comparisons with the slumbers of the sepulchre.
Then on the other hand, that the soul is not immortal because all the stripes of the bark casket match in a different fashion. The body is talked of as though it personated the soul, and the soul is talked of as though it decayed with the body. The life is talked of as though inseparable from both, and the spirit as though the complement of either. The soul is talked of as independent of the spirit, just as much as the body is talked of as independent of the soul: the spirit being all that a man would be if he were holy (John 4:23); the flesh coming to mean mind, heart, even our refined and more elevated nature when dead in spirit (Romans 7:18); and the whole being no more capable of being used when they have grown into their rhetoric shapes for a dyad or a triad of man, than “body “and “soul,” to be a division of the Almighty (Daniel 10: 6; Leviticus 26:11).
We set out, therefore. Allow us one caution.
Matter is an efficiency; so say some scientists. Soul is an additional efficiency: so say we. Now if matter continues, though it be but an efficiency of power, why may not soul continue? And as matter continues slumbering in the grave, why may not soul be somewhere; and why may not it have a dreamless sleep? and why may we not get rid of the horror of thinking of it in utter annihilation?
One might.
Any man impressed that way had better.
We ourselves have spoken of this shadow of efficiency. We have suggested efficiency, and something more. What that more is who can tell? We are really arguing from the Bible. And while the Bible does not tell us what that efficiency is that is additional to the bean-matter, or what that efficiency is that is additional as the brute-soul, it does tell us that the two are inseparably together. And while the matter and the mind are both efficiencies, they differ in this. The matter is not “slumbering in the grave.” It is as alert as it ever was, saving that it lacks life. It is needed in the circle of efficiencies. But the soul is not needed. The Bible gives us plenty of reason to understand why matter should be kept up. But the soul need not be. It may die in its efficiency, and rise again at the judgment of the just.
CHAPTER 12
The Whole Man, Body
THERE is nothing left now but to arrange separate classes of Scripture as they bear upon the question before us. Our procedure will be understood. We do not quote any passage with a view of laying much weight upon it. We do not approach any chapter with a view to make the Scriptures that it employs bear all the weight, or indeed do more than their part in the general array. Our view is to unite all the chapters. If the whole man has body, and the whole man dies, and the whole man is buried, and the whole man rises; if the whole man awakes to judgment, and the whole man enters then for the first time among the blessed, our proposition is proved. That is, no one of these points might appear conclusive; yet if they all combine, it betokens a habit of thought on the part of the Bible which puts beyond doubt the question of our being mortal.
Now in this chapter we are to quote where the whole man is spoken of as body.
In the first place he is said to be formed out of the ground. In the second chapter of Genesis the brutes are said to be “formed out of the ground, and then, a moment afterward, they are called “living souls.” The English Version helps us a little by seeming shy of this latter expression. Let me quote the whole passage. “And out of the ground Jehovah God formed every beast of the field, and every fowl of the air, and brought them to Adam to see what he would call them: and whatsoever Adam called every living soul, that was the name thereof” (Genesis 2:19). And yet in the same chapter this is the account of man, “Jehovah God formed man dust out of the ground, and breathed in his nostrils breath of life, and man became a living soul.” Nor are these uncommon similarities. They occur often. “And God said, Let the earth bring forth the living soul after his kind, cattle and creeping thing and beast of the earth after his kind” (Genesis 1:24); and then in the third chapter, “In the sweat of thy face shalt thou eat bread, till thou return unto the ground; for out of it wast thou taken” (verse 19). Solomon is infinitely bolder; “That which befalls the sons of men befalls beasts; even one thing be falls them: as the one dies so dieS the other; yea, they have all one spirit; so that a man hath no pre-eminence above a beast: for all is vanity. All go unto one place; all are of the dust, and all turn to dust again” (Ecclesiastes 3: 19, 20).
King James' men again modify the Hebrew, and say “of the dust of the ground.” The difference may be very slight, but the inclination, on that very account, very obvious.
But not only is man said to be “out of the ground,” but he is called directly “dust.” “God made man dust of the ground” (Genesis 2:7). This is asserted with absolute boldness: “Dust thou art, and unto dust shalt thou return” (Genesis 3:19). It is turned about with varied expression; “He knows our frame; he remembers that we are dust” (Psalm 103:14). “All go unto one place; all are of the dust, and all turn to dust again” (Ecclesiastes 3:20).
“All flesh shall perish together, and man shall turn again unto dust” (Job. 34:15). “His breath goes forth; he returns to his earth “(Psalm 146:4): and once more, “Then shall the dust return to the earth as it was, and the breath shall return unto God who gave it” (Ecclesiastes 12:7).
Now, sentences that speak of us as “flesh” are still more striking. In the arguments of the apostles, flesh is made to answer to the whole unregenerate part of man. It is actually embodied as everything but the “spirit.” And as the “spirit” is the conscientious part of our nature, the “flesh” must be the whole of the rest; and therefore must be the whole man in such a sense as to include thought and accountable activity. So the body is talked about. “The body is dead because of sin” (Romans 8:10). “I keep under my body, and bring it into subjection” (1 Corinthians 9:11). “That ye present your bodies a living sacrifice” (Romans 12:1). Again, “Thy whole body shall be full of light” (Matthew 6:22). Again, “The tongue defiles the whole body” (James 3:6). Again, “It is sown a soul-body; it is raised a spirit-body” (1 Corinthians 15:44). “Having our bodies washed with pure water “(Hebrews 10:22). Or once more, as some translate, “Who shall deliver me from this dead body?” (Romans 7:24).
Now, when we return to the earlier part of the Word, and see “flesh” spoken of as though it were the whole of man; as when we hear Job say, “All flesh shall perish” (Job 34:15), or the Psalmist, “He remembered that they were but flesh” (Psalm 78:39), or Moses, “They shall be one flesh” (Genesis 2:24), or the sixth chapter, throwing all animals together, “destroy all flesh” (verse 17), it does not settle indeed that such words shall never be used figuratively; but it does throw the onus of the kind and degree of their figurative use upon those who gratuitously assume that the body, even when animate, is a brutal essence in such a sense that it may have living in it or living out of it, as the case may be, an immortal and separably existent thinking spirit.
We might add a paragraph about the “blood.” The “blood” is said to be the “soul” (Leviticus 17:14). We might speak of such expressions as, “This is now bone of my bones, and flesh of my flesh “(Genesis 2:23). We might speak of woman as derived from man, and of children derived through sixty centuries from a single pair. But these things will be adverted to under other heads. It is enough for us to observe that the stripes, fitted thus far, fit better with our view than the other; that even when there are figures, the figures fit best in our arrangement of the box; and, most graphic of all, that when we search through the margins of King James, we find whole sentences put off there, proving by their position in the margin that they are more faithful to the text; and giving us this honest and artlessly rendered testimony, that they agree with our view of the soul, and not with its being independent in essence, and continuous in immortality.
CHAPTER 13
The Whole Man Dead.
Suppose the whole man does die at death, how would we prove it?
I. One proof would be if he is represented as becoming unconscious; and this we have of the very strongest kind. “His spirit goes forth; he returns to his earth: in that very day his thoughts perish “(Psalm 146:4). Lest any one should say, This means merely his counsels, we can fairly pile up kindred expressions. “In death there is no remembrance of thee. In the grave who shall give thee thanks?” (Psalm 6:5). “For the dead cannot praise thee; they that go down into the pit cannot hope for thy truth “(Isaiah 38:18). “For the living know that they shall die; but the dead know not anything “(Ecclesiastes 9:5). “For there is no work, nor device, nor knowledge, nor wisdom, in the grave, whither thou goes” (Ecclesiastes 9:10).
It may be said, We talk that way: we speak of the man dying. For good rhetorical reasons we think of him as living, and yet speak of him as dead. And the attempt might be made to obviate entirely the peculiar appearances of revelation. And yet it must be remembered that to a large degree we derive an imprint from revelation. When we speak of Joseph dying, and Joseph being buried, and Joseph being embalmed, and Joseph rising again from the grave, we follow the Scripture language even against our preconceived ideas; and yet we have fabricated sufficiently a language of our own, to show our difference from Scripture. We speak of the dead corpse, and of our mortal part, and of the relics of the dead, and of our mortal remains; and we speak of the rising of the body; when it is 7iot possible to match those words in Scripture. Eschatology delivers itself in our day differently from the Holy Ghost. And I do not mean, in merely variant speech, but in difference of creed. The Bible keeps the soul in constant union with the body. Theology, in just such unconscious ways, implies their separation.
4. How astounding this becomes when passages, such as we are asking for, are forged by a false translation. Leviticus furnishes one, “Nor shall ye go in to any dead body “(21:11). Numbers furnishes six, “He shall come at no dead body “(6: 6). “There were certain men who were defiled by the dead body of a man “(6: 6; see also verse 10). “He that touches the dead body of any man “(19:11; see also verse 16). We could increase the list. Now these might be triumphantly obtruded, and the great fact fancied that the Bible does speak as though the body were separately dead. And yet it is the mere translation-Bible. How surprised many an English reader will become when he understands that the simple Hebrew is, “A DEAD SOUL.” Let me insist upon this. We have declared that the Bible no where contains any serious instance at all where the body can be conceived of as separately dead. And here, where a sharp eye might suppose that there is one, it turns out singularly opposite.
The body is not talked of, after all, as dead; but the soul is so talked of. And we shall see, when we come to devote a special chapter to the soul, that there is a world of similar speech; that that which dies at death, is specially the soul; that that which comes up at the resurrection, is specially the sleeping soul; that that whose sleep is death, is the soul even more than the body; and that that which is precipitated into hell, is the soul in its first surprises; along with the body in which it has just arisen from the darkness of the sepulchre.
We must not anticipate, however. Our points are these:
First, that death is spoken of as an unconsciousness: (if there are any difficulties in this, we shall speak of them in the next chapter) second, that the body is not spoken of as separately dead: third, that the man dies according to the testimony of Scripture; and fourth, that if there be any difference it is on the side of the soul; we do most distinctly hear of “a dead soul:” “Nor shall ye go in to a dead soul” (Leviticus 21:11). “He shall come at no dead soul” (Numbers 6:6). “There were certain men who were defiled by the dead soul of a man:” other passages, that speak of “dead bodies” (2 Chronicles 20: 21; Psalm 90:6; Jeremiah 31: 40; Amos 8:3), using indeed not the same expression, but not at all the words dead body; using only a single vocable, as for example, “something faded” (Psalm 79: 2), or as for example, “dead one” (2 Kings 8:5), or in another instance,” exhausted ones” (2 Chronicles 20:24), expressions common to the whole man; or, in the New Testament (Revelation 11:8), a noun meaning wrecks or things fallen, having no distinct application, of course, to anything but the perished or exhausted sufferer.
Much of the argument suited to this chapter will, however, appear in the next.
CHAPTER 14
The Whole Man Buried.
If we chose to take advantage of the dissensions of theology, on the principle Divide et impera, we might insist that whoever opposes us should state his theory, and then we might unsettle that, and so evict, in turn, each possible hypothesis.
For example, Turrettin, assuming what it would puzzle him immensely to conceive, that the soul, disembodied, can still have place, makes that place heaven, and makes the soul occupy the same place before and after the resurrection (Tur: Vol. 2; Quaest, 9, p. 281). Now the beggar's soul (Luke 16:22) either did or did not rest in Hades (see verse 23). If it did, Turrettin is mistaken. If it did not, then the whole scenic accuracy of the parable must be given up as a proof of immortality.
We might multiply the instances.
We are so clear, however, that we will not ask this advantage of segregation. The point shall be, Is the soul immortal or not? And if the affirmative shift a little in their theorizing plans, so be it. It is a symptom of mistake. But we will not tax each separate conceit with more than its generic difficulties.
