Systematic Theology (Volume 3 of 3)

I. Physical Death.

Physical death is the separation of the soul from the body. We distinguish it from spiritual death, or the separation of the soul from God; and from the second death, or the banishment from God and final misery of the reÜnited soul and body of the wicked.

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Spiritual death: Is. 59:2—“but your iniquities have separated between you and your God, and your sins have hid his face from you, so that he will not hear”; Rom. 7:24—“Wretched man that I am! who shall deliver me out of the body of this death?” Eph. 2:1—“dead through your trespasses and sins.” The second death: Rev. 2:11—“He that overcometh shall not be hurt of the second death”; 20:14—“And death and Hades were cast into the lake of fire. This is the second death, even the lake of fire”; 21:8—“But for the fearful, and unbelieving, and abominable, and murderers, and fornicators, and sorcerers, and idolaters, and all liars, their part shall be in the lake that burneth with fire and brimstone; which is the second death.”

Julius MÜller, Doctrine of Sin, 2:303—“Spiritual death, the inner discord and enslavement of the soul, and the misery resulting therefrom, to which belongs that other death, the second death, an outward condition corresponding to that inner slavery.” Trench, Epistles to the Seven Churches, 151—“This phrase [‘second death’] is itself a solemn protest against the Sadduceeism and Epicureanism which would make natural death the be-all and the end-all of existence. As there is a life beyond the present life for the faithful, so there is death beyond that which falls under our eyes for the wicked.” E. G. Robinson: “The second death is the continuance of spiritual death in another and timeless existence.” Hudson, Scientific Demonstration of a Future Life, 222—“If a man has a power that transcends the senses, it is at least presumptive evidence that it does not perish when the senses are extinguished.... The activity of the subjective mind is in inverse proportion to that of the body, though the objective mind weakens with the body and perishes with the brain.”

Prof. H. H. Bawden: “Consciousness is simply the growing of an organism, while the organism is just that which grows. Consciousness is a function, not a thing, not an order of existence at all. It is the universe coming to a focus, flowering so to speak in a finite centre. Society is an organism in the same sense that the human being is an organism. The spatial separation of the elements of the social organism is relatively no greater than the separation of the unit factors of the body. As the neurone cannot deny the consciousness which is the function of the body, so the individual member of society has no reason for denying the existence of a cosmic life of the organism which we call society.”

Emma M. Caillard, on Man in the Light of Evolution, in Contemp. Rev., Dec. 1893:878—“Man is nature risen into the consciousness of its relationship to the divine. There is no receding from this point. When ‘that which drew from out the boundless deep turns again home,’ the persistence of each personal life is necessitated. Human life, as it is, includes, though it transcends the lower forms through which it has developed. Human life, as it will be, must include though it may transcend its present manifestation, viz., personality.” “Sometime, when all life's lessons have been learned, And suns and stars forevermore have set, And things which our weak judgments here have spurned, The things o'er which we grieved with lashes wet, Will flash before us through our life's dark night, As stars shine most in deepest tints of blue: And we shall see how all God's plans were right, And most that seemed reproof was love most true: And if sometimes commingled with life's wine We find the wormwood and rebel and shrink, Be sure a wiser hand than yours or mine Pours out this portion for our lips to drink. And if some friend we love is lying low, Where human kisses cannot reach his face, O do not blame the loving Father so, But wear your sorrow with obedient grace; And you shall shortly know that lengthened breath Is not the sweetest gift God sends his friend, And that sometimes the sable pall of death Conceals the fairest boon his love can send. If we could push ajar the gates of life, And stand within, and all God's working see, We could interpret all this doubt and strife, And for each mystery find a key.”

Although physical death falls upon the unbeliever as the original penalty of sin, to all who are united in Christ it loses its aspect of penalty, and becomes a means of discipline and of entrance into eternal life.

To the Christian, physical death is not a penalty: see Ps. 116:15—“Precious in the sight of Jehovah Is the death of his saints”; Rom. 8:10—“And if Christ is in you, the body is dead because of sin; but the spirit is life because of righteousness”; 14:8—“For whether we live, we live unto the Lord; or whether we die, we die unto the Lord: whether we live therefore, or die, we are the Lord's”; 1 Cor. 3:22—“whether Paul, or Apollos, or Cephas, or the world, or life, or death, or things present, or things to come; all are yours”; 15:55—“O death, where is thy victory? O death, where is thy sting?” 1 Pet. 4:6—“For unto this end was the gospel preached even to the dead, that they might be judged indeed according to men in the flesh, but live according to God in the spirit”; cf. Rom. 1:18—“For the wrath of God is revealed from heaven against all ungodliness and unrighteousness of men, who hinder the truth in unrighteousness”; 8:1, 2—“There is therefore now no condemnation to them that are in Christ Jesus. For the law of the Spirit of life in Christ Jesus made me free from the law of sin and of death”; Heb. 12:6—“For whom the Lord loveth he chasteneth.”

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Dr. Hovey says that “the present sufferings of believers are in the nature of discipline, with an aspect of retribution; while the present sufferings of unbelievers are retributive, with a glance toward reformation.” We prefer to say that all penalty has been borne by Christ, and that, for him who is justified in Christ, suffering of whatever kind is of the nature of fatherly chastening, never of judicial retribution; see our discussion of the Penalty of Sin, pages 652-660.

“We see but dimly through the mists and vapors Amid these earthly damps; What are to us but sad funereal tapers May be Heaven's distant lamps. There is no death,—what seems so is transition; This life of mortal breath Is but a suburb of the life Elysian Whose portal men call death.” “'Tis meet that we should pause awhile, Ere we put off this mortal coil, And in the stillness of old age, Muse on our earthly pilgrimage.”Shakespeare, Romeo and Juliet, 4:5—“Heaven and yourself Had part in this fair maid; now Heaven hath all, And all the better is it for the maid: Your part in her you could not keep from death, But Heaven keeps his part in eternal life. The most you sought was her promotion, For 't was your heaven she should be advanced; And weep ye now, seeing she is advanced Above the clouds, as high as Heaven itself?” Phoebe Cary's Answered: “I thought to find some healing clime For her I loved; she found that shore, That city whose inhabitants Are sick and sorrowful no more. I asked for human love for her; The Loving knew how best to still The infinite yearning of a heart Which but infinity could fill. Such sweet communion had been ours, I prayed that it might never end; My prayer is more than answered; now I have an angel for my friend. I wished for perfect peace to soothe The troubled anguish of her breast; And numbered with the loved and called She entered on untroubled rest. Life was so fair a thing to her, I wept and pleaded for its stay; My wish was granted me, for lo! She hath eternal life to-day!”

Victor Hugo: “The tomb is not a blind alley; it is a thoroughfare. It closes with the twilight, to open with the dawn.... I feel that I have not said the thousandth part of what is in me.... The thirst for infinity proves infinity.” Shakespeare: “Nothing is here for tears; nothing to wail, Or knock the breast; no weakness, no contempt, Dispraise or blame; nothing but well and fair.” O. W. Holmes: “Build thee more stately mansions, O my soul, As the swift seasons roll! Leave thy low-vaulted past! Let each new temple, nobler than the last Shut thee from heaven with a dome more vast, Till thou at length art free, Leaving thine outgrown shell by life's unresting sea!” J. G. Whittier: “So when Time's veil shall fall asunder, The soul may know No fearful change or sudden wonder, Nor sink the weight of mystery under, But with the upward rise, and with the vastness grow.”

