“And when he had said this he fell asleep.”

—Acts vii. 60.

At death, as we have seen, the spirit and the soul are separated from the body, and, still united together, are launched into the unseen world. For though the soul is not the spirit, these two form the incorporeal parts of our compound nature, are the two immaterial elements of that trinity of life,—body, soul, spirit, which are united to make one human being. They both survive death. For death is the separation of the soul from the body, not of the soul from the spirit. But it must be remembered that the spirit, when at death it is, in company with the soul, withdrawn from the body, passes into the Intermediate State, shaped and stamped with the impress which the life on earth has fastened upon it. The spirit enters the new life, either enslaved, disfigured, degraded, dishonoured by the sensual soul, or else strong, free, true, purified in its victory over the flesh. It carries with it, in short, the character which in life it has acquired.

It may be well to fall into the usage of ordinary speech, and speak of that which survives death as the soul, so long as we keep in mind what is really meant, viz., that it is the soul united with the spirit which survives death.

When, then, we say that the disembodied soul enters the Intermediate Life, we are bound to consider in what condition it enters it. For people sometimes argue thus: “Yes! I grant that there will be an interval or waiting time between death and the Day of Judgment. But then, during that time, is not the soul asleep? Surely the dying are said to fall asleep. Then, if asleep, they are unconscious, and to the unconscious soul the Intermediate State will seem to last but for an instant, and will no sooner be entered upon than it will be practically at an end. For complete insensibility to the passing and movement of time is one of the effects of complete unconsciousness. And, in truth, is it not the case that the Bible over and over again speaks of death as a state of sleep or taking rest? [41a] Thus the Intermediate State is in fact a blank. The eyes close in death, and they remain closed till they open to gaze upon the glories of the Resurrection, and the terrors of the judgment seat of Christ. Does not our own Prayer Book sanction this view in her Service for the Burial of the Dead? [41b] And do we not in common language ourselves express the same belief when we give to the resting place of the bodies of the dead the name of ‘cemetery,’ or sleeping place?”

The answer to all this is that the language which represents death as a profound slumber is language applicable enough to describe what befalls the body, but is quite inapplicable when it is used of the soul. Sleep is distinctly a physical and corporeal function. The soul cannot be liable to or affected by corporeal influences when it is separated from the body. The soul cannot sleep. It is the body, in the hushed stillness of the chamber of death, which seems, now that the last struggle is over, and the spasm of dying leaves it motionless, to be sleeping. But even in life, while the body sleeps, the soul is awake. It is often, during the sleep of the body, even more active than during the waking hours. In dreams the soul is busy with its fancies. Thoughts flit this way and that through the mind of the sleeper. Indeed, the body is more often a hindrance rather than a help to the activities of thought. To lose all consciousness of the existence of the body, to be as if the body for the time were not,—this is to set the mind thinking in freedom unrestrained. For the body and the conscious sensation of the presence of the body seem to serve to drag down and encumber the energy of thought. A sound through the ear, a sight presented to the eye, a touch, an ache,—these break off sustained thinking. No wonder, when the body sleeps profoundly, the soul is often then most active. And will not this be so when the profoundest sleep of all falls upon the body?

It is clear that the disembodied soul, if we may again go back to the Bible, is not by our Lord regarded as in a state of lethargy and dull unconsciousness. “To-day,” said He, “shalt thou be with Me in Paradise.” If this promise was meant to be a blessing and a solace it was meant to be consciously felt as a blessing and a solace. How else could the thief have been in any true sense with Christ? S. Paul said, “For me to live is Christ, to die is gain.” [43] Gain! Wherein could it be a gain to him to die, if to die was to exchange that eager, active vitality, so full of welcome pain and happy suffering, so full of a service, whose fruits were rich in blessing,—to exchange all this for dull heaviness and blank oblivion?

In the narrative of the rich man and Lazarus, which, as we saw, describes the Intermediate State, the rich man is said to have “lifted up his eyes being in torments.” So, then, his pain was felt. He was conscious; he reflected; he remembered; he spoke. Once more, in a remarkable passage in the First Epistle of S. Peter, to which, on a future occasion, I shall again refer, our Lord is spoken of as “having been put to death in the flesh, but quickened,” i.e., made alive, “in spirit” [44]; words which, whatever the context may mean, can only have the force of bringing the effect of death in its relation to Christ’s human body into sharp contrast with its effect in relation to His human spirit. In respect of His human body He was put to death; but in respect of His human spirit He was quickened or lived, lived still, in Paradise, though His body was dead. I need not, I think, refer to other passages. It is abundantly clear, both from the necessity of the thing, and from the obvious testimony of the Bible, that the soul still lives, still is awake, still is conscious.

What, then, follows from the soul’s consciousness in and through the passage of death? Obviously this,—that the life of the soul goes on, and is therefore the life of the same soul, sustained without break or interruption, after death, by an unsuspended continuity of the consciousness of personal identity. For of what is the soul still conscious? Of itself. The life therefore of the soul after death is one with the life of the soul before death. The same soul lives on. The only change to it is the absence of the body, which has been withdrawn from it, and is laid in the ground, and dissolves into dust. And this continuous consciousness of identity means that the soul’s character is preserved unchanged and unaffected by the shock of the separation. For a character it had been contracting during its sojourn in the body, a character of its own. The spiritualized soul before death is a spiritualized soul after death. The animalized soul before death remains after death an animalized soul. The righteous is righteous still. The holy, the pure, the faithful, the devout, the true, are true, and devout, and faithful, and pure, and holy still. The wicked and tainted soul is still wicked and tainted when it enters the unseen, and begins its life in the Intermediate State. It is on the other side what it was on this side. Death,—the crisis and shock of death,—makes no change, no other change than this, that it strips off the outer clothing which enveloped the soul. It leaves the soul the same, no better, no worse. This is what is implied in the personal identity of the soul. It means the continuity of consciousness, and therefore continuity of character.

Do we cling to some vague and fanciful expectation that the mere act of dying, so to call it, will itself work a great change upon the soul, will blot out our sins, will clear away our imperfections, will in an instant heal the wounds and scars, which evil habits, long inured in us, have wrought upon the soul? It will do nothing of the sort. We shall be no better, no holier on the other side than we were on this, no more fitted for heaven than when we died. If this be so,—and, so far as we can see, it must be so,—how much does it behove us to fear greatly the peril we incur by a careless and God-forgetting life! “Israel doth not know,” said the prophet, “My people doth not consider.” [47] That was the pity of it. It was the thoughtlessness, and the ignorance which came of it, that ruined the nation.

Oh! that in life we would look things in the face more steadily! Would that we were ready to take heed how surely we are, day by day, shaping and moulding our character for good or for evil, a character which no shock of dissolution will affect, which will be ours when the crisis comes to end our probation here, and to usher us, as we are and have become, into that unseen life beyond!