Now the difficulties common to every theory of immortality are, first, that our burial is spoken of as of the whole man; second, of the whole man not in such a sense as that a part can continue to live, but, that the whole sleeps; third, that that sleep is dreamless and entire; and fourth, that all the Scripture that might seem to imply that we are awake, is insignificant in extent, and easily manageable, on the other theory.
1. In the first place, the whole man is spoken of as buried. Now do not let us misunderstand this. I do not say that one such passage, or that ten such passages, would prove anything as against opposite texts: but I wish to crush by weight of column. I wish to show that all the idiom, like the current of the Nore, flows in but a single route. Like the pile on velvet, the Scripture can be smoothed down one way, and resists, the other. Take some instances. “Miriam died and was buried” (Numbers 20: 1). “Aaron died, and was buried” (Deuteronomy 10: 6). Christ was buried (1 Corinthians 15: 4). Or, taking the active verb, “They buried Abraham” (Genesis 49:31). They “buried Saul” (2 Samuel 2: 5). “I buried Leah” (Genesis 49:31). “I saw the wicked buried” (Ecclesiastes 8:10). “David is both dead and buried” (Acts 2:29). Suspecting some idiosyncrasies in this, try other expressions: try the whole weight of necrological detail. They killed him (2 Kings 15: 25). They “embalmed him” (Genesis 1:2). “They put him in a coffin” (Genesis 1: 26). They tore him in pieces (Genesis 37:33). They buried him (2 Chronicles 21:20). Or try grammatic equivalents. See if some more distant idioms cannot hint at the body. “I will go down into the grave” (Genesis 37:35). Or read a little farther, “I will go down unto my son.” So are many expressions. He was gathered to his fathers (Judges 2:10). “He was gathered to his people” (Genesis 25:8). There is no hint that they were not all dead and buried. “He that goes down to the grave shall not go up” (Job 7:9). “If I wait, the grave is my house” (Job 17:13). “They shall go down to the bars of the pit, when our rest together is in the dust” (Job 17:16). “Yet shall he be brought to the grave, and shall remain in the tomb” (Job 21:32). “They shall lie down alike in the dust, and the worms shall cover them” (Job 5:26).
“For since the fathers fell asleep, all things continue as they were” (2 Peter 3:4).
3. But says some one, following each sentence as I quote it, and blotting it out, That is but the sleep of the body. It is like the rising of the sun, or like the falling of the dew. The dew does not really fall, but it looks that way. Man does not really die, but beasts do. And the general look of our unconsciousness would fully account for the rhetoric speech.
Grant all that. But then there is a difficulty. Would not the Holy Ghost come to our rescue? Would not the Holy Ghost, when he came to didactic utterances, set these things right? The sponging and the blotting who more capable than God himself? Having left me sleeping in the dust, would he not paint again, and tell me, like the Shulamite, “I sleep, but my heart wakes” (Song Of Solomon 5:2). Now, unfortunately for my belief of immortality, he does no such thing. He follows this thought of “sleep,” and prints it, and settles it: and this is our third evidence. I mean to note it rapidly. He tells us we are unconscious. He gives us no trace that we think in the grave. He tells us we do not: and leaves us, for the great purposes of mercy, only warned of a gracious resurrection.
“Why died I not from the womb?” cries the patriarch Job. “Now should I have lain still and been quiet; I should have slept: then had I been at rest.” Is not the very idea here, of soul-rest, and thinking unconsciousness? “As a hidden untimely birth, I had not been; as infants which never saw light.”
Blessed be forgetfulness! that is his idea. “There the wicked cease from troubling; and there the weary be at rest. The small and the great are there; and the servant is free from his master. Wherefore is light given to him that is in misery, and life unto the bitter in soul? Which long for death, but it cometh not; and dig for it more than for hid treasure; which rejoice exceedingly, and are glad when they can find the grave?” (Job 3:11, 13-22). He says in another place, “I should have been as though I had not been” (Job 10:19). He speaks of the place as “a land of darkness as darkness itself, and where the light is as darkness” (verse 22). He speaks of the time as the whole period “till the heavens be no more” (14:12). And he seems to take the ground of entire non-existence: that till the time of the blessed resurrection, even God shall not find us; “Thou shalt seek me in the morning, but I shall not be” (7:21). For “man dies, and wastes away: yea, man gives up the ghost, and where is he?” (14:11).
And lest any one say, Job was not inspired, let us appeal to the Psalms. “In death there is no remembrance of thee. In the grave who shall give thee thanks?” (Psalm 6:3). They put it in still more methodical light; “What profit is there in my blood, when I go down to the pit? Shall the dust praise thee? Shall it declare thy truth?” (Psalm 30:9). “Wilt thou show wonders to the dead? Shall the dead arise and praise thee? Shall thy loving kindness be declared in the grave? or thy faithfulness in destruction? Shall thy wonders be known in the dark? and thy righteousness in the land of forgetfulness?” (Psalm 88:10-12). And then the refrain long afterward; “The dead praise not the Lord, neither any that go down into silence” (Psalm 115:17).
Solomon is even still stronger; “The dead know not anything” (Ecclesiastes 9:5). “There is no knowledge in the grave” (Ecclesiastes 9:10).
4. And now, in the fourth place, we are to consider those passages that seem to contradict all this; and first the parable of Dives.
We are teaching that man is unconscious in the grave. This parable is speaking as though death were alive with history. Let us listen, “The rich man also died, and was buried; and in hell he lifted up his eyes, being in torment, and saw Abraham afar off, and Lazarus in his bosom” (Luke 16:22, 23). This cannot be after the judgment, for he distinctly says, “I pray thee, therefore, father, that thou would send him to my father's house; for I have five brethren; that he may testify unto them, lest they also come into this place of torment” (vs. 27, 28).
Now there can be nothing fairer, as to this parable, than to reply, that if the favourers of immortality will say what this parable means, and choose an interpretation for it, we will meet them on their own ground. Is it a parable at all? Some say, No; because a man's name is given. Let us choose, therefore, two grand methods of interpretation; one as fable, and the other as fact; in other words, one as the Unjust Steward, commended solely at a single point; the other as the marriage of Cana of Galilee, true throughout, and responsibly told, as a strict detail of an accomplished history.
Our blessed Lord had been insulted. He had been told, “This man receives sinners and eats with them” (Luke 5:2). He began a series of parables. The point of the parables was, The True Believer. He begins gently. We have, pictured first, the hundred sheep. He does not denounce the ninety and nine. He hovers only over the lost one, and brings him forth as rescued the true Christian Believer. So the lost money; as, in another chapter, the publican (18:13); though there he begins to reflect more upon the pampered Pharisee. So the prodigal (15:11); but now with still bitterer reflections, making the self-righteous more and more ungodly; so that the elder brother stands out in the baseness of impenitent life. And so at last, Dives. The whole group is painted to convict the Pharisee.
And when at last we are told of the purple and fine linen, it is infinitely far from Christ to be speaking of the luxury of rich men. He is speaking of the ascetic Jewish worshipper. The “purple” is a false royalty. The “linen” is a vain righteousness. And the “faring sumptuously” is the condition of the ninety-nine just persons. And Lazarus is the Eleazur of the Old Testament; not a real man at all, but Eleazur, the Lord my help; just the very picture, in his poverty, and rags, of the true believer of that illustrious line, the Sheep, the Money, and the Publican, the Prodigal, and the Unjust Steward, all of whom picture in common forms the contrition and the up-waking of the gospel.
Now let our opponents choose. Shall this narrative, like that of the Unjust Steward, be confined to a single point; and shall that point be a trust to the blood of Abraham? Shall all the dressings of the fable be a mere device; and the main lesson be, that when Dives died, Abraham was afar off, and the beggar-man reposing in his bosom? or shall we bring in all the hard accessories? In one way the meaning is complete. The Unjust Steward can be taken in his allegoric point, viz., making friends in his life-time of the gifts and the grace which in his ungodly state are to him “another man's”: and so Dives can be treated solely in his disappointed state of disinheritance from Abraham. But let our opponents choose. As to the verity that is actually meant we insist upon a choice being made. Is the whole an accurate fact? Or is it, like the tale of the Bramble (Judges 9:14), a free-wrought fable?
If it be an accurate fact, let there be no trifling, of course. If Dives lifted up his eyes, where did he get his eyes? Or if that may be thought to be a figure, let us notice how much need there is of figures everywhere. What are we to think of the “torment”? What are we to think of the “flame”? What are we to think of the “water”? What are we to think of the “tongue”? and of the cooling of the tongue? and of the “gulf fixed”? And of “Lazarus afar off”? and of the “bosom of Abraham”? If these things, on account of all three men being spirits, must be relegated into the realm of figure, where is the limit? and why may not all be? Especially as there are parables of Christ that are not even allegorically just, except in one single phase (Matthew 20:10, Luke 16:8).
Our account, therefore, of the Pharisee is, that he is unconscious and dead; and that this scene in his sepulchre is of high rhetoric fiction. It merely brings out his dire mistake about the blood of Abraham, and about the publicans and harlots that would get into his bosom sooner than he. It is merely a notice of what he would see and know if he were to wake up in the dead grave and understand his history. To speak of the liberties taken, I would mention the very word Hades as nowhere else spoken of as a place of torment. Gesenius, therefore, argues that it may mean such a place, but has the significant word seme I, and a reference to this single passage. Moreover, the word itself ought to be looked at. I notice the active form unseeing* rather than the word unseen; and, therefore, boldly teach that the parable of Dives is the waking up of dead ghosts, to put on the cerements of their clay, and stalk the stage in religious fiction.
This is worthy of study. If the Greek word Hades means un-seeing, and the Hebrew word (Sheol) means nothing to the contrary, it would require great ingenuity to show that the testimony of the name is not quite on the side of unconsciousness.
If any one begs that we bring forward anything else that will match it in the Holy Bible, we hurry on now to other passages. “Hell from beneath is moved for thee to meet thee at thy coming: it stirs up the dead for thee, even all the chief ones of the earth; it hath raised up from their thrones all the kings of the nations. All they shall speak and say unto thee, Art thou also become weak as we? Art thou become like unto us? Thy pomp is brought down to the grave, and the noise of thy viols: the worm is spread under thee, and the worms cover thee. How art thou fallen from heaven, O Lucifer, son of the morning! “(Isaiah 14:9-12). In the Revelation, “I saw under the altar the souls of them that were slain for the word of God, and for the testimony that they held” (Revelation 6:9). See now how difficulties cluster. Understand all this as an allegory, and everything lies smooth. “Under the altar” means under the hope of blessed immortality that the altar has achieved. “White robes” means the same thing laid away and buried with them to be put on at the last day.
Crying means the impatient appeal of the blood of dead saints for speedy justice. Rest means unconscious death: and the date, precisely our date: for now read the whole. “And white robes were given unto every one of them; and it was said unto them that they should rest yet for a little season, until their fellow servants also, and their brethren that should be slain as they were, should be fulfilled” (verse 11). But now quote all this of their immortality, and what do we behold? Why first, we behold dead souls, just as Dives must behold Lazarus, though he was a disembodied spirit: second, they are under the altar; third, they cry; fourth, they speak about their blood, though they are disembodied spirits; fifth, they have white robes; and sixth, they rest, as though they were in durance vile, though they are in receipt of their felicity!
Job says, “Dead things are formed from under the water, and the inhabitants thereof” (Job 26:5). We pass it as though it were trivial, but I happened to dig into the sentence, and there comes up another case. “Dead things” are shades. “Are formed” means tremble. The language reads, “The shades tremble under the waters, and under the inhabitants thereof” (Job 26:5); the meaning being, that the whole universe bows homage to its Creator; and, as in the other cases, bold rhetoric art makes even the dead join the spectacle, and down deep below the very monsters of the sea (Jonah 2:5, 6) the Oriental Hades tremble in its dark inhabitants.