To neither saint nor sinner is death a cessation of being. This we maintain, against the advocates of annihilation:

1. Upon rational grounds.

(a) The metaphysical argument.—The soul is simple, not compounded. Death, in matter, is the separation of parts. But in the soul there are no parts to be separated. The dissolution of the body, therefore, does not necessarily work a dissolution of the soul. But, since there is an immaterial principle in the brute, and this argument taken by itself might seem to prove the immortality of the animal creation equally with that of man, we pass to consider the next argument.

The Gnostics and the ManichÆans held that beasts had knowledge and might pray. The immateriality of the brute mind was probably the consideration which led Leibnitz, Bishop Butler, Coleridge, John Wesley, Lord Shaftesbury, Mary Somerville, James Hogg, Toplady, Lamartine, and Louis Agassiz to encourage the belief in animal immortality. See Bp. Butler, Analogy, part i, chap. i (Bohn's ed., 81-91); Agassiz, Essay on Classification, 99—“Most of the arguments for the immortality of man apply equally to the permanency of this principle in other living beings.” Elsewhere Agassiz says of animals: “I cannot doubt of their immortality any more than I doubt of my own.” Lord Shaftesbury in 1881 remarked: “I have ever believed in a happy future for animals; I cannot say or conjecture how or where; but sure I am that the love, so manifested by dogs especially, is an emanation from the divine essence, and as such it can, or rather, it will, never be extinguished.” St. Francis of Assisi preached [pg 985]to birds, and called sun, moon, earth, fire, water, stones, flowers, crickets, and death, his brothers and sisters. “He knew not if the brotherhood His homily had understood; He only knew that to one ear The meaning of his words was clear” (Longfellow, The Sermon of St. Francis—to the birds). “If death dissipates the sagacity of the elephant, why not that of his captor?” See Buckner, Immortality of Animals; William Adams Brown, Christian Theology in Outline, 240.

Mansel, Metaphysics, 371, maintains that all this argument proves is that the objector cannot show the soul to be compound, and so cannot show that it is destructible. Calderwood, Moral Philosophy, 259—“The facts which point toward the termination of our present state of existence are connected with our physical nature, not with our mental.” John Fiske, Destiny of the Creature, 110—“With his illegitimate hypothesis of annihilation, the materialist transgresses the bounds of experience quite as widely as the poet who sings of the New Jerusalem, with its river of life and its streets of gold. Scientifically speaking, there is not a particle of evidence for either view.”John Fiske, Life Everlasting, 80-85—“How could immortal man have been produced through heredity from an ephemeral brute? We do not know. Nature's habit is to make prodigious leaps, but only after long preparation. Slowly rises the water in the tank, inch by inch through many a weary hour, until at length it overflows, and straightway vast systems of machinery are awakened into rumbling life. Slowly the ellipse becomes eccentric, until suddenly the finite ellipse becomes an infinite paraboloid.”

Ladd, Philosophy of Mind, 206—“The ideas of dividing up or splitting off are not applicable to mind. The argument for the indestructibility of mind as growing out of its indiscerptibility, and the argument by which Kant confuted it, are alike absurd within the realm of mental phenomena.” Adeney, Christianity and Evolution, 127—“Nature, this argument shows, has nothing to say against the immortality of that which is above the range of physical structure.” Lotze: “Everything which has once originated will endure forever so soon as it possesses an unalterable value for the coherent system of the world; but it will, as a matter of course, in turn cease to be, if this is not the case.” Bowne, Int. to Psych. Theory, 315-318—“Of what use would brutes be hereafter? We may reply: Of what use are they here?... Those things which have perennial significance for the universe will abide.” Bixby, Crisis in Morals, 203—“In living beings there is always a pressure toward larger and higher existence.... The plant must grow, must bloom, must sow its seeds, or it withers away.... The aim is to bring forth consciousness, and in greatest fulness.... Beasts of prey and other enemies to the ascending path of life are to be swept out of the way.”

But is not the brute a part of that Nature which has been subjected to vanity, which groans and travails in pain, and which waits to be redeemed? The answer seems to be that the brute is a mere appendage to man, has no independent value in the creation, is incapable of ethical life or of communion with God the source of life, and so has no guarantee of continuance. Man on the other hand is of independent value. But this is to anticipate the argument which follows. It is sufficient here to point out that there is no proof that consciousness is dependent upon the soul's connection with a physical organism. McLane, Evolution in Religion, 261—“As the body may preserve its form and be to a degree made to act after the psychic element is lost by removal of the brain, so this psychic element may exist, and act according to its nature after the physical element ceases to exist.” Hovey, Bib. Eschatology, 19—“If I am in a house, I can look upon surrounding objects only through its windows; but open the door and let me go out of the house, and the windows are no longer of any use to me.”Shaler, Interpretation of Nature, 295—“To perpetuate mind after death is less surprising than to perpetuate or transmit mind here by inheritance.” See also Martineau, Study, 2:332-337, 363-365.

William James, in his Essay on Human Immortality, argues that thought is not necessarily a productive function of the brain; it may rather be a permissive or transmissivefunction. Thought is not made in the brain, so that when the brain perishes the soul dies. The brain is only the organ for the transmission of thought, just as the lens transmits the light which it does not produce. There is a spiritual world behind and above the material world. Our brains are thin and half transparent places in the veil, through which knowledge comes in. Savage, Life after Death, 289—“You may attach a dynamo for a time to some particular machine. When you have removed the machine, you have not destroyed the dynamo. You may attach it to some other machine and find that you have the old time power. So the soul may not be confined to one body.”These analogies seem to us to come short of proving personal immortality. They [pg 986]belong to “psychology without a soul,” and while they illustrate the persistence of some sort of life, they do not render more probable the continuance of my individual consciousness beyond the bounds of death. They are entirely consistent with the pantheistic theory of a remerging of the personal existence in the great whole of which it forms a part. Tennyson, In Memoriam: “That each, who seems a separate whole, Should move his rounds and, fusing all The skirts of self again, should fall Remerging in the general Soul, Is faith as vague as all unsweet.” See Pfleiderer, Die Ritschl'sche Theologie, 12; Howison, Limits of Evolution, 279-312.

Seth, Hegelianism: “For Hegel, immortality is only the permanence of the Absolute, the abstract process. This is no more consoling than the continued existence of the chemical elements of our bodies in new transformations. Human self-consciousness is a spark struck in the dark, to die away on the darkness whence it has arisen.” This is the only immortality of which George Eliot conceived in her poem, The Immortal Choir: “O may I join the choir invisible Of those immortal dead who live again In minds made better by their presence; live In pulses stirred to generosity, In deeds of daring rectitude, in scorn For miserable aims that end in self, In thoughts sublime that pierce the night like stars, And with their mild persistence urge man's search To vaster issues.”Those who hold to this unconscious immortality concede that death is not a separation of parts, but rather a cessation of consciousness; and that therefore, while the substance of human nature may endure, mankind may ever develop into new forms, without individual immortality. To this we reply, that man's self-consciousness and self-determination are different in kind from the consciousness and determination of the brute. As man can direct his self-consciousness and self-determination to immortal ends, we have the right to believe this self-consciousness and self-determination to be immortal. This leads us to the next argument.

(b) The teleological argument.—Man, as an intellectual, moral, and religious being, does not attain the end of his existence on earth. His development is imperfect here. Divine wisdom will not leave its work incomplete. There must be a hereafter for the full growth of man's powers, and for the satisfaction of his aspirations. Created, unlike the brute, with infinite capacities for moral progress, there must be an immortal existence in which those capacities shall be brought into exercise. Though the wicked forfeit all claim to this future, we have here an argument from God's love and wisdom to the immortality of the righteous.