Escaping, therefore, from rhetoric, which may linger more in doubt, our opponent may bring forth the celebrated case of the Thief (Luke 23:43).
But that we will not linger upon, because it is disposed of by the single remark, that the passage is absolutely ambiguous.
If I say in English, And Jesus said unto him, Verily I say unto thee to-day thou shalt be with me in paradise, it is a positive equivoque as to whether “I say to-day,” or” thou shalt be to-day;” and ten thousand years would not settle it as a point of grammar. But the question may be asked, Will the Greek help us? or will the logic of the passage afford any solution?
As to the Greek, it has like ambiguity with the English, as may be learned from the fact that men like Hesychius (see Wetstein and Grotius in loc), with no point to gain, have made Christ mean, “I say today.” It may be set down as prejudice on our part, but we think the Greek has less ambiguity than the English. For example, Christ says, “Verily I say unto thee, This day. . thou shalt deny me thrice.” Here, though the expression “this night” following immediately after, makes mistake more impossible, the word “that,” as will be noticed, is put carefully in: I say unto thee that this day,” etc. (Mark 14:30). The same guard is used in Luke 4:21, and in Luke 5:26 (see also other passages, e. g. Luke xix: 9). Moreover, the adverb is moved to a less exposed position (Luke 22:34), and there are other marks (Luke 13: 32; Hebrews 5: 5). But we will not insist on the grammar (see also Acts 26: 29), nor much on the logic. We only think that the instinct that approaches a sufferer, and says, “I will not trouble you now; but when you come to think of this scene, Lord remember me” etc. (verse 42), might consider itself gloriously answered, if the Great Sufferer exclaimed, Thou mayest trouble me now; I will settle it at once: “I say unto thee to-day” etc. etc. The Greek is, to say the very least, ambiguous; and is therefore perfectly worthless to withstand on either side great evidences against it.
We grapple, therefore, with another sentence: “Now that the dead are raised, even Moses showed at the bush, when he called the Lord the God of Abraham, and the God of Isaac, and the God of Jacob. For he is not a God of the dead, but of the living (Luke 20:37, 38).
This will be a grand sentence; for it will be plain and positive which ever way the victory turns. It is not that it is a sentence of our Lord's: for that, past all peradventure, makes not a particle of difference. “All Scripture is given by inspiration of God.” It is, that there is here no poetic flight, or flash of a dreamy rhetoric. It is all prose. It is in the tread of a grave debate. It is under the weight of a national question. It is under the spur of a grave opportunity for truth. And it is under the eye of a large assembly of the people, waiting eagerly for the expected answer.
Now, how possibly can I maintain my theory? I say, Abraham is dead. And not only so, but he is extinct from thinking. If he has a soul, it is a dead soul, committed to the keeping of God who gave it. He is in no manner of sense, as a present patriarch, alive. And yet our Saviour does most distinctly teach, as against the thought of the Sadducee, first, that there is a God of Abraham, and second, and in a way that is a reason in the case, “He is not a God of the dead, but of the living.”
How possibly can we survive such a distinct ratiocination?
It is fair to ask, What is the ratiocination? In fact, can anything be fairer? What was our Lord attempting to prove? How if it turns out that this passage can be swept into the list of proofs for us? Our Lord is defending the resurrection. Imagine a case. Suppose our Lord was not defending the resurrection. Suppose he were defending immortality. Suppose he were to argue, “I am the God of Abraham, and the God of Isaac, and the God of Jacob.” Those patriarchs must every one of them be alive; “for God is not the God of the dead, but of the living.” And suppose the answer came, Not so, Lord; but there is a glorious resurrection; and the promise, “I am the God of Abraham” is incontestably fulfilled; not by his hovering like a sprite, but by his ascending among the blest; not in this passing age, but in that glorious period when we are to be assembled beyond the tomb. Could Christ's argument stand out against such a reply?
But suppose it were different. Suppose it were for the “resurrection” (verse 33). Suppose it were just what it was. How complete, then, like all the pregnant ratiocinations of our Master (see Matthew 21:23, 24; 22:21). “Few and evil have the days of my life been,” says the patriarch Jacob. Now, says our Lord, God was the God of Jacob. What is the use of having a God, if that was all the record of the ancient patriarch? God is the God of every man, rectorally. But God, to be the God of any one as his good Father, must provide him better than Jacob had. And, therefore, there must be more of Jacob.
Instead of an argument for immortality, it is an argument the other way; for it argues that there would be no chance to give Jacob a better life unless he rose again, which would be palpably untrue. Jacob, according to our opponent's plan, is now enjoying more than enough to balance all his misery; and I will, in parting, give this slight touch too to the passage, that in the third account of the scene, viz., that of the philosophic Luke, he remembers another clause that he had heard reported, viz., this gloss of Christ himself upon what he was saying, that the life he was speaking of was a life that we had, treasured in God (see John 6:57; Colossians 3:3); for, as he chooses to express it, “all live unto, i.e., in reference to (see Greek particle), Him” (verse 38).
One passage more. The risen Samuel (1 Samuel 28:11). This also is quoted as proving that we can listen in our tombs.
We have already remarked that Samuel says, “Why hast thou disquieted me to bring me up?” (verse 15), which agrees, in all its cast as a sentence, with the proprieties of the speech in Acts, “For David, after he had served his own generation by the will of God, fell on sleep, and was laid unto his fathers, and saw corruption” (Acts 13:36).
But neglecting that; what does the passage in any other way conclude? Has any one denied that the dead can be raised up? Why, our very doctrine is, that all will be brought up alive at the final judgment. Was it a ghost that Endor saw? She says, Not. The language is, “An old man cometh up;” and she says, “He is covered with a mantle. And Saul perceived that it was Samuel; and he stooped with his face to the ground, and bowed himself (verse 14). That the old man stirred in his grave one moment before he was lifted up, is no more apparent than that the millions of the earth must be awake, or they cannot hear the final trumpeter No text can be tortured, in all this narrative, to say one word for immortality.
But on the contrary, Why did not Samuel say something about his glorious state? Such is an argument that has not been enough considered. There have been a room-full of the departed, that have gone and come again; and many of them have lived long lives, like the Shunamite's son, and told nothing. There is Jairus' daughter. Why did she not testify to her Deliverer what she had heard of him in Hades? It may be said that they were forbidden. Then why was not that mentioned? Moreover, scores of men that were healed, refused to be bound by any secrecy (Luke 5:14, 15). Why not some resurrected one? And Eutychus and Lazarus and all those lifted out of Hades why are they as silent as their sepulchres? And why did the Widow's son, spending long winters in his village, tell to an inquisitive world no grand facts of his immortal living. The very idea is impossible.
Gathering up our train, however, we must prepare for the next step. If the whole man is dead, and the whole man is buried, we will look with keen avidity to the next fact, viz., a like uniformity in revelation as to the whole man rising again.
CHAPTER 15
The Whole Man Raised from the Dead.
In arraying our argument here, we will speak first of the single expressions of Scripture, like those we have already noticed of death and burial; we will consider, second, the accent laid upon our rising; we will consider, third, the fact of judgment; we will consider, fourth, the surprises in that event; we will consider, fifth, the picking out of a DAY, the Judgment Day, and emphasizing it so much; and we will consider, sixth, those serious sentences in which men are entered together into heaven or into hell.
No mortal ever comes up by miracle without coming up as Samuel (1 Samuel 28:14), or Moses (Matthew xvii; 3), just as he comes up at the resurrection in the last day. If he were conscious in his sepulchre, why not bring Moses up, and let him talk to the Lord disembodied, or like that ether that floated before the eye of Eliphaz? (Job 4:16). Why create a body? And why ALWAYS and I beg that may be noted as the point of my argument is the whole machinery of Scripture framed on the notion of an undivided man?
Especially, why evermore speak of the man as rising? “Now if Christ be preached that he rose from the dead, how say some among you that there is no resurrection of the dead? “(1 Corinthians 15:11.) Notice the striking uniformity; “The dead are raised up” (Matthew 11: 5). “Whoso eats my flesh, I will raise him up at the last day” (John 6:54). Lazarus is raised (John 12:1). “Christ both died, and rose, and revived” (Romans 14:9); and again, “died, and was buried, and rose again” (1 Corinthians 15:4); or, a little differently, “must be killed, and must be raised again” (Matthew 16:21). “Women received their dead raised to life again” (Hebrews 11:35); and “all that are in their graves shall hear his voice, and shall come forth” (John 5:28).
Let it be distinctly understood: The whole force of our evidence here is not exhausted even in these combined quotations. But a man breathes by his lungs. There may come a time when he may lose too much of his lungs to breathe at all. Immortality is a question of Scripture. We may cut off so much of Scripture as to stop its breath. We have cut off necrological speeches about the grave. We are cutting off necrological speeches about our rising. And we are to complete our task. The roots of the whole dogma are possible only in the Word. We are cutting them off, one by one. And as we reach the last, there is no atom of sap that can be pleaded from outside tradition.
II. Again, if resurrection be only of the body, why is it so constantly harped upon as everything in our history? Death is never alluded to. If resurrection be only of the body, then death was my great birth. I leaped at once from shame to blessedness. Why does not all this appear? If death be only of the body, I shoot up, when that falls, into the life of Jesus. Who does not long for that? If resurrection be only of the body, it finds me an old citizen: I have lived and reigned with Christ millenniums of years. And yet I am to be told, that, though I have never lived otherwise scarce at all; though the life I once lived in the flesh was not a century; though it was wretched; though it seems to me like an ugly dream; though it flew by me like a vision; and death bore me out of it, and I became perfect at the grave; yet that is not my “great day” at all; but the whole oil of exultation is to be poured out on the resurrection of my clay.
Will any one solve the riddle?
What mourners men have been at the idea of glorification! “Man lies down, and rises not: till the heavens be no more, they shall not awake nor be raised out of their sleep. O that thou would hide me in the grave; that thou would keep me secret until thy wrath be past, that thou would appoint me a set time, and remember me” (Job 14:12, 13). “Thou w r ilt not leave my soul in Hades; neither wilt thou suffer thy Holy One to see corruption” (Psalm 16:10). Even the Messiah seems to have no love for the grave. “But God will redeem my soul from the power of the grave: for he shall receive me” (Psalm 49:15).
Now why is this?
And why, though the body is important, yet bear down upon it with so much accent, when none has been allotted to the more giant up starting of the soul? “If a man die, shall he live again?” Why certainly, in the twinkling of an eye. But, poor Job! “All the days of my appointed time will I wait, till my change come” (Job. 14:14). And listen to David, “But God will redeem my soul from the power of the grave: for he shall receive me” (Psalm 49:15).
And all this becomes still more decisive when Paul speaks of the resurrection as the great “hope” of the believer. “Looking for that blessed hope” etc. (Titus 2:13). “And now I stand, and am judged for the hope of the promise made of God unto our fathers. Why should it be thought a thing incredible that God should raise the dead?” (Acts 26: 6, 8). And again, “have hope toward God, which they themselves also allow, that there shall be a resurrection of the dead, both of the just and of the unjust” (Acts 24: 15). Again, “What advantage it me if the dead rise not?” (1 Corinthians 15:32). “If in this life only we have hope toward God, we are of all men most miserable” (verse 19). “They also which are fallen asleep in Christ are perished” (verse 18). And again, that almost blasphemous sentence, “Let us eat and drink, for to-morrow we die” (verse 32). I say, almost blasphemous: for if Paul really believed that we are glorified at death, and yet spoke of our unblameableness (1 Thessalonians 3:13), and our confidence (1 John 2:28), and our redemption (Ephesians 4:30), and our sanctification (Ephesians 5:26, 27), and our adoption (Romans viii: 23), and our joy (1 Thessalonians 2:19), and hope (Titus 2:13), and comfort (1 Thessalonians 4:18), and our glorification (Romans 8:17, 18), and our entire reward and perfectness (Revelation 2:18), as all waiting for us in our sepulchre, we would turn against the apostle as an intellectual puzzle, and judge it to be a light verdict, that gay reply of Festus, as he “said with a loud voice, Paul thou art beside thyself; much learning doth make thee mad” (Acts 26:24).