In reply to this argument, it has been said that many right wishes are vain. Mill, Essays on Religion, 294—“Desire for food implies enough to eat, now and forever? hence an eternal supply of cabbage?” But our argument proceeds upon three presuppositions: (1) that a holy and benevolent God exists; (2) that he has made man in his image; (3) that man's true end is holiness and likeness to God. Therefore, what will answer the true end of man will be furnished; but that is not cabbage—it is holiness and love, i. e., God himself. See Martineau, Study, 2:370-381.

The argument, however, is valuable only in its application to the righteous. God will not treat the righteous as the tyrant of Florence treated Michael Angelo, when he bade him carve out of ice a statue, which would melt under the first rays of the sun. In the case of the wicked, the other law of retribution comes in—the taking away of “even that which he hath” (Mat. 25:29). Since we are all wicked, the argument is not satisfactory, unless we take into account the further facts of atonement and justification—facts of which we learn from revelation alone.

But while, taken by itself, this rational argument might be called defective, and could never prove that man may not attain his end in the continued existence of the race, rather than in that of the individual, the argument appears more valuable as a rational supplement to the facts already mentioned, and seems to render certain at least the immortality of those upon whom God has set his love, and in whom he has wrought the beginnings of righteousness.

Lord Erskine: “Inferior animals have no instincts or faculties which are not subservient to the ends and purposes of their being. Man's reason, and faculties endowed with power to reach the most distant worlds, would be useless if his existence were to terminate in the grave.” There would be wastefulness in the extinction of great minds; see Jackson, James Martineau, 439. As water is implied by the organization of [pg 987]the fish, and air by that of the bird, so “the existence of spiritual power within us is likewise presumption that some fitting environment awaits the spirit when it shall be set free and perfected, and sex and death can be dispensed with” (Newman Smyth, Place of Death in Evolution, 106). NÄgeli, the German botanist, says that Nature tends to perfection. Yet the mind hardly begins to awake, ere the bodily powers decline (George, Progress and Poverty, 505). “Character grows firmer and solider as the body ages and grows weaker. Can character be vitally implicated in the act of physical dissolution?” (Upton, Hibbert Lectures, 353). If a rational and moral Deity has caused the gradual evolution in humanity of the ideas of right and wrong, and has added to it the faculty of creating ethical ideals, must he not have provided some satisfaction for the ethical needs which this development has thus called into existence? (Balfour, Foundations of Belief, 351).

Royce, Conception of God, 50, quotes Le Conte as follows: “Nature is the womb inwhich, and evolution the process by which, are generated sons of God. Without immortality this whole process is balked—the whole process of cosmic evolution is futile. Shall God be so long and at so great pains to achieve a spirit, capable of communing with himself, and then allow it to lapse again into nothingness?” John Fiske, Destiny of Man, 116, accepts the immortality of the soul by “a supreme act of faith in the reasonableness of God's work.” If man is the end of the creative process and the object of God's care, then the soul's career cannot be completed with its present life upon the earth (Newman Smyth, Place of Death in Evolution, 92, 93). Bowne, Philosophy of Theism, 254—“Neither God nor the future life is needed to pay us for present virtue, but rather as the condition without which our nature falls into irreconcilable discord with itself, and passes on to pessimism and despair. High and continual effort is impossible without correspondingly high and abiding hopes.... It is no more selfish to desire to live hereafter than it is to desire to live to-morrow.” Dr. M. B. Anderson used to say that there must be a heaven for canal horses, washerwomen, and college presidents, because they do not get their deserts in this life.

Life is a series of commencements rather than of accomplished ends. Longfellow, on Charles Sumner: “Death takes us by surprise, And stays our hurrying feet; The great design unfinished lies, Our lives are incomplete. But in the dark unknown Perfect their circles seem, Even as a bridge's arch of stone Is rounded in the stream.” Robert Browning, Abt Vogler: “There never shall be one lost good”; Prospice: “No work begun shall ever pause for death”; “Pleasure must succeed to pleasure, else past pleasure turns to pain; And this first life claims a second, else I count its good no gain”; Old Pictures in Florence: “We are faulty—why not? We have time in store”; Grammarian's Funeral: “What's time? Leave Now for dogs and apes,—Man has Forever.”Robert Browning wrote in his wife's Testament the following testimony of Dante: “Thus I believe, thus I affirm, thus I am certain it is, that from this life I shall pass to another better, there where that lady lives, of whom my soul was enamored.”And Browning says in a letter: “It is a great thing—the greatest—that a human being should have passed the probation of life, and sum up its experience in a witness to the power and love of God.... I see even more reason to hold by the same hope.”

(c) The ethical argument.—Man is not, in this world, adequately punished for his evil deeds. Our sense of justice leads us to believe that God's moral administration will be vindicated in a life to come. Mere extinction of being would not be a sufficient penalty, nor would it permit degrees of punishment corresponding to degrees of guilt. This is therefore an argument from God's justice to the immortality of the wicked. The guilty conscience demands a state after death for punishment.

This is an argument from God's justice to the immortality of the wicked, as the preceding was an argument from God's love to the immortality of the righteous. “History defies our moral sense by giving a peaceful end to Sulla.” Louis XV and Madame Pompadour died in their beds, after a life of extreme luxury. Louis XVI and his queen, though far more just and pure, perished by an appalling tragedy. The fates of these four cannot be explained by the wickedness of the latter pair and the virtue of the former. Alexander the Sixth, the worst of the popes, was apparently prosperous and happy in his iniquities. Though guilty of the most shameful crimes, he was serenely impenitent, and to the last of his days he defied both God and man. Since [pg 988]there is not an execution of justice here, we feel that there must be a “judgment to come,”such as that which terrified Felix (Acts 24:25). Martineau, Study, 2:383-388. Stopford A. Brooke, Justice: “Three men went out one summer night, No care had they or aim, And dined and drank. ‘Ere we go home We'll have,’ they said, ‘a game.’ Three girls began that summer night A life of endless shame, And went through drink, disease, and death As swift as racing flame. Lawless and homeless, foul, they died; Rich, loved and praised, the men: But when they all shall meet with God, And Justice speaks,—what then?” See John Caird, Fund. Ideas of Christianity, 2:255-297. G. F. Wilkin, Control in Evolution: “Belief in immortality is a practical necessity of evolution. If the decisions of to-day are to determine our eternal destiny, then it is vastly more important to choose and act aright, than it is to preserve our earthly life. The martyrs were right. Conscience is vindicated. We can live for the ideal of manhood. Immortality is a powerful reformatory instrument.” Martineau, Study of Religion, 2:388—“If Death gives a final discharge to the sinner and the saint alike, Conscience has told us more lies than it has ever called to their account.” Shakespeare, Henry V, 4:2—“If [transgressors] have defeated the law and outrun native punishment, though they can outstrip men, they have no wings to fly from God”; Henry VI, 2d part, 5:2—“Can we outrun the heavens?” Addison, Cato: “It must be so,—Plato, thou reasonest well.—Else whence this pleasing hope, this fond desire, This longing after immortality? Or whence this secret dread and inward horror Of falling into naught? Why shrinks the soul Back on herself and startles at destruction? 'Tis the divinity that stirs within us, 'Tis Heaven itself that points out a hereafter, And intimates eternity to man.”

Gildersleeve, in The Independent, March 30, 1899—“Plato in the PhÆdo argues for immortality from the alternation of opposites: life must follow death as death follows life. But alternation of opposites is not generation of opposites. He argues from reminiscence. But this involves pre-existence and a cycle of incarnations, not the immortality which we crave. The soul abides, as the idea abides, but there is no guarantee that it abides forever. He argues from the uncompounded nature of the soul. But we do not know the soul's nature, and at most this is an analogy: as soul is like God, invisible, it must like God abide. But this is analogy, and nothing more.”William James, Will to Believe, 87—“That our whole physical life may lie soaking in a spiritual atmosphere, a dimension of being which we at present have no organ for apprehending, is vividly suggested to us by the analogy of the life of our domestic animals. Our dogs, for example, are in our human life, but are not of it. They bite, but do not know what it means; they submit to vivisection, and do not know the meaning of that.”

George Eliot, walking with Frederic Myers in the Fellows' Garden at Trinity, Cambridge, “stirred somewhat beyond her wont, and taking as her text the three words which have been used so often as the inspiring trumpet-calls of men—the words God, Immortality, Duty—pronounced with terrible earnestness how inconceivable was the first, how unbelievable the second, and yet how peremptory and absolute the third.”But this idea of the infinite nature of Duty is the creation of Christianity—the last infinite would never have attained its present range and intensity, had it not been indissolubly connected with the other two (Forrest, Christ of History and Experience, 16).

This ethical argument has probably more power over the minds of men than any other. Men believe in Minos and Rhadamanthus, if not in the Elysian Fields. But even here it may be replied that the judgment which conscience threatens may be, not immortality, but extinction of being. We shall see, however, in our discussion of the endlessness of future punishment, that mere annihilation cannot satisfy the moral instinct which lies at the basis of this argument. That demands a punishment proportioned in each case to the guilt incurred by transgression. Extinction of being would be the same to all. As it would not admit of degrees, so it would not, in any case, sufficiently vindicate God's righteousness. F. W. Newman: “If man be not immortal, God is not just.”

But while this argument proves life and punishment for the wicked after death, it leaves us dependent on revelation for our knowledge how long that life and punishment will be. Kant's argument is that man strives equally for morality and for well-being; but morality often requires the sacrifice of well-being; hence there must be a future reconciliation of the two in the well-being or reward of virtue. To all of which it might be answered, first, that there is no virtue so perfect as to merit reward; and secondly, that virtue is its own reward, and so is well-being.

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(d) The historical argument.—The popular belief of all nations and ages shows that the idea of immortality is natural to the human mind. It is not sufficient to say that this indicates only such desire for continued earthly existence as is necessary to self-preservation; for multitudes expect a life beyond death without desiring it, and multitudes desire a heavenly life without caring for the earthly. This testimony of man's nature to immortality may be regarded as the testimony of the God who made the nature.

Testimonies to this popular belief are given in Bartlett, Life and Death Eternal, preface: The arrow-heads and earthen vessels laid by the side of the dead Indian; the silver obolus put in the mouth of the dead Greek to pay Charon's passage money; the furnishing of the Egyptian corpse with the Book of the Dead, the papyrus-roll containing the prayer he is to offer and the chart of his journey through the unseen world. The Gauls did not hesitate to lend money, on the sole condition that he to whom they lent it would return it to them in the other life,—so sure were they that they should get it again (Valerius Maximus, quoted in Boissier, La Religion Romaine, 1:264). The Laplanders bury flint and tinder with the dead, to furnish light for the dark journey. The Norsemen buried the horse and armor for the dead hero's triumphant ride. The Chinese scatter paper images of sedan porters over the grave, to help along in the sombre pilgrimage. The Greenlanders bury with the child a dog to guide him (George Dana Boardman, Sermon on Immortality).

Savage, Life after Death, 1-18—“Candles at the head of the casket are the modern representatives of the primitive man's fire which was to light the way of the soul on its dark journey.... Ulysses talks in the underworld with the shade of Hercules though the real Hercules, a demigod, had been transferred to Olympus, and was there living in companionship with the gods.... The Brahman desired to escape being reborn. Socrates: ‘To die and be released is better for me.’ Here I am walking on a plank. It reaches out into the fog, and I have got to keep walking. I can see only ten feet ahead of me. I know that pretty soon I must walk over the end of that plank,—I haven't the slightest idea into what, and I don't believe anybody else knows. And I don't like it.” Matthew Arnold: “Is there no other life? Pitch this one high.” But without positive revelation most men will say: “Let us eat and drink, for to-morrow we die”(1 Cor. 15:32).

“By passionately loving life, we make Loved life unlovely, hugging her to death.”Theodore Parker: “The intuition of mortality is written in the heart of man by a Hand that writes no falsehoods.... There is evidence of a summer yet to be, in the buds which lie folded through our northern winter—efflorescences in human nature unaccountable if the end of man is in the grave.” But it may be replied that many universal popular impressions have proved false, such as belief in ghosts, and in the moving of the sun round the earth. While the mass of men have believed in immortality, some of the wisest have been doubters. Cyrus said: “I cannot imagine that the soul lives only while it remains in this mortal body.” But the dying words of Socrates were: “We part; I am going to die, and you to live; which of us goes the better way is known to God alone.” Cicero declared: “Upon this subject I entertain no more than conjectures;” and said that, when he was reading Plato's argument for immortality, he seemed to himself convinced, but when he laid down the book he found that all his doubts returned. Farrar, Darkness and Dawn, 134—“Though Cicero wrote his Tusculan Disputations to prove the doctrine of immortality, he spoke of that doctrine in his letters and speeches as a mere pleasing speculation, which might be discussed with interest, but which no one practically held.”

Aristotle, Nic. Ethics, 3:9, calls death “the most to be feared of all things ... for it appears to be the end of everything; and for the deceased there appears to be no longer either any good or any evil.” Æschylus: “Of one once dead there is no resurrection.”Catullus: “When once our brief day has set, we must sleep one everlasting night.”Tacitus: “If there is a place for the spirits of the pious; if, as the wise suppose, great souls do not become extinct with their bodies.” “In that if,” says Uhlhorn, “lies the whole torturing uncertainty of heathenism.” Seneca, Ep. liv.—“Mors est non esse”—“Death is not to be”; Troades, V, 393—“Post mortem nihil est, ipsaque mors nihil”—“There is nothing after death, and death itself is nothing.” Marcus Aurelius: “What springs from earth dissolves to earth again, and heavenborn things fly to their [pg 990]native seat.” The Emperor Hadrian to his soul: “Animula, vagula, blandula, Hospes comesque corporis, QuÆ nunc abibis in loca? Pallidula, rigida, nudula.” Classic writers might have said of the soul at death: “We know not where is that Promethean torch That can its light relume.”

Chadwick, 184—“With the growth of all that is best in man of intelligence and affection, there goes the development of the hope of an immortal life. If the hope thus developed is not a valid one, then we have a radical contradiction in our moral nature. The survival of the fittest points in the same direction.” Andrew Marvell (1621-1678)—“At my back I always hear Time's winged chariot hurrying near; And yonder all before us lie Deserts of vast Eternity.” Goethe in his last days came to be a profound believer in immortality. “You ask me what are my grounds for this belief? The weightiest is this, that we cannot do without it.” Huxley wrote in a letter to Morley: “It is a curious thing that I find my dislike to the thought of extinction increasing as I get older and nearer the goal. It flashes across me at all sorts of time that in 1900 I shall probably know no more of what is going on than I did in 1800. I had sooner be in hell, a great deal,—at any rate in one of the upper circles, where climate and the company are not too trying.”