If I am unconscious in the grave, and the clanging of the trumpet supervenes upon my dying memory, I can understand the Great White Throne, as an apparition strangely natural, and the Grand Assize as in the highest degree to be expected after the confusions of my earthly living. If my neighbour, when he dies to-night, has his whole case left resting through the ages of the sepulchre; if there be, therefore, the necessity of a seal, by which he may be known at last (Ephesians 4:30); and an earnest (Ephesians 1:14); and a life hid with Christ (Colossians 3:3); and an attesting by his earthly faith (Hebrews 11:39); I can understand how all this must be looked into, when he comes to rise, and how the hurrying thousands may be spoken of as before a solemn judgment. But how unspeakably does all this puzzle us, if it be our body! If it be our body only that is missing, and Jehovah's trumpets are sent out only for our dust; why make a court for that? And why, after we have been ages in hell, summon us up by a herald to meet a Grand Assize, simply when we are putting on our body? The idea of any judgment, therefore, when we have been fixed in our awards for ages, puzzles our whole thought; and though our thought is not the test, still, as against the proofs that have been brought, it will serve to give confidence to men, as against phantasies that have so long possessed us.
IV. But, fourthly, there is to be a waking in surprise (Matthew 25:11). How is that to be considered possible?
I lie down to sleep, and friends, who saw me sink into dissolution, know that I died in hope. I had a hope full of immortality. But suppose I was under a grand mistake. Scores of instances, coming up at the last, might fill the judgment spaces with terrible amazement. And this would plainly seem the nature of the Bible picture. But suppose I have been in hell. Here really comes in sight the dignity of a Scriptural refutation. Suppose I have been glorified. Nay rather this Suppose that I never died.
Suppose that I lived right on; and what was called death was the mere dropping of my frame. Suppose that I knew last night as much of fate as I shall know for a thousand years. What is meant by my surprise? And why do I cry out in remonstrance (Luke 13:25); and tell how I prophesied (Matthew 7:22); and ask, “when saw I thee naked” (Matthew 25:44); and call, in sudden tones, and in an agony of anguished disappointment, “Lord, Lord, open unto us?” (Luke 13:25).
All this has to be taken in under the “immortal” theory.
When I died, I became glorified. I had never been perfect before. I had always sinned against my Redeemer. When I died, 1 became perfect. There then, if anywhere in the calendar, I must expect to see my Red Letter. Why is the Bible so twisted? The day I die seems sponged out of the account; and the day I rise, when by these “immortal” notions bliss is an old tale; when I have been glorified for thousands of years; when death was my nativity, and life lies behind me like a speck in the past, “that day” (2 Timothy 4:8), or “the day of Christ” (Philippians 1:10), or the day of mercy (2 Timothy 1:18), the day of hope (Titus 2:13), and the day of redemption (Ephesians 4:30), the declaration day (1 Corinthians 3:13), and the coronation day (2 Timothy 4:8), and the inauguration day (2 Thessalonians 1:10), “the day of wrath” (Romans 2:5), the unknown day (Matthew 24:36), “the great day” (Jude 1:6), or, as one apostle expresses it, “The Great Day of His Wrath” (Revelation 6:17), is greeted with a blaze of ornament; and my dawn of glory stands so unmentioned as to be almost forgotten. Why is this? The judgment, which would be indeed our life-date if our theory be true, treated as though it were our life-date, and death, which is our adversary's birth, scarce ever mentioned?
VI. Lastly; why are the paradise-gates opened as though for the first time? Paul says, “These all, having been attested by faith, received not the promise (see 2 Peter 3:4; 1 John 2:25), God, with reference to us, having looked forward to a something better, that they without us should not be made perfect” (Hebrews 11:39, 40). “With reference to us;” that is, that Paul may not enter late to heaven, and find Lot centuries in advance. This seems the plain meaning: that the souls under the altar may rest yet for a little season, till they and their fellow-servants, and their brethren also, who should be slain as they were, should have their numbers filled up (Revelation 6:11). This seems the sole meaning. No Scripture ever speaks of an earlier entrance into paradise. And as we can see a plain reason for all starting evenly in heaven and in hell, we see the probability that it should occur at Judgment; in fact, the whole beauty of the scene, if the Judgment at the last actually consigns the object of it either to pain or glory.
Now seven quotations more. “The wicked is reserved to the day of destruction” (Job 21:30). Again, “They shall be brought forth to the day of wrath” (ib.). “Many of them that sleep in the dust shall awake, some to everlasting life, and some to shame and everlasting contempt” (Daniel 12:2). “He shall separate them one from another, as a shepherd divides his sheep from the goats” (Matthew 25:32). “But rejoice, inasmuch as ye are partakers of Christ's sufferings; that, when his glory shall be revealed, ye may be glad also with exceeding joy” (1 Peter 4:13). “Henceforth there is laid up for me a crown of righteousness, which the Lord, the righteous judge, shall give me at that day” (2 Timothy 4:8). “The Lord knows how to deliver the godly out of temptations, and to reserve the unjust unto the day of judgment to be punished” (2 Peter 2:9).
CHAPTER 16
The Whole of Man, Soul.
If soul has an analogy with life in the bean-stalk, we might expect that, in a long document like Holy Scripture, if dust and flesh were spoken of as the whole man, so soul and spirit would be; and this we everywhere discover throughout the revelation. The attempts of the translators to conceal it, only show the unconscious prejudice which is a help to our position. It would be impossible, if soul and body were separate essences, and if, as a subsidiary fact, the body died on a certain date, and the soul continued animate, to find the Holy Ghost, and that as His literary habit, representing the soul as dead, and the body not so in any single instance. What are we to augur, if this actually comes out in the Hebrew? and if, when we find it so, we find the translators apparently shocked with such a discovery, and smothering it up in their translation? For example, what are we to think if we read in Leviticus, “Neither shall he go in to any dead soul”? (21:11). What are we to think if there are scores of such expressions? (Numbers 6:6; 19:11; Haggai 2:13). What are we to think of smiting the soul (Leviticus 24: 17, 18), and killing the soul (Numbers 31:19), and slaying the soul? (Deuteronomy 27:25).
What are we to think of metamorphosing this (R. V.) into slaying “persons,” or smiting the “life” (Leviticus 24:17, margin) of anybody? What are we to think of the expression, “Doeg slew eighty-five souls? “(1 Samuel 22:18). Or what are we to think of the Bible enumerating men by their souls, and speaking of “thirty and two thousand souls” (Numbers 31:35), and of the translators changing this usually into persons (Numbers 31:35; Genesis 14:21), but of its occurring so often that they feel the monotony of the change, and sometimes keep in the more literal word? Nay, what is to be thought of this having stolen into classic English, and that we ourselves should speak of so many thousand souls? letting the soul stand for the man, just as the dust does (Psalm 30:9), and just as the flesh does (Luke 3:6), in other corresponding expressions?
Do not let it be said, We can overcome all this: for what are we to overcome it with but the Bible? These adverse appearances are in the Bible. All those other are in the Bible. And if life and death and burial, and rising again, and judgment, all offer themselves in idioms, and all in ways idiomatically alike, where are we to go to correct everything? and where get proof of immortality except in some other texts, which in some way, idiomatically or not, will furnish us with a different impression?
Look at another fact. The translators introduce the very word soul as though it were a human adjunct. They associate it with Adam. They say not one word about soul till man comes to be created: indeed, not there, in the first chapter (Genesis 1:26); for there is no word that would answer to it. It is not till the second chapter (Genesis 2:7), that we hear a word about it; and there it is made to start, as though it were the appanage of man. We have this distinct rendering; “God formed man [of the] dust of the ground, and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life; and man became a living soul.” Who would ever dream that the word was first applied to fish? We turn to the first chapter and read, “Let the waters swarm with swarms of living soul” (1:20). We look a little further, and “God created great whales, and every living soul” (verse 21), We glance down the page, “And God said, Let the earth bring forth the living soul” (verse 24): a little further, “And God said, To you it shall be for meat, and to every beast of the earth, and to every fowl of the air, and to every thing that creeps upon the earth, in which is a living soul”(verses 29, 30). We come to man, and no use of that word for him occurs in the first chapter. The word animal (anima, Latin) seems, at the start, to assert its whole right to the name. I charge no unfairness; but I charge unconsciousness. I charge unconscious prejudice. And I charge that no Englishman would know of these facts, or would suppose that beasts had souls, save only in an accommodated sense, or in a form that would be set down as secondary.
To resume; I am alluding in all this to the fact, that the translators, before they come to speak of man in the second chapter, smother the word soul under a false or indifferent translation.
Now, abandoning these bolder points, let us do what we refused to do first, i.e., treat the soul more radically. We would not do it first, because those bolder things would serve best, in limine. When we begin to refine, men stop their ears. We wished to get it uttered that the Bible talks of dead souls; and that it treats the whole man as though he were dust, and also as though he were soul; and that it mixes him irreparably with brutes (Ecclesiastes 3:19); that is, that, unless there is a resurrection, the Scripture so endows us like brutes, that we have, as Solomon states it, all one spirit (Ecclesiastes 3:19); and such inseparable unity, that as the brute dies, so dies also the man (id.). This seems shocking doctrine; but so much more glorious the resurrection of the dead; and so much more intelligible the treatment of the Bible, when it lays such awful stress upon the wrath (Romans 2:5), and upon the glory (1 Peter 4:13), of that final day.
Let us go back, however. Soul is too seminal a word not to be looked into radically; and, therefore, we will treat the original image, that breeds the word in so many of the languages of the earth.
And I begin by saying, that it would be a great outrage upon truth, if a trope were seized upon to express all the great realities of being, and there were nothing in that trope, so fondly gone for, to express in eligible detail the idea that gendered it.
Breath is the trope we are thinking of.
There is a strange tenacity with which thought has refused all other expressions. Let us inspect but two languages.
There was needed a trope that should become the name for living. We hardly think of tropes in such a connection. And we turn to the Hebrew, and find the word hay ah; and turn to the Greek, and find the word zoe; and we hardly think of them as any but original words. But the least touch of a dictionary reveals the image. Hay ah means life, and zoe means life; but, when we penetrate to the root, we find in both of them the idea of breathing. Now that might be thought enough. Breathing is a very tolerable image. When a child is born, breathing announces that he is alive; and when the man is dying, breathing announces that he is not dead. It is the ocular insignia of life. But one would think that that might end it. And yet, with wonderful tenacity of gripe, all nations seem to love that figure. There comes up an idea of soul. How it originates, may be perhaps best claimed from the word. But delaying that, there comes up a need for an expression; and we turn to the Lexicons, and find, no longer indeed hay ah and zoe for they are already appropriated; but we find other and similar vocables that mean breath. Why is this? What is therein souls, whether of animals or men, that implies breathing? And yet no other trope is thought of. We have nephesh in the Hebrew, and psuche in the Greek. And all through the weary way, these words come up. Now it is an outrage upon thought, that men should stick to a figure so closely, and yet that there should not be some prevailing feature to make it such a desired expression.
But now further! Thought rolls on, and there is need of another explication. What shall it be? There is need of something higher. Life is subtle enough, but there is life in a bean. Soul is dignified enough, but there is soul in a brute. I do not mean anything outside of soul; but it would be convenient to speak of conscience, and the higher thought; and that which the soul possesses above the range of merely sensuous ideas. Soul moral we would like, as well as soul rational and fleshly. How shall we call it? How strange if the speech-builders should go with a bee-line to the old figure, and search whether there be not another word which means nothing in the world but breath, but which is thus far unoccupied; and which will leave the delicious image, which seems to have attracted everybody, free and unspoken, as now quite a different word for higher and still more ethereal being.
The word has risen to the lips already; ruah in the Hebrew, and pneuma in the Greek; translated out of both languages by our word spirit; borrowed, as being our nobler title, and applied to God; and yet nothing in the world but breath; that trope, for reasons that must have been singularly express, following our race through all the higher conceptions of their created being.
Now what are those reasons?
Let me pause, however, to say, that it would be an idle chapter if I filled it with typological conceits. The reader can build those as well as any one. If I went nakedly to the trope, and said, Breath acts so and so, and therefore soul, by reason of the name, must be so and so, and that against the current of popular persuasion, men would laugh at me; and, therefore, let it be distinctly understood; I do not mean to prove that the soul is not immortal by mere lexicon proofs of what the breath is, and, therefore, of what the soul must be to have bred the figure.
Far otherwise. I mean to resort, as before, to Scripture. I mean to be firm within it. But, as Scripture talks of the soul under no other similitude than breath, I mean to talk so also; and on this thread of a tropical sense I mean to string the thoughts that are to be derived from the Holy Ghost.
1. In the first place, breath is evanescent. It is so with the bean stalk. It dies; and its hay ah just ceases, and perishes like a dream away. Now, listen to the Scripture: “His breath goes forth; he returns to his earth; in that very day his thoughts perish” (Psalm 146:4). We look into the Hebrew, and the word translated “breath” is just the common one, spirit. The answer, then, echoing back, Yes, but it also means breath, places us in just the position in which we wish to stand. A word means breath, and that same word, falling under the Hebrew eye, means also spirit. Breath is known to be evanescent. In spite of its evanescent character, it is the favourite word for spirit. Now, if this were all, the inference would not be so complete. But, presently, we are thronged with passages which either (1) seem utterly careless whether we translate breath or spirit, or, what is far higher proof, (2) oblige us to translate, spirit; but imply a kindred evanescence to that which is included in the idea of breath.
(1) Of the former class is the text just quoted, “His breath goes forth” (Psalm 146:4). It would answer just as well to say, “His spirit goes forth.” We can multiply the instances. Job says, “In whose hand is the breath of all mankind” (Job 12:10). It might just as well be translated, “In whose hand is the spirit of all mankind.” “Thou takes away their breath, they die” (Psalm 104: 29). “Thou takes away their spirit”: it would have been just as well. And so in Solomon, “Yea, they have all one breath” (Ecclesiastes 3:19). “Yea, they have all one spirit.” In the Greek, King James' men often hesitate. Witness an instance in St. James: “For as the body, without the spirit” They throw immediately into the margin, “The body without the breath” (James 2:26). And how could they decide?
Now I say, This negligence of speech is thoroughly venial, if the soul is a breath. If when Jesus cries, “Father, into thy hands I commit my spirit,” it would create no confusion of speech if it were translated, “Father, into thy hands I commit my breath”; if, in other words, spirit were figured by breath in the precise sense in which Christ was using it: if Israel gave up the ghost (Genesis 49:33) in that perishing sense in which he gave up his breath; then it would make little difference, this negligence of use as between the breath and the spirit. Driven for our proof entirely to the words of Scripture, that man will be an unfair polemic, who, when we touch the Scripture language here and there, entrenches himself in imagined proofs; when we are literally cutting away all his evidences.
(2) Then again, the Bible justifies the figure. It not only uses spirit and breath indiscriminately; it not only uses soul and life with utter negligence; but it does not hesitate an instant to speak of a dead soul.
Here is the place to notice that enormity.
Abraham speaks constantly of his soul living (Genesis 12:13). Lot seems to have no other idea of his escape from peril (Genesis 19:20). The patriarchs seem to have no other idiom so present in their language. And, when the converse comes up, and we hear of smiting souls (Leviticus 24:17), and of smiting beasts' souls (verse 18), and of cutting off souls (Exodus 12:15), and of that strongest of all expressions, “dead souls” (Leviticus 21:11; Numbers 6:6), as answering entirely to the idea of the loathsome corpse (Numbers 9:10) by touching which the Israelites might be defiled, we have certainly gone a good deal farther than the negligent mixing of soul and breath; and have reached that other point, namely, that the whole man is talked of boldly as though he were evanescent spirit.
2. Let me speak of this under a second head.
That the soul is figured under the name of breath, requires a word of explanation before we can teach thereby that the soul is therefore inseparable from the body. That the breath, in a certain intelligible way, is also inseparable from the body, does not forbid the speech that the breath has left the body. We say that the life has left the palm-tree. But what do we mean? We mean that the two things, body and breath; or the two things, viz. life and the palm-tree, are inseparable in the very highest way; that is, not only cannot the breath go out, and exist, or similarly, not only cannot the life leave the palm and continue to be, but the palm cannot exist either. The life has gone out like a spark; and the man and the tree have lost their being. Now till the Bible taught us differently this is what we would infer from the departure of the spirit. The spirit goes out (Psalm 146:4); the spirit is given up (Job 11:20); the spirit is departing (Genesis 35:18); or, in a rare case or two, returns (1 Kings 17: 22); or comes back (Luke 8:55), after returning to God who gave it (Ecclesiastes 12:7); and if left to ourselves, we would treat that like the oak tree, and regard the departure of life like the departure of breath from the living animalism.
But, luckily, the Bible is very communicative. It does not leave us to guess, but favours this very supposition.
In the first place, it makes soul inseparable by dignifying it often as the whole name for the person. “Seventy souls” (Judges 9:5). “Thirty souls” (20:39). “Eighty-five souls” (1 Samuel 22:18). Our translators smother the idiom (Numbers 31:35): sometimes, however, it is allowed to come out (Genesis 46:15, 18, 22, 25-27). It is a favourite expression of the Bible. Just as animals are called lives (Genesis 37:20; Psalm 104:25), so men are called souls. And, as a further step in the investigation, soul is a favourite name for self (see Gesenius). Indeed there is no other expression in the Hebrew to answer at all to this personal idea (Job 9:21; Psalm 3:3; Isaiah 51:23).
But further; soul is ever on the lips when inspired men need a word for life (Lamentations 5:9, Job 2:4, John 10:11). This puzzles the translators. In our view the thing is manageable. If soul is answered to by the expiration of breath, then it is the essence and whole of that subtle thing called living. In fact all these terms are interchangeable. Spirit is soul, and more. Soul is mind, and more. Soul is life, and more. And life is more than vegetable life, and different from dust, though we cannot conceive of life but as dwelling in a body. To us, therefore, all the Bible Equivoques become matter of instruction. “Take no thought for your soul (psuche), what ye shall eat or what ye shall drink” (Matthew 6: 25). The translators drop the word, of course. And they dislocate sentences. Our Saviour, in a brief context, declares, “For whosoever will save his soul, shall lose it; but, whosoever shall lose his soul for my sake and the Gospel's, the same shall save it” (Mark 8:35); and immediately adds, “For what shall it profit a man if he shall gain the whole world, and lose his own soul? Or what shall a man give in exchange for his soul?“ King James translates differently in one clause and the other.
Judges 15:19; 1 Samuel 30:12; 1 Kings 10:5.
Let us not be misunderstood: we are not sure we would not translate some of these clauses as they have done. We would, but for certain specialties of exegesis. But that is neither here nor there. What we are protesting against is, such a popular belief as sways languages, and has erected such barriers of thought as between the soul and the life of the mammal.
The Bible boldly says, The soul dies (Judges 16:30; Job 31 39; Psalm 76:50). It says that it goes down into the grave (Psalm 30:3; 86:13; Acts 2: 31). It vacates it of all its consciousness (Job 10:22; Psalm 6:5; 146:4). And if it says that it departs, it is as the breath departs. God is the former of our bodies because they are framed of dust, and give back the dust again after they are dead. But he is the father of our spirits; not only because they possess his likeness, but because they go back into his hand; that is, because there is nothing to survive that we know of, but His hand's efficiency.
We are inclined to the belief that wishing to save one's soul means having no higher motive; and that losing one's soul means, as by contrast with a higher and nobler object; and that the doctrine of the passage is that a man is not saved till he catches sight of something higher than mere salvation.
So much for the second point. Let me conclude it in the words of Scripture. “If He set his heart on Himself; if He take to Himself His spirit and His breath, all flesh would breathe out (expire) together, and man would return to the dust “(Job 34:14, 15).
3. Now, we have but to imagine that all animals were brutes, to bring out a third point, viz., that, taking the document of Scripture as it is, all mankind would be perfectly reconciled to the belief in souls as though they were evanescent like the breath. I am sure that it would be impossible to have any other idea. We have seen that souls begin with fishes (Genesis 1: 20). Swarms of living souls are our first notice of this great anti-type of breath. The word is never idle. It occurs four times in this very chapter. It occurs never in this first chapter of Genesis in connection with man. It occurs just as it would occur if the animating principle that makes the brute, were, just as that word animal declares, a soul under the image of breath. And as it is an unnatural conceit that that soul should float off, and live separate after the animal dies, I think everybody would assent to the belief that, if man were out of the way, the soul, wherever it is mentioned, might be likened to our breathing life, a thing hanging upon our breath, and a thing that might be conceived as vanished, when the eye glazes, and we breathe out our life into the air.
And why should man stand in the way? I beg it may be noticed that all the Israelite books speak of the brutes as having souls. There is never a hesitation. If there is any halting of a verse to give beasts this exalted gift, it is found to be by the translators. “Any living soul that is in the waters,” says Leviticus (11:10). “And with every living soul,” says the Almighty, “that is with you; of the fowl, of the cattle and of every beast of the earth with you; from all that go out of the ark, to every beast of the earth” (Genesis 9:10). The cases are many (see Genesis 2:19). This is the law of the beasts, and of the fowl, and of every living soul that moves in the waters, and of every soul that creeps upon the earth” (Leviticus 11:46).
The position, let it be noticed, is, that if these broad passages, that seem to introduce the very idea of soul for the first time, were un-incumbered with the instance of man, the verdict would be an easy one. We would all exclaim, The soul departs like the breath; and it is its ceasing like the breath, that has made the expiration from the lungs so favourite a type of what is animate in creation.
But now for the easy retort, that man is not out of the way. Man is the great mammal. Man is heaven-wide from the brute. And it is reasonable that this nobler animation should be endowed with a great soul that does not succumb to the changes and chances of mortality.
But let it be considered. Is not this mere philosophizing? Notice what we have said. Our appeal is to the Bible. Man, Scripturally, is a wonderful chief. But we get that out of the word of God. Man, Scripturally, is to live in Paradise. But must we not get him there in a Biblical way? Man, Scripturally, is to be raised again. Now we have said all along, We insist on what is said in Scripture; and, as Scripture does not say we are immortal, we insist that the soul of man shall be confounded with the brute, except in those precise respects in which we are taught otherwise in the word of God.