The book of Job shows how impossible it is for man to work out the problem of personal immortality from the point of view of merely natural religion. Shakespeare, in Measure for Measure, represents Claudio as saying to his sister Isabella: “Aye, but to die, and go we know not where; To lie in cold obstruction and to rot; This sensible warm motion to become A kneaded clod.” Strauss, Glaubenslehre, 2:739—“The other world is in all men the one enemy, in its aspect of a future world, however, the last enemy, which speculative criticism has to fight, and if possible to overcome.” Omar KhayyÁm, RubÁiyÁt, Stanzas 28-35—“I came like Water, and like Wind I go.... Up from Earth's Centre through the seventh gate I rose, and on the throne of Saturn sate, And many a knot unravelled by the Road, But not the master-knot of human fate. There was the Door to which I found no Key; There was the Veil through which I might not see: Some little talk awhile of Me and Thee There was,—And then no more of Thee and Me. Earth could not answer, nor the Seas that mourn, In flowing purple, of their Lord forlorn; Nor rolling Heaven, with all his signs revealed, And hidden by the sleeve of Night and Morn. Then of the Thee in Me, who works behind The veil, I lifted up my hands to find A Lamp, amid the darkness; and I heard As from without—‘The Me within Thee blind.’ Then to the lip of this poor earthen Urn I leaned, the secret of my life to learn; And Lip to Lip it murmur'd—‘While you live, Drink!—for, once dead, you never shall return!’ ” So “The Phantom Caravan has reached The Nothing it set out from.” It is a demonstration of the hopelessness and blindness and sensuality of man, when left without the revelation of God and of the life to come.

The most that can be claimed for this fourth argument from popular belief is that it indicates a general appentency for continued existence after death, and that the idea is congruous with our nature. W. E. Forster said to Harriet Martineau that he would rather be damned than annihilated; see F. P. Cobbe, Peak of Darien, 44. But it may be replied that there is reason enough for this desire for life in the fact that it ensures the earthly existence of the race, which might commit universal suicide without it. There is reason enough in the present life for its existence, and we are not necessitated to infer a future life therefrom. This objection cannot be fully answered from reason alone. But if we take our argument in connection with the Scriptural revelation concerning God's making of man in his image, we may regard the testimony of man's nature as the testimony of the God who made it.

We conclude our statement of these rational proofs with the acknowledgment that they rest upon the presupposition that there exists a God of truth, wisdom, justice, and love, who has made man in his image, and who desires to commune with his creatures. We acknowledge, moreover, that these proofs give us, not an absolute demonstration, but only a balance of probability, in favor of man's immortality. We turn therefore to Scripture for the clear revelation of a fact of which reason furnishes us little more than a presumption.

Everett, Essays, 76, 77—“In his TrÄume eines Geistersehers, Kant foreshadows the Method of his Kritik. He gives us a scheme of disembodied spirits, and calls it a bit of mystic (geheimen) philosophy; then the opposite view, which he calls a bit of vulgar [pg 991](gemeimen) philosophy. Then he says the scales of the understanding are not quite impartial, and the one that has the inscription ‘Hope for the future’ has a mechanical advantage. He says he cannot rid himself of this unfairness. He suffers feeling to determine the result. This is intellectual agnosticism supplemented by religious faith.”The following lines have been engraved upon the tomb of Professor Huxley: “And if there be no meeting past the grave, If all is darkness, silence, yet 'tis rest. Be not afraid, ye waiting hearts that weep, For God still giveth his beloved sleep, And if an endless sleep he wills, so best.” Contrast this consolation with: “Let not your heart be troubled: ye believe in God, believe also in me. In my Father's house are many mansions: if it were not so, I would have told you. I go to prepare a place for you. And if I go and prepare a place for you, I will come again, and receive you unto myself, that where I am, there ye may be also” (John 14:1-3).

Dorner: “There is no rational evidence which compels belief in immortality. Immortality has its pledge in God's making man in his image, and in God's will of love for communion with men.” Luthardt, Compendium, 289—“The truth in these proofs from reason is the idea of human personality and its relation to God. Belief in God is the universal presupposition and foundation of the universal belief in immortality.”When Strauss declared that this belief in immortality is the last enemy which is to be destroyed, he forgot that belief in God is more ineradicable still. Frances Power Cobbe, Life, 92—“The doctrine of immortality is to me the indispensable corollary of that of the goodness of God.”

Hadley, Essays, Philological and Critical, 392-397—“The claim of immortality may be based on one or the other of two assumptions: (1) The same organism will be reproduced hereafter, and the same functions, or part of them, again manifested in connection with it, and accompanied with consciousness of continued identity; or, (2) The same functions may be exercised and accompanied with consciousness of identity, though not connected with the same organism as before; may in fact go on without interruption, without being even suspended by death, though no longer manifested to us.” The conclusion is: “The light of nature, when all directed to this question, does furnish a presumption in favor of immortality, but not so strong a presumption as to exclude great and reasonable doubts upon the subject.”

For an excellent synopsis of arguments and objections, see Hase, Hutterus Redivivus, 276. See also Bowen, Metaph. and Ethics, 417-441; A. M. Fairbairn, on Idea of Immortality, in Studies in Philos. of Religion and of History; Wordsworth, Intimations of Immortality; Tennyson, Two Voices; Alger, Critical History of Doctrine of Future Life, with Appendix by Ezra Abbott, containing a Catalogue of Works relating to the Nature, Origin, and Destiny of the Soul; Ingersoll Lectures on Immortality, by George A. Gordon, Josiah Royce, William James, Dr. Osler, John Fiske, B. I. Wheeler, Hyslop, MÜnsterberg, Crothars.

(a) The account of man's creation, and the subsequent allusions to it in Scripture, show that, while the body was made corruptible and subject to death, the soul was made in the image of God, incorruptible and immortal.

Gen. 1:26, 27—“Let us make man in our image”; 2:7—“And Jehovah God formed man of the dust of the ground, and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life; and man became a living soul”—here, as was shown in our treatment of Man's Original State, page 523, it is not the divine image, but the body, that is formed of dust; and into this body the soul that possesses the divine image is breathed. In the Hebrew records, the animating soul is everywhere distinguished from the earthly body. Gen. 3:22, 23—“Behold, the man is become as one of us, to know good and evil; and now, lest he put forth his hand, and take also of the tree of life, and eat, and live for ever: therefore Jehovah God sent him forth from the garden of Eden”—man had immortality of soul, and now, lest to this he add immortality of body, he is expelled from the tree of life. Eccl. 12:7—“the dust returneth to the earth as it was, and the spirit returneth unto God who gave it”; Zech. 12:1—“Jehovah, who stretcheth forth the heavens, and layeth the foundation of the earth, and formeth the spirit of man within him.”

Mat. 10:28—“And be not afraid of them that kill the body, but are not able to kill the soul: but rather fear him who is able to destroy both soul and body in hell”; Acts 7:59—“And they stoned Stephen, calling upon the Lord, and saying, Lord Jesus, receive my spirit”: 2 Cor. 12:2—“I know a man in Christ, fourteen years ago (whether in the body, I know not; or whether out of the body, I know not; God knoweth), such a one caught up even to the third heaven”; 1 Cor. 15:45, 46—“The first man Adam became a living soul. The last Adam became a life-giving spirit. Howbeit that is not first which is spiritual, but that which is natural; then that which is spiritual”—the first [pg 992]Adam was made a being whose body was psychical and mortal—a body of flesh and blood, that could not inherit the kingdom of God. So Paul says the spiritual is not first, but the psychical; but there is no intimation that the soul also was created mortal, and needed external appliances, like the tree of life, before it could enter upon immortality.

But it may be asked: Is not all this, in 1 Cor. 15, spoken of the regenerate—those to whom a new principle of life has been communicated? We answer, yes; but that does not prevent us from learning from the passage the natural immortality of the soul; for in regeneration the essence is not changed, no new substance is imparted, no new faculty or constitutive element is added, and no new principle of holiness is infused. The truth is simply that the spirit is morally readjusted. For substance of the above remarks, see Hovey, State of Impenitent Dead, 1-27.