And that perishableness is not one of those respects, we prove by showing how the Bible delights to mix men with brutes in speaking of their spirits. “One soul of five hundred” says the Almighty; “of the persons, and of the beeves, and of the asses, and of the sheep” (Numbers 31:28). This blending occur on great occasions of divine administration. “Behold I destroy all flesh wherein is a spirit of life,” says God, (Genesis 6: 17). And we learn that “All in whose nostrils was the breath of a spirit of life, of all that was in the dry land, died” (Genesis 7: 22). “This is the token of the covenant,” says God, “which I make between me and you, and every living soul that is with you, for perpetual generations” (9:12). “And the bow shall be in the cloud; and I will look upon it, that I may remember the everlasting covenant between God and every living soul of all flesh that is upon the earth” (verse 16). Now hold, if you please, that there is nothing positive in this treatment of the genus soul; I beg you to observe how much negative there is in it that just where of all the world we would expect to find some disseverance of the beast's soul and the man's soul from each other, they are thrown, on solemn days, remorselessly together; and, indeed, in moral enactments. Man is enjoined not to smite the soul of a beast. “He that smites the soul of a man shall surely be put to death. And he that smites the soul of a beast shall make it good, soul for soul” (Leviticus 14:17, 18).
Now here we might rest. But I beg to say that the inspired writers go further, and absolutely deal with what is positive. Not only do they say that like sheep we are laid in the grave, and that Death shall be our shepherd (Psalm 49:14); not only do they say that we are “born like the wild ass's colt” (Job 11:12); not only do they affirm that we are “like the beasts that perish” (Psalm 49:12); not only do they ask, “Who knows a spirit of man that goes upward, and a spirit of the beast that goes down- ward to the earth?” (Ecclesiastes 3: 21); but they say in this very last chapter, “I said in my heart concerning the estate of the sons of men, that God might manifest them, and that they might see that they themselves are beasts. For that which befalls the sons of men, befalls beasts; even one thing befalls them: as the one dies, so dies the other; yea they have all one spirit: so that a man hath nothing left of him more than a beast: for all is vanity.
The translators say “beast for beast;” and that doubtless is the meaning. But the universal care to throw out the word soul, and put in something else, shows how thought has been saturated. “Kills a man” is the translation of the first clause, and “Kills a beast,” of the second; giving nothing in the margin for the second; and giving another word than soul for its account of the first.
All go unto one place; all are of the dust; and all turn to dust again” (Ecclesiastes 3: 18-20).
Now, as we have all along said, we do not trust to these texts, or to a thousand such texts. But let it be observed, we are going through the whole of the Bible. I do not trust to one lung, or especially to one part of one lung. But I beg to ask, Where are my antagonist's lungs? We have sounded from side to side, and cannot discover for him any breathing spaces.
4. But fourthly; men may ask, Do you not distinguish the soul from the body? And here will be our fourth argument. Breath also can be distinguished from the body. We may go down as low as the lily. The dust in the lily's stalk, and the life of the lily, are plainly distinguishable. And if we ascend to animals, the dog, with his fine intelligence, is to be looked at in different endowments; his matter first, his life afterwards; and his intelligent life after that: and let it be distinctly understood; we believe these to be different gifts, and different efficiencies, from God who made us. But does that at all prevent that they be inseparable? Molecules might be related a million of years, and yet might never climb a pole; and, therefore, we believe in motions of life which must be by energy of heaven, which enables the bean-dust to sprout itself upward, and to draw in surrounding molecules, and to become unitary as one climbing vine upon the earth. Soul, therefore, may be thoroughly distinguished from molecules of matter; and yet may not be separable in the least degree. Animals afford a still stronger analogy. If life may be distinguished from the lily-dust, so may soul from the dust of the cat and the dog. And yet, if we do not separate the vital oak from the tons' weight of leaf and branch, and if we do not separate, except in thought, the mind of the bison from his material molecules, why should we do it in the instance of man? I mean, why Should we do it unless there is that in the language of Scripture that ordains a difference? that is, that asserts the fact that man, different from the tree, has a separate essence, independent of the body?
But, now, the Bible's distinctions of the soul are just as ours are in the tree and in the bison. It begins with vast indifference. It speaks of the body as though it included the soul, and it speaks of the soul as though it included the body. This is just as it might better be, if each were interlinked with either. It speaks of the soul as though it included every thing; and, therefore, we have the soul for self (Psalm 103:1; Hosea 9:4); and, therefore endlessly, we have the soul for person (Numbers 19:18; Ezekiel 27:13); and, therefore also, we have the soul indifferently for body (Leviticus 5:2). We hear of dead souls (Numbers 6:6), and of souls physically smitten (Leviticus 24:17), and of souls sensuously eating and thirsting and touching and crying out, which are functions of the animal frame. In other words, we have the Spirit speaking expressly in ways in which we are accustomed to speak when we mix, in ontological respects, life and matter.
At the same time, we have the two distinguished. Beginning back at the beginning, we have the soul acting, and that in ways that involve the body. “Make me savoury meat,” says the patriarch Isaac, “that my soul may bless thee” (Genesis 27:4). “When a soul will offer a meat offering,” says Leviticus (2:1). We need make no discrimination. It may be eating. It may be smiting. It may be touching. There is a perfect carelessness of division. “Soul take thine ease” say the rich sinner, “eat, drink and be merry” (Luke 12:19). These are the sentences which mix the oak with its vitality. Then there are sentences where the soul is said to feel. There the vitality separates a little. “His soul clave unto Dinah,” says the narrative in Genesis (34:3). “Ye know the soul of a stranger,” says Moses afterward (Exodus 23:9). “Our soul loathes this light bread” (Numbers 21:5). “If your soul abhor my judgments” (Leviticus 26:15). And then, “anguish of soul” (Genesis 42:21), and “bitterness of soul” (1 Samuel 1:10), and grief of soul (Job 30:25), and affliction of soul (Isaiah 58:10), drift us away from what we ever dream of as connected with the body. Nay, we have sins of soul (Leviticus 4:2), and, finally God's soul (Judges 10:16), which seem to make audaciously wicked the linking of soul with the brutal chemistry of our bodies.
And here, indeed, is the grand rally of the appeal. Is it not, it will be said, past all decency of doubt that the soul does and the body does, nay that the soul is and the body is, a very different thing? May not these travellers together get mixed in many a sentence? May not the soul eat, and may not the soul smite and touch and slay, just as the body may “serve” and be “holy,” through the mere tasteful mingling of important metaphors, and yet, when it comes to sin (Ezekiel 18:4), and to love (1 Samuel 18:1), and to faith (Lamentations 3:25), and above all to God (Jeremiah 14:19), can there be the same conceivable essence in both soul and body?
Now here is the place for making our grand final distinction.
There is not the same conceivable essence of life and a bean-stalk. We assert of life what we cannot assert of the mere molecules of the bean. The mere molecules of the bean have a certain efficiency. The mere life of the bean-stalk has another efficiency. The mind of the bison and the dog has an efficiency still different. These are energies of God. They are piled up still heavier in the case of man. Now, they are so different in faith and in hope and in love and in sin from what they are in moving the body, that there are no limits which we will not concede in the ennobling of thought beyond the molecules of the body: and yet, with the precedent of life so far beyond the bean-particles, and with the precedent of soul so far beyond the dog-particles, we cannot mix the dog's soul with his body, and then refuse, except on the distinct basis of Scripture, that the soul of the man shall follow, as the dog's does, the natural history of the animal frame.
The soul, as a distinct appellative, becomes so common, that the Bible does not hesitate, in one passage, to link with it all the highest interests of our eternal claim. “Fear not them,” says our blessed Redeemer, “which kill the body, but are not able to kill the soul” (Matthew 10:28): but not only does the passage itself correct itself by immediately linking one with the other, “Fear him who is able to destroy both soul and body in hell”; not only does our Saviour put a gloss upon it by modifying the like sentences, “And I say unto you, my friends, Be not afraid of them that kill the body, and after that have no more that they can do” (Luke 12:4); not only does he throw away the idea of our being disembodied, by leaping, as in other passages (2 Corinthians 5:1), across the gulf, and saying, “Fear him which, after he hath killed” (that is, the body, 5:4), “hath power to cast into hell” (Luke 12:5); not only is the same leap characteristic of Paul: “It is appointed to all men once to die, and after that the judgment “(Hebrews 9:27); but the case itself is of no particular moment when we come to remember that, like the life of the oak (Psalm 58:10), or like the soul of a fish (Genesis 1:20), or like the spirit of a saint (1 John 4:2), the soul does, most of all, describe the man. It is not at all unnatural that we should hear of the salvation of the soul. It would be highly unnatural if that word were not preferred, to speak of the raised man, when he is to be immortal. And just as Stephen says, “Receive my spirit” (Acts 7:59); and just as Christ says, “I commend my spirit “(Luke 23:46); and just as the parable says, “Thy soul shall be required of thee” (Luke 12:20), so the phrase, “And are not able to kill the soul” (Matthew 10:28), is so naturally accounted for without, that it cannot overcome the weight of the afore quoted antagonistic revelations.
It remains only to note another fact, viz., that the blood is said to be the soul (Leviticus 17:14).
Now I am not going to run away with this, or to teach the doctrine that it is a scientific inspiration. It may have been a creed in Egypt; and the argument may have been, With this profound association with blood, ye shall not eat it. I do not care scientifically to expound the passage. It may have been a wise incorporation by God of the deepest science about our life with the respect due to our history; but no doubt the blood of Christ is the metaphor for atonement for all our sins, because of some ancient thought that blood was the soul: a thought that must be largely metaphoric; but which, by passing by brain; by saying nothing of that cerebral part which must very early have appeared to man as the secret of his consciousness; by passing by nerve and lung and liver and sense, and all our vital members; by coming to such a senseless thing as blood; by coming nevertheless to that which modern discovery does put at the very fountain of our being; by singling that cell-germ which does begin in the blood, and which does grow from the very cellules on, like a coral reef I say, this profound hypothesis:
“Flesh in the soul thereof, which is the blood thereof (Genesis 9:4): “For the soul of the flesh is in the blood” (Leviticus 17:11); “No soul of you shall eat blood” (verse 12), “For it is the soul of all flesh. Its blood is in [or as] its soul: for the soul of all flesh is its blood” (5:14: see also Deuteronomy 12:23-25), does show that the inspired Author of the Bible had no earthly aversion to encouraging the belief that the soul was inseparable from our bloody-tissues.
CHAPTER 17
The Spirit.
SPIRIT has been spoken of almost enough; because much that should be said of it could not be separated, conveniently, from the soul.
There are, however, some aspects that must be treated specially.
Spirit is a higher word; more recent, probably, than the soul. Soul comes to the lips of the chronicler, as of reptiles and in the very first creation (Genesis 1: 20). Soul, therefore, has lost its early sense, and is seldom used for wind or breath: we might almost say, never (see Gesen). Spirit, therefore, seems the newer word, and naturally more extreme, in this, that, first, it has not failed out of its earlier sense (Job 9:18), and yet it has been chosen to mean what is the very highest and noblest. Accordingly, as we might expect, it has some meanings that are lower and plainer than are found for the soul; but most, a great deal higher.
Let me illustrate.
“His spirit came again,” we hear in the inspired history (1 Samuel 30:12), when “they gave him a piece of a cake of figs and two clusters of raisins.” So it was with Samson (Judges 15:19). And it was expressed with even a commoner word when a person actually died. “There was no breath left in him” (1 Kings 17:17); and Elijah went and prayed, “and the soul of the child came into him again” (verse 22). Spirit, also, is spoken of beasts; and, in fact, of man and beast; for all are thrown together in whom are the spirit of life (Genesis 6:11); and Solomon declares, “For that which befalls the sons of men befalls beasts; even one thing befalls them: as the one dies, so dies the other; yea, they have all one spirit” (Ecclesiastes 3:19).
But, needing a name for conscience and the higher part, the Scriptures have fallen upon this; so that, as we have said, spirit is the name, not only for the common breath or life of man (Ezekiel 27:8), but, more theologically, for his conscience (Galatians 5:17). This last is erected into so distinct a notion, that the Apostle calls it the “inner man “(Romans 7:22), and plainly implies that it belongs to all men, saints and sinners. He speaks of it as in himself.
He represents the pneuma as pleading for the law, even when he was carnal, sold under sin. He represents this pneuma so strongly, that modern exegetes break away from the old patristic understanding, and think he must be speaking of the regenerated man. And yet the very strongest expressions, as for example this, “I delight in the law of the Lord after the inward man” (verse 22); or, for another example, this, “What I hate, that do I” (verse 15); or, for still another, this, “With the mind I myself serve the law of God” (verse 25); however much they may have been seized, in modern times, as describing the believer, do really describe the impenitent; the idea being the old and common one, that man has an imperial conscience; that that conscience is on the side of law; that that law is spiritual (Romans 7: 14) and the mind of the Almighty; that that mind is liked by the inner nature of man (verse 22); that that nature is decaying in the lost; that that nature is renewed in the believer (Psalm 51:10); and that that nature, which ever way it is going, whether as being renewed or as being grieved away, is the spirit of man, for which that name has been decreed which we are now considering as among the words of Scripture.
This spirit is so distinctly set apart, that it is antagonized to other powers, which nevertheless can think and reason; as, for example, to the flesh. The flesh is said to feel (Romans 13:14); and also, without hesitation, it is said to desire (Ephesians 2: 3); and we are to understand that it thinks and reasons (2 Corinthians 1:17): and yet, in the same narrow realm of man, we are to suppose there is room for spirit. “The flesh lusts against the spirit” (Galatians 5: 17). I beg that it may be noticed how didactic the expression is. The apostle is dealing in the soberest reflections. And yet he hesitates not a moment; “The flesh lusts against the spirit, and the spirit against the flesh: and these are contrary the one to the other, so that ye cannot do the things that ye would.” Our point, therefore, is, that spirit is used to describe the moral faculty of our nature.
But not only is it antagonized to flesh, and that ruder form of our carnality; but to soul, and that in ways injuriously smothered by our translators. Paul makes it colour the risen body. He says, “Some will say, How are the dead raised up?” (1 Corinthians 15:35). And after a good deal of preliminary writing, he comes to this striking expression, “It is sowed a soul-body; it is raised a spirit-body” (verse 44). He is not afraid to descant upon it: “There is a soulbody, and there is a spirit-body”: and then winds up with the asseverance, “Howbeit that was not first which is spiritual, but that which is psuchical, and afterward that which is spiritual” (verse 46): the meaning of all which is, that we are born into this world with a body that is under the dominion of the soul; that is, of man in all that part of his nature that has least of conscience and of the fear of God; but that we will be born into another world, spiritual. There is no thought of etheriality of flesh, or of spirituality, in any sense of there being no grossness or avoirdupois solidity of our persons; but it is an intimation of our holiness; that, whereas, in this world, we had bodies subject to our souls, in a better world they shall be subject to our spirits; the mere conclusion being, that spirit is a higher name for the soul; that is, that it is the conscience and the moral part, at the Great Day become regnant in our nature.
With this understanding, we have no trouble with “spirit, soul and body” (1 Thessalonians 5: 23), and the mad trichotomies preached up in our day. Body contains the whole. Soul is inseparable from the body. And spirit is but another name for it in its grander and more conscientious leanings. The three borrow and diffuse their lights. The soul need not be separated from the body, if the soul is not to be separated from the spirit. I mean, the very use of this trinity, throwing the soul into the same category with the body, and then throwing the soul with the evidently inseparable spirit, leads to the imagination that all are inseparable, and are only to be distinguished in those natural ways that are common even to the brute creation.
But now, further! God becomes mingled with this language. What is the meaning of spirit? Breath. Whose breath? Man's. Nay but who breathes it? God. There is a delight in Scripture in attributing to God subjective presence in the work of man. Paul, magnifying prophecy (and he meant prophecy in the wider sense), says, “Thus are the secrets of his heart made manifest; and so, falling down on his face, he will worship God, and report that God is in you of a truth” (1 Corinthians 14:25). Christ says, “The Father that dwells in me, he doeth the works” (John 14:10). And breaking out in a still grander strain, Paul declares, “I am crucified with Christ: nevertheless I live: yet not I, but Christ lives in me: and the life which I now live in the flesh, I live by the faith of the Son of God, who loved me, and gave himself for me” (Galatians 2: 20).
It is not a violence, therefore, that Scripture, having this tendency of speech, should take the word breath, and apply it to Him who breathes it. And we should predict that, if one word breath was higher than another word breath; that is, that if one word breath was applied to soul, and another word breath was applied to something higher, namely conscience, God would be especially described by that higher and nobler breath. Hence God is very rarely called soul, and is very constantly called Spirit; sometimes as breathing into matter (Job 26:13), but oftener as breathing into our higher part, and working the very renewal that we need in our heart and conscience.
Now, so inseparable is our breath from God's breath, I mean pneuma or breath as the trope for conscience, that in many a passage it makes no difference which is thought of. For example, where Paul says, “They that are after the spirit, do mind the things of the spirit” (Romans 8:5), it makes no difference which we understand, unless indeed it does make a difference, and we should understand it of our spirits, seeing that, in the ninth verse, the Spirit of God is separately mentioned, “Ye are not in the flesh, but in the spirit, if so be that the Spirit of God dwell in you.” We can multiply these equivoques.
“If we live in the spirit, let us also walk in the spirit” (Galatians 5:25). “He that sows to the spirit, shall, of the spirit reap life everlasting” (Galatians 6:8). “Sanctification of the spirit” Paul talks of, when writing to the Thessalonians (2 Thessalonians 2: 13). “By the spirit that he hath given us,” says the apostle John (1 John 3:24). And that no one may be horrified by this raising of a doubt, let him examine the work of our translation, and he will see the most painful confusion in supplying the capital letter, where God's Spirit or man's spirit is the thing in question (see for this John 4:23, 24; 2 Corinthians 3:6; 12:18; Ephesians 6: 18; Philippians 1:27; 1 Timothy 4:12; 1 Peter 4:6; 1 John 4:2).
I say, therefore, that it makes no difference, in many a passage, whether the word pneuma is the spiritual breath that God breathes into man, and, therefore, that glorious efficiency in the soul of the sinner, or whether it is the spiritual breath that that efficiency creates, i.e., the higher conscience or moral part of our humanity. And, now, I go further and say, that there is a splendid passage that says that the one thing and the other thing are distinguishably and with reverent significance the same.
Let me proceed carefully.
When I say that God is in me, I mean modest and easily defended truth. The Bible is full of such things. It says we are “partakers of the divine nature” (2 Peter 1:4). It can only be because some instance is new, that it can shock us in the least degree.
Now, we introduce such an instance. Our Lord speaks to the woman of Samaria. He has been sketching the realities of worship. He says, “Ye worship ye know not what: we know what we worship: for salvation is of the Jews” (John 4: 22). He goes on to say, “But the hour cometh, and now is, when the true worshipper shall worship the Father in spirit and in truth” (v 23). And then follows this strangely false rendered aphorism “SPIRIT IS God” (verse 24). 1 know of nothing so confidently thrown into mistake in all our criticism. The meaning of our Saviour is evident. Man, he says, must worship the Father in spirit. And then, as an obvious consideration why spirit must be the region of worship, he says, “Spirit is God.”
Nor need we be shocked at such an asseverance. The Apostle repeats it. “Now the Lord is that spirit” (2 Corinthians 3:17). The last sentence in which the word “spirit” had been mentioned, it is spelled without a capital even by the translators (verse 6). And, yet, here comes the bold echo, “The Lord is that spirit.” And it puts beyond difficulty the words of Christ when he speaks in awful earnestness to the woman of Samaria.
“Spirit is God.”
Now, I know, grammar will be appealed to, to refute us. But take this sentence, “Gain is godliness” (1 Timothy 6:5). Precisely the same grammar reigns in one passage as in the other. Old Middleton has ruled another case (John 1: 1) through the Article. But Glassius and Rambach have entirely refuted him (see Winer). There are no grammatical difficulties. The meaning of our Lord is plain. We recur to our idea. Spirit is so the breath of the Almighty that it gives a name even to Him. And our blessed Lord would teach the doctrine; not that God's Spirit and man's spirit are one and the same thing, but that, in Oriental speech, as life in us is Christ in us (1 John 5:12), and as miracle in us is God in us (1 Corinthians 14:25), and, hence, as piety in us is the Holy Ghost in us (1 Corinthians 3:16), so, and more definitely, the spirit or higher part in man is God's Spirit; as the old heathen expressed it, the voice of the Almighty; and in very literal ways, the work of his power: like the life in the bean, a divine efficiency; like the mind in the ox, the light of the word of God; in the instance of man, a higher word, warranting the speech of Christ that the spirit or higher part of man is God's Spirit, not altogether in metaphoric sense, but in that efficient way in which God is our light and righteousness.
Then, firstly, the passage is lost to them who would build on it, in any way, helps to the doctrine of the separateness and essence of the spirit. There is no such passage as “God is a spirit.”
Secondly, we understand the sentence, “Whether in the body or out of the body” (2 Corinthians 12:2).
If God is our upholding Breath, he could carry Paul, in the spirit, altogether away from any other efficiency of his nature. He could make Paul be on earth, and see in heaven. He could work any miracle. And, therefore, this conscious uncertainty of Paul is no more decisive of his two estates, than his yet more mere shadowy speech, “absent in body, but present in spirit” (1 Corinthians 5:3). We may pass these things.
Thirdly; spirit, therefore, is not disembodied. It parts, never a moment, with its metaphor of breath. Even God's mixture with it betokens the same idea. If we live, it is not we that live,” but there is no sign of living outside of either soul or body; and “the life that we now live in the flesh,” must be so a pattern of the embodied life beyond, that, unless Scripture is a mistake, we settle that as our faith from its plainest revelation.
CHAPTER 18
The Immortality Of The Soul A Relic Of Paganism.
The most intolerable burden that our doctrine has to carry, is the weight of the world's belief: and I confess that the church is so far infallible, that all the great teachings of the gospel cannot be supposed to have been lost or hid or misunderstood among believers.
But our very statement is, that our doctrine is not a vital one.
Far more vital is the doctrine of the sacraments. If the sacrament is of the very body and blood of the Redeemer, to disown it, when our Saviour says, “This is my body” (1 Corinthians 11: 24); to denounce it, in the face of that earnest speech, “As the living Father hath sent me, and I live by the Father, so he that eats me shall live by me” (John 6:57) a speech repeated, and redoubled, and wrought in, even when according to our Protestant thought it was seen to be misunderstood, then the Papist is right, and it is a horrible impiety; and yet all this was the belief of the world, scarcely broken until three hundred years ago.
It will not do to plead precedents.
Galileo shocked the faith of the whole of Christendom.
And yet it will be said. Take the common sober arithmetic. Where are the probabilities likely to preponderate? Are you certain to be right, and the whole family of believers of crass intellect, and pitiably and, as you would have it appear, shamefully and with scarce any argument asleep and wrong? That is the strong appeal. What ought we to do?
It will be right certainly to pare down the opposition, and to show that the court of Christendom has had offered to it some notable demurrers.
This article not only showed the prevalence of such conceits by its adoption, but it showed, either first, their innocence, or second, their revival and obstinacy, or respectable continuance, by its rescission; for in 1562, ten years later than Edward's reformers, the Articles were reduced to thirty nine; and this was one of the three that were bodily excluded. The remark of Archdeacon Blackburne may be noted:
“By allowing separate souls to have sense, feeling and perception, the doctrines of purgatory and invocation would naturally follow” (Blackburne's Works, volume 3: page 85).
III. In the third place, I appeal to Luther.
Now Luther's testimony has been wonderfully debated. Bayle denies that he believed in our being mortal.