Savage, Life after Death, 46, 53—“The word translated ‘soul’, in Gen. 2:7, is the same word which in other parts of the O. T. is used to denote the life-principle of animals. It does not follow that soul implies immortality, for then all animals would be immortal.... The firmament of the Hebrews was the cover of a dinner-platter, solid, but with little windows to let the rain through. Above this firmament was heaven where God and angels abode, but no people went there. All went below. But growing moral sense held that the good could not be imprisoned in Hades. So came the idea of resurrection.... If a force, a universe with God left out, can do all that has been done, I do not see why it cannot also continue my existence through what is called death.”

Dr. H. Heath Bawden: “It is only the creature that is born that will die. Monera and AmoebÆ are immortal, as Weismann tells us. They do not die, because they never are born. The death of the individual as a somatic individual is for the sake of the larger future life of the individual in its germinal immortality. So we live ourselves spiritually into our children, as well as physically. An organism is nothing but a centre or focus through which the world surges. What matter if the irrelevant somatic portion is lost in what we call death! The only immortality possible is the immortality of function. My body has changed completely since I was a boy, but I have become a larger self thereby. Birth and death simply mark steps or stages in the growth of such an individual, which in its very nature does not exclude but rather includes within it the lives of all other individuals. The individual is more than a passive member, he is an active organ of a biological whole. The laws of his life are the social organism functioning in one of its organs. He lives and moves and has his being in the great spirit of the whole, which comes to a focus or flowers out in his conscious life.”

(b) The account of the curse in Genesis, and the subsequent allusions to it in Scripture, show that, while the death then incurred includes the dissolution of the body, it does not include cessation of being on the part of the soul, but only designates that state of the soul which is the opposite of true life, viz., a state of banishment from God, of unholiness, and of misery.

Gen. 2:17—“in the day that thou eatest thereof thou shalt surely die”; cf. 3:8—“the man and his wife hid themselves from the presence of Jehovah God”; 16-19—the curse of pain and toil: 22-24—banishment from the garden of Eden and from the tree of life. Mat. 8:22—“Follow me; and leave the dead to bury their own dead”; 25:41, 46—“Depart from me, ye cursed, into the eternal fire.... These shall go away into eternal punishment”; Luke 15:32—“this thy brother was dead, and is alive again; and was lost, and is found”; John 5:24—“He that heareth my word, and believeth him that sent me, hath eternal life, and cometh not into judgment, but hath passed out of death into life”; 6:47, 53, 63—“He that believeth hath eternal life.... Except ye eat the flesh of the Son of man and drink his blood, ye have not life in yourselves.... the words that I have spoken unto you are spirit, and are life”: 8:51—“If a man keep my word, he shall never see death.”

Rom. 5:21—“that, as sin reigned in death, even so might grace reign through righteousness unto eternal life”; 8:13—“if ye live after the flesh, ye must die; but if by the Spirit ye put to death the deeds of the body, ye shall live”; Eph. 2:1—“dead through your trespasses and sins”; 5:14—“Awake, thou that sleepest, and arise from the dead, and Christ shall shine upon thee”; James 5:20—“he who converteth a sinner from the error of his way shall save a soul from death, and shall cover a multitude of sins”; 1 John 3:14—“We know that we have passed out of death into life, because we love the brethren”; Rev. 3:1—“I know thy works, that thou hast a name that thou livest, and thou art dead.”

We are to interpret O. T. terms by the N. T. meaning put into them. We are to interpret the Hebrew by the Greek, not the Greek by the Hebrew. It never would do to [pg 993]interpret our missionaries' use of the Chinese words for “God”, “spirit”, “holiness”, by the use of those words among the Chinese before the missionaries came. By the later usage of the N. T., the Holy Spirit shows us what he meant by the usage of the O. T.

(c) The Scriptural expressions, held by annihilationists to imply cessation of being on the part of the wicked, are used not only in connections where they cannot bear this meaning (Esther 4:16), but in connections where they imply the opposite.

Esther 4:16—“if I perish, I perish”; Gen. 6:11—“And the earth was corrupt before God”—here, in the LXX, the word ?f????, translated “was corrupt,” is the same word which in other places is interpreted by annihilationists as meaning extinction of being. In Ps. 119:176, “I have gone astray like a lost sheep” cannot mean “I have gone astray like an annihilated sheep.” Is. 49:17—“thy destroyers [annihilators?] and they that made thee waste shall go forth from thee”; 57:1, 2—“The righteous perisheth [is annihilated?] and no man layeth it to heart; and merciful men are taken away, none considering that the righteous is taken away from the evil to come. He entereth into peace; they rest in their beds, each one that walketh in his uprightness”; Dan. 9:26—“And after the three score and two weeks shall the anointed one be cut off [annihilated?].”

Mat. 10:6, 39, 42—“the lost sheep of the house of Israel ... he that loseth his life for my sake shall find it ... he shall in no wise lose his reward”—in these verses we cannot substitute “annihilate” for “lose”; Acts 13:41—“Behold, ye despisers, and wonder, and perish”; cf. Mat. 6:16—“for they disfigure their faces”—where the same word ?fa???? is used. 1 Cor. 3:17—“If any man destroyeth [annihilates?] the temple of God, him shall God destroy”; 2 Cor. 7:2—“we corrupted no man”—where the same word f?e??? is used. 2 Thess. 1:9—“who shall suffer punishment, even eternal destruction from the face of the Lord and from the glory of his might” = the wicked shall be driven out from the presence of Christ. Destruction is not annihilation. “Destruction from” = separation; (per contra, see Prof. W. A. Stevens, Com. in loco: “from” = the source from which the “destruction” proceeds). “A ship engulfed in quicksands is destroyed; a temple broken down and deserted is destroyed”; see Lillie, Com. in loco. 2 Pet. 3:7—“day of judgment and destruction of ungodly men”—here the word “destruction” (?p??e?a?) is the same with that used of the end of the present order of things, and translated “perished” (?p??et?) in verse 6. “We cannot accordingly infer from it that the ungodly will cease to exist, but only that there will be a great and penal change in their condition” (Plumptre, Com. in loco).

(d) The passages held to prove the annihilation of the wicked at death cannot have this meaning, since the Scriptures foretell a resurrection of the unjust as well as of the just; and a second death, or a misery of the reunited soul and body, in the case of the wicked.

Acts 24:15—“there shall be a resurrection both of the just and unjust”; Rev. 2:11—“He that overcometh shall not be hurt of the second death”; 20:14, 15—“And death and Hades were cast into the lake of fire. This is the second death, even the lake of fire. And if any was not found written in the book of life, he was cast into the lake of fire”; 21:8—“their part shall be in the lake that burneth with fire and brimstone; which is the second death.” The “second death” is the first death intensified. Having one's “part in the lake of fire” is not annihilation.

In a similar manner the word “life” is to be interpreted not as meaning continuance of being, but as meaning perfection of being. As death is the loss not of life, but of all that makes life desirable, so life is the possession of the highest good. 1 Tim. 5:6—“She that giveth herself to pleasure is dead while she liveth”—here the death is spiritual death, and it is implied that true life is spiritual life. John 10:10—“I came that they may have life, and may have it abundantly”—implies that “life” is not: 1. mere existence, for they had this before Christ came; nor 2. mere motion, as squirrels go in a wheel, without making progress; nor 3. mere possessions, “for a man's life consisteth not in the abundance of things which he possesseth” (Luke 12:15). But life is: 1. right relation of our powers, or holiness; 2. right use of our powers, or love; 3. right number of our powers, or completeness; 4. right intensity of our powers, or energy of will; 5. right environment of our powers, or society; 6. right source of our powers, or God.

(e) The words used in Scripture to denote the place of departed spirits have in them no implication of annihilation, and the allusions to the condition of the departed show that death, to the writers of the Old and the New [pg 994] Testaments, although it was the termination of man's earthly existence, was not an extinction of his being or his consciousness.

On ???? Sheol, Gesenius, Lexicon, 10th ed., says that, though ???? is commonly explained as infinitive of ???, to demand, it is undoubtedly allied to ??? (root ??), to be sunk, and = “sinking,” “depth,” or “the sunken, deep, place.” ??d??, Hades, = not “hell,” but the “unseen world,” conceived by the Greeks as a shadowy, but not as an unconscious, state of being. Genung, Epic of the Inner Life, on Job 7:9—“Sheol, the Hebrew word designating the unseen abode of the dead; a neutral word, presupposing neither misery nor happiness, and not infrequently used much as we use the word ‘the grave’, to denote the final undefined resting-place of all.”

Gen. 25:8, 9—Abraham “was gathered to his people. And Isaac and Ishmael his sons buried him in the cave of Machpelah.” “Yet Abraham's father was buried in Haran, and his more remote ancestors in Ur of the Chaldees. So Joshua's generation is said to be ‘gathered to their fathers’though the generation that preceded them perished in the wilderness, and previous generations died in Egypt” (W. H. Green, in S. S. Times). So of Isaac in Gen. 35:29, and of Jacob in 19:29, 33,—all of whom were gathered to their fathers before they were buried. Num. 20:24—“Aaron shall be gathered unto his people”—here it is very plain that being “gathered unto his people” was something different from burial. Deut. 10:6—“There Aaron died, and there he was buried.” Job 3:13, 18—“For now should I have lain down and been quiet; I should have slept; then had I been at rest.... There the prisoners are at ease together; They hear not the voice of the taskmaster”; 7:9—“As the cloud is consumed and vanisheth away, So he that goeth down to Sheol shall come up no more”; 14:22—“But his flesh upon him hath pain, And his soul within him mourneth.”

Ez. 32:21—“The strong among the mighty shall speak to him out of the midst of Sheol”; Luke 16:23—“And in Hades he lifted up his eyes, being in torments, and seeth Abraham afar off, and Lazarus in his bosom”; 23:43—“To-day shalt thou be with me in Paradise”; cf. 1 Sam. 28:19—Samuel said to Saul in the cave of Endor: “to-morrow shalt thou and thy sons be with me”—evidently not in an unconscious state. Many of these passages intimate a continuity of consciousness after death. Though Sheol is unknown to man, it is naked and open to God (Job 26:6); he can find men there to redeem them from thence (Ps. 49:15)—proof that death is not annihilation. See Girdlestone, O. T. Synonyms, 447.

(f) The terms and phrases which have been held to declare absolute cessation of existence at death are frequently metaphorical, and an examination of them in connection with the context and with other Scriptures is sufficient to show the untenableness of the literal interpretation put upon them by the annihilationists, and to prove that the language is merely the language of appearance.

Death is often designated as a “sleeping” or a “falling asleep”; see John 11:11, 14—“Our friend Lazarus is fallen asleep; but I go, that I may awake him out of sleep.... Then Jesus therefore said unto them plainly, Lazarus is dead.” Here the language of appearance is used; yet this language could not have been used, if the soul had not been conceived of as alive, though sundered from the body; see Meyer on 1 Cor. 1:18. So the language of appearance is used in Eccl. 9:10—“there is no work, nor device, nor knowledge, nor wisdom, in Sheol whither thou goest”—and in Ps. 146:4—“His breath goeth forth; he returneth to his earth; In that very day his thoughts perish.”

See Mozley, Essays, 2:171—“These passages often describe the phenomena of death as it presents itself to our eyes, and so do not enter into the reality which takes place beneath it.” Bartlett, Life and Death Eternal, 189-358—“Because the same Hebrew word is used for ‘spirit’ and ‘breath,’ shall we say that the spirit is only breath? ‘Heart’ in English might in like manner be made to mean only the material organ; and David's heart, panting, thirsting, melting within him, would have to be interpreted literally. So a man may be ‘eaten up with avarice,’ while yet his being is not only not extinct, but is in a state of frightful activity.”

(g) The Jewish belief in a conscious existence after death is proof that the theory of annihilation rests upon a misinterpretation of Scripture. That such a belief in the immortality of the soul existed among the Jews is abundantly evident: from the knowledge of a future state possessed by the Egyptians (Acts 7:22); from the accounts of the translation of Enoch and [pg 995] of Elijah (Gen. 5:24; cf. Heb. 11:5; 2 K. 2:11); from the invocation of the dead which was practised, although forbidden by the law (1 Sam. 28:7-14; cf. Lev. 20:28; Deut. 18:10, 11); from allusions in the O. T. to resurrection, future retribution, and life beyond the grave (Job 19:25-27; Ps. 16:9-11; Is. 26:19; Ez. 37:1-14; Dan. 12:2, 3, 13); and from distinct declarations of such faith by Philo and Josephus, as well as by the writers of the N. T. (Mat. 22:31, 32; Acts 23:6; 26:6-8; Heb. 11:13-16).

The Egyptian coffin was called “the chest of the living.” The Egyptians called their houses “hostelries,” while their tombs they called their “eternal homes” (Butcher, Aspects of Greek Genius, 30). See the Book of the Dead, translated by Birch, in Bunsen's Egypt's Place, 123-333: The principal ideas of the first part of the Book of the Dead are “living again after death, and being born again as the sun,” which typified the Egyptian resurrection (138). “The deceased lived again after death” (134). “The Osiris lives after he dies, like the sun daily; for as the sun died and was born yesterday, so the Osiris is born” (164). Yet the immortal part, in its continued existence, was dependent for its blessedness upon the preservation of the body; and for this reason the body was embalmed. Immortality of the body is as important as the passage of the soul to the upper regions. Growth or natural reparation of the body is invoked as earnestly as the passage of the soul. “There is not a limb of him without a god; Thoth is vivifying his limbs” (197).

Maspero, Recueil de Travaux, gives the following readings from the inner walls of pyramids twelve miles south of Cairo: “O Unas, thou hast gone away dead, but living”; “Teti is the living dead”; “Arise, O Teti, to die no more”; “O Pepi, thou diest no more”;—these inscriptions show that to the Egyptians there was life beyond death. “The life of Unas is duration; his period is eternity”; “They render thee happy throughout all eternity”; “He who has given thee life and eternity is Ra”;—here we see that the life beyond death was eternal. “Rising at his pleasure, gathering his members that are in the tomb, Unas goes forth”; “Unas has his heart, his legs, his arms”; this asserts reunion with the body. “Reunited to thy soul, thou takest thy place among the stars of heaven”; “the soul is thine within thee”;—there was reunion with the soul. “A god is born, it is Unas”; “O Ra, thy son comes to thee, this Unas comes to thee”; “O Father of Unas, grant that he may be included in the number of the perfect and wise gods”; here it is taught that the reunited soul and body becomes a god and dwells with the gods.

Howard Osgood: “Osiris, the son of gods, came to live on earth. His life was a pattern for others. He was put to death by the god of evil, but regained his body, lived again, and became, in the other world, the judge of all men.” Tiele, Egyptian Religion, 280—“To become like god Osiris, a benefactor, a good being, persecuted but justified, judged but pronounced innocent, was looked upon as the ideal of every pious man, and as the condition on which alone eternal life could be obtained, and as the means by which it could be continued.” Ebers, Études ArchÉologiques, 21—“The texts in the pyramids show us that under the Pharaohs of the 5th dynasty (before 2500 B. C.) the doctrine that the deceased became god was not only extant, but was developed more thoroughly and with far higher flight of imagination than we could expect from the simple statements concerning the other world hitherto known to us as from that early time.” Revillout, on Egyptian Ethics, in Bib. Sac., July, 1890:304—“An almost absolute sinlessness was for the Egyptian the condition of becoming another Osiris and enjoying eternal happiness. Of the penitential side, so highly developed in the ancient Babylonians and Hebrews, which gave rise to so many admirable penitential psalms, we find only a trace among the Egyptians. Sinlessness is the rule,—the deceased vaunts himself as a hero of virtue.” See Uarda, by Ebers; Dr. Howard Osgood, on Resurrection among the Egyptians, in Hebrew Student, Feb. 1885. The Egyptians, however, recognized no transmigration of souls; see Renouf, Hibbert Lectures, 181-184.