Luther certainly hankered after invocation. It filled his fancy. Moreover, in the broil of a reform, just such as Luther would be thrown back upon many an expression of his old belief. Besides, he was taxed with this inconsistency, and beyond all manner of doubt paltered and hesitated. We do not defend him. We only say, He taught our doctrine: and no twisting of his speech can work out of it any other expression.
Let me quote.
On Ecclesiastes 9:10 he says, “Therefore Solomon thought that the dead utterly slept, and were quite unconscious. They lie there dead, not counting days or years; but when raised up, shall seem to themselves scarce to have slept a moment.” On Genesis 4: 9; “We gather from this place the very strongest showing, that, if there were no one that had a care for us after this life, Abel slain would not be again sought after. But God seeks after Abel taken away from this life; wills him to be not forgotten; keeps memory of him; asks where is he.”
* Opera Wittcomb. vol. 4. p. 36. f lb. vol. 6. p. 64.
One of the apologists of Luther says that “the origin of the calumny,” for so he chooses to call it, “is in a letter he wrote to Amsdorf in the year 1522, in which he appears much inclined to believe that the souls of the just sleep to the day ofjudgment, without knowing where they are, etc. He does not pretend to say that they are dead in this interval” [What can be meant by that?], “but only lay in a profound rest and sleep, in which opinion he followed many fathers of the ancient church.”
Let it be observed, these are the words of an apologist.
Look again: “When he shall rise again,” says Luther, speaking of the Elector who died on a return from the chase, “it will seem to him as though he had just come from the forests, where he was hunting.”
Luther seems to have conceived it right to speak of the soul as living though dead (Colossians 3: 3); but this is about his account of it: “True it is, they have peace in faith,” says he, speaking of Romans 5:1, “but the same peace is invisible and surpasses all human conceit: insomuch that, being even in death, feeling no life at all, we must nevertheless believe we live.”
Seckendorf, History, Book 3; p. 30. Coll. Mens., p. 402.
There can be no doubt of Luther's leaning; and Sleidan, telling us of his death (which of course precludes the idea of his having recanted), gives us this sequel: “At supper he spoke of various matters, and asked this among the rest, whether in the eternal life we shall know each other? and when the desire was expressed to know his opinion, What, he asked, happened to Adam? He had never seen Eve: but, when God was forming her, he was wrapped in the profoundest slumber. Nevertheless, roused again to life, he did not ask, when he saw her, Who is she? or, Where did she come from? but says, she is flesh of his flesh and bone of his bones. How, though, did he know this? unless, filled with the Holy Spirit, endowed with the knowledge of God, he so pronounced? In the same manner we, in another life, shall be renewed by Christ; and parents, .wives, children and all the rest, we shall know much more perfectly than at that time Adam knew Eve.”
So much for intermediate unconsciousness as incontestable an idea of Luther. 4. Now Tyndal; what are we to say of him?
I will transcribe at length.
He is replying to Sir Thomas More. “And ye, in putting them [departed souls] in heaven, hell and purgatory, DESTROY THE ARGUMENTS WHEREWITH CHRIST AND PAUL PROVE THE RESURRECTION. What God doth with them, that shall we know when we come to them. The true faith puts the resurrection, which we are warned to look for every hour. The heathen philosophers, denying that, did put that the souls did ever live. And the Pope joins the spiritual doctrine of Christ and the fleshly doctrine of philosophers together, things so contrary that they cannot agree, no more than the spirit and the flesh do in a Christian man. And, because the fleshly minded Pope consents unto heathen doctrine, therefore he corrupts the scripture to establish it.
Moses saith in Deuteronomy, the secret things pertain unto the Lord, and the things that be open pertain unto us, that we may do all that is written in the book. Wherefore, Sir, if we loved the laws of God, and would occupy ourselves to fulfil them, and would, on the other side, be meek and let God alone with his secrets, and suffer him to be wiser than we, we should make none article of the faith of this or that. If the souls be in heaven, tell me why they be not in as good case as the angels be? And then what cause is there of the resurrection? “On More objecting, “What shall he care how long he live in sin that believeth Luther that he shall after this life feel neither good nor evil in body or soul until the day of doom?“ Tyndal answers, “Christ and his apostles taught no other, but warned to look for Christ's coming again every hour; which coming again, because ye believe will never be, therefore have ye feigned that other merchandise.”
* Sleidan, Book 16: page 488.
* Tyndall, p. 327.
The capitals are ours. Let us recollect; this is William Tyndall.
Could I with any wisdom continue the list? Locke and Dodwell and the Bishop of Carlile and the Archdeacon of Cleveland and Coward and Layton might add more signatures to the opinion, but could they add more influence? What pious saint could give a weightier judgment in the Bible than its martyred translator? “The peculiar genius,” says Froude, speaking of a later version, “The peculiar genius, if such a word may be permitted, which breathes through it; the mingled tenderness and majesty; the Saxon simplicity; the preternatural grandeur, unequalled, unapproached, in the attempted improvements of modern scholars, all are here, and bear the impress of one man, William Tyndal. Lying, while engaged in that great office, under the shadow of death, the sword above his head, and ready at any moment to fall, he worked under circumstances alone perhaps truly worthy of the task which was laid upon him: his spirit, as it were, divorced from the world, moved in a purer element than common air. With the reward which at other times as well as those, has been held fitting by human justice for the earth's great ones, he passed away in smoke and flame to rest.”
* History of England (London Edition) volume 2: p. 498.
He was attacked for his belief; but nothing was wrested from him but this. “I protest before God and our Saviour Christ and all that believe in him, that I hold, of the souls that are departed, as much as may be proved by manifest and open Scripture, and think the souls departed in the faith of Christ and love of the law of God to be in no worse case than the soul of-Christ was from the time that he delivered his spirit into the hands of his Father, until the resurrection of his body in glory and immortality. Nevertheless I confess openly, that I am not persuaded that they be already in the full glory that Christ is in, or the elect angels of God are in. Nether is it any article of my faith: for if so it were, I see not but then the preaching of the resurrection of the flesh were a thing in vain. Notwithstanding yet I am ready to believe it, if it may be proved from open Scripture.”
We have broken the force of the severest false versions upon our belief; for the church and the world will not upbraid us so bitterly, if they see men like Tyndal yoked with us in our forth-putting of the intent of revelation; but we have not broken the force of this damaging appeal, viz., that it is to the highest degree incredible that the immense mass of catholic belief, within the range of more recent history, should have coined such a thought as that we are immortal, with no foundation in the least but what may have been forged for it in the brain of man.
The bold polemic, too, will make a demand of us. He will say, Explain this prodigy. He will be right. Universal thought demands some origin. That which semfier, ubique, ab omnibus, has been believed, cannot grow up out of the vapours of the night, but must have had an intellectual source, commensurate with the boldness of its presentations.
What is this source?
Our doctrine, let it be perceived, is the resurrection of the dead. Man, to have fulfilled his duty, should have grasped what he could of that, and held on to the light as it was bestowed, until life and immortality were brought to light in the Redeemer. He fell from this knowledge. Immortality in some shape he could not relinquish. Immortality in ghost and spectre; nay, in just what shape he could dream, after all that was visible was put away in the sepulchre, would be just that shape of the belief that heathen would be apt to have. Resurrection was too unlikely. It was distant; nay, had been but partially revealed. At any rate, it had been lost; and no matter what had been the cause, we may search all the books, and not a trace of it can be found, except
a slight syllable or two among the dead in Egypt.
* Tyndales Works (1573), Preface.
What was to be done? Give up our living again? Never. The mind yearns after immortality. The manes of ancient Rome, with just the least possible of dress or form; immortality, with scarce any substance; our thought and our feeling busily kept on with but little account of quo or quomodo, would be the natural device, and, beyond all doubt, the actual one. The world peopled itself with shadows, and that as the natural scheme, when the doctrine of our rising had faded, or had not yet been revived into view.
But, now, when it was preached, what would be natural? When I give a boy an apple! Suppose he has one. His little chubby hand holds it; but I give him a brighter and a better! What is the result?
He grasps both. This is the simple history of immortality. Man is a composite animal, made up of different faculties. There is not a trace of revelation that he lives divided. When he dies, the Bible seems to say, He dies. When he lives, it seems to be by rising. And yet that doctrine unquestionably was lost. Refusing to be mortal, he conjures up the idea of spirit. Spreading over the earth, he builds that faith into his monuments. Becoming a writer and a sage, he sings it, and weaves it into his speech. Becoming imbedded in his literature, it is seated in the very heart of man. Christ comes, and brings another resurrection: but the little boy clutches both apples.
This is our account of immortality. And let it be remembered, if it have a shadow of the truth, we are not the rationalists: we are not the novices, greedy for something new: we are not the dotards, grubbing into the past: we are not infidel, determined upon change; but we are just the plain men of the Word of God, restricting ourselves to texts, and showing where a Pagan flood broke in upon the fountain of the Gospel.
Now, that all this is not mere impudence, look at some facts that may be noted:
First, these very testimonies of Tyndale. “The heathen philosophers, denying that, did put that the soul did ever live.” And again, “The Pope joins the spiritual doctrine of Christ and the fleshly doctrine of philosophers together; things so contrary, that they cannot agree, no more than the spirit and the flesh do in a Christian man.” And then, “Because the fleshly minded Pope consents unto heathen doctrine, therefore he corrupts the Scripture to establish it.”
Second; worldly men have taken the same view. Let me quote from Macaulay. “At length the darkness begins to break; and the country which had been lost to view as Britain, reappears as England. The conversion of the Saxon colonists to Christianity was the first of a long series of salutary revolutions. It is true that the Church had been deeply corrupted both by that superstition and by that philosophy against which she had long contended, and over which she had at last triumphed. She had given a too easy admission to doctrines borrowed from the ancient schools, and to rites borrowed from the ancient temples. Roman policy and Gothic ignorance, Grecian ingenuity and Syrian asceticism had contributed to deprave her. Yet she retained enough of the sublime theology and benevolent morality of her earlier days, to elevate many intellects, and to purify many hearts.”
Tyndales Works (1573), p. 324.
Thirdly; as reasoned out by any competent reader of the past, this vivifying of the old life into the new can be plainly exhibited. It was so in sacrifice. The old Astarte lived again on the hills of Benjamin. It was so in ritual. The lustrum bewitched the sacrament. It was so in calendar appointments. The Saturnalia bestrid the feast day.
Nor is it uninteresting that God Himself set certain examples that were perverted. He burrowed into what was Egyptian. “I shall be that I shall be” has been uncovered on the Nile. He measured temples. The court and sacred places had their patterns over the flood. There is no jealousy of this sort with the Almighty. And when our Saviour came, he borrowed for the Sermon on the Mount. Paul took all he could from what was Greek (Acts 17:28). And Christ, in all these ways, has taught the lesson, that nothing is to be despised, and that what God has cleansed, that no man is to call common.
History of England volume 1: page 5. At least, it is said so. We doubt it.
But, then, an imitating world has gone too far.
What a good thing it would be if all the borrowings from Paganism were set down in a chart. The world will learn more of these things. Such men as Aristotle have been teaching from their urns. Such men as Plato have coloured the very books of Scripture. And though, blessed be God, they have made these more full, and, for the ages of time, more bold and more useful to the Church, yet no one can read the Evangelist John without seeing, that Plato helped to shape him; that Philo, or his predecessors, helped to choose for him his points; and though all under the influence of the Spirit, yet the Spirit moving the Apostle to resist those frauds that were being imposed by the men who were the expounders of these great philosophies. Now, what John did not fence off, broke into the Church. It is horrible to see the ravages of Platonism. We are occupied with it yet. And it has furnished so much example of the world dominating over the faith, that I need but mention my plea, which is, that it is the commerce with the past that has made men sink into the rut of the soul's being immortal.
THE END.