It is morally impossible that Moses should not have known the Egyptian doctrine of immortality: Acts 7:22—“And Moses was instructed in all the wisdom of the Egyptians.” That Moses did not make the doctrine more prominent in his teachings, may be for the reason that it was so connected with Egyptian superstitions with regard to Osiris. Yet the Jews believed in immortality: Gen. 5:24—“and Enoch walked with God: and he was not; for God took him”; [pg 996] cf. Heb. 11:5—“By faith Enoch was translated that he should not see death”; 2 Kings 2:11—“Elijah went up by a whirlwind into heaven”; 1 Sam. 28:7-14—the invocation of Samuel by the woman of Endor; cf. Lev. 20:27—“A man also or a woman that hath a familiar spirit, or that is a wizard, shall surely be put to death”; Deut. 18:10, 11—“There shall not be found with thee ... a consulter with a familiar spirit, or a wizard, or a necromancer.”

Job 19:25-27—“I know that my Redeemer liveth, And at last he will stand up upon the earth: And after my skin, even this body, is destroyed, Then without my flesh shall I see God; Whom I, even I, shall see, on my side, And mine eyes shall behold, and not as a stranger. My heart is consumed within me”; Ps. 16:9-11—“Therefore my heart is glad, and my glory rejoiceth: My flesh also shall dwell in safety. For thou wilt not leave my soul to Sheol; Neither wilt thou suffer thy holy one to see corruption. Thou wilt show me the path of life: In thy presence is fulness of joy; In thy right hand there are pleasures for evermore”; Is. 26:19—“Thy dead shalt live; my dead bodies shall arise. Awake and sing, ye that dwell in the dust; for thy dew is as the dew of herbs, and the earth shall cast forth the dead”; Ez. 37:1-14—the valley of dry bones—“I will open your graves, and cause you to come up out of your graves, O my people”—a prophecy of restoration based upon the idea of immortality and resurrection; Dan. 12:2, 3, 13—“And many of them that sleep in the dust of the earth shall awake, some to everlasting life, and some to shame and everlasting contempt. And they that are wise shall shine as the brightness of the firmament; and they that turn many to righteousness as the stars for ever and ever.... But go thou thy way till the end be: for thou shalt rest, and shalt stand in thy lot, at the end of the days.”

Josephus, on the doctrine of the Pharisees, in Antiquities, XVIII:1:3, and Wars of the Jews, II:8:10-14—“Souls have an immortal vigor. Under the earth are rewards and punishments. The wicked are detained in an everlasting prison. The righteous shall have power to revive and live again. Bodies are indeed corruptible, but souls remain exempt from death forever. But the doctrine of the Sadducees is that souls die with their bodies.” Mat. 22:31, 32—“But as touching the resurrection of the dead, have ye not read that which was spoken unto you by God, saying, I am the God of Abraham, and the God of Isaac, and the God of Jacob? God is not the God of the dead, but of the living.”

Christ's argument, in the passage last quoted, rests upon the two implied assumptions: first, that love will never suffer the object of its affection to die; beings who have ever been the objects of God's love will be so forever; secondly, that body and soul belong normally together; if body and soul are temporarily separated, they shall be united; Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob are living, and therefore they shall rise again. It was only an application of the same principle, when Robert Hall gave up his early materialism as he looked down into his father's grave: he felt that this could not be the end; cf. Ps. 22:26—“Your heart shall live forever.” Acts 23:6—“I am a Pharisee, a son of Pharisees: touching the hope and resurrection of the dead I am called in question”; 26:7, 8—“And concerning this hope I am accused by the Jews, O king! Why is it judged incredible with you, if God doth raise the dead?” Heb. 11:13-16—the present life was reckoned as a pilgrimage; the patriarchs sought “a better country, that is, a heavenly”; cf. Gen. 47:9. On Jesus' argument for the resurrection, see A. H. Strong, Christ in Creation, 406-421.

The argument for immortality itself presupposes, not only the existence of a God, but the existence of a truthful, wise, and benevolent God. We might almost say that God and immortality must be proved together,—like two pieces of a broken crock, when put together there is proof of both. And yet logically it is only the existence of God that is intuitively certain. Immortality is an inference therefrom. Henry More: “But souls that of his own good life partake He loves as his own self; dear as his eye They are to him: he'll never them forsake; When they shall die, then God himself shall die; They live, they live in blest eternity.” God could not let Christ die, and he cannot let us die. Southey: “They sin who tell us love can die. With life all other passions fly; All others are but vanity. In heaven ambition cannot dwell, Nor avarice in the vaults of hell; They perish where they had their birth; But love is indestructible.”

Emerson, Threnody on the death of his beloved and gifted child: “What is excellent, As God lives, is permanent: Hearts are dust, hearts' loves remain; Heart's love will meet thee again.” Whittier, Snowbound, 200 sq.—“Yet Love will dream, and Faith will trust (Since He who knows our need is just), That somehow, somewhere, meet we must. Alas for him who never sees The stars shine through his cypress trees! Who hopeless lays his dead away, Nor looks to see the breaking day Across his mournful marbles play! Who hath not learned, in hours of faith, The truth to flesh and sense unknown, That Life is ever lord of death, And Love can never lose its own.” Robert Browning, Evelyn Hope: “For God above Is great to grant as mighty to make, And creates the love to reward the love; I claim you still for my own love's sake! Delayed it may be for more lives yet, Through worlds I shall traverse not a few; Much is to learn and much to forget, Ere the time be come for taking you.”

[pg 997]

The river St. John in New Brunswick descends seventeen feet between the city and the sea, and ships cannot overcome the obstacle, but when the tide comes in, it turns the current the other way and bears vessels on mightily to the city. So the laws of nature bring death, but the tides of Christ's life counteract them, and bring life and immortality (Dr. J. W. A. Stewart). Mozley, Lectures, 26-59, and Essays, 2:169—“True religion among the Jews had an evidence of immortality in its possession of God. Paganism was hopeless in its loss of friends, because affection never advanced beyond its earthly object, and therefore, in losing it, lost all. But religious love, which loves the creature in the Creator, has that on which to fall back, when its earthly object is removed.”

(h) The most impressive and conclusive of all proofs of immortality, however, is afforded in the resurrection of Jesus Christ,—a work accomplished by his own power, and demonstrating that the spirit lived after its separation from the body (John 2:19, 21; 10:17, 18). By coming back from the tomb, he proves that death is not annihilation (2 Tim. 1:10).

John 2:19, 21—“Jesus answered and said unto them, Destroy this temple, and in three days I will raise it up.... But he spake of the temple of his body”; 10:17, 18—“Therefore doth the Father love me, because I lay down my life, that I may take it again.... I have power to lay it down, and I have power to take it again”; 2 Tim. 1:10—“our Savior Christ Jesus, who abolished death, and brought life and immortality to light through the gospel”—that is, immortality had been a truth dimly recognized, suspected, longed for, before Christ came; but it was he who first brought it out from obscurity and uncertainty into clear daylight and convincing power. Christ's resurrection, moreover, carries with it the resurrection of his people: “We two are so joined, He'll not be in glory and leave me behind.”

Christ taught immortality: (1) By exhibiting himself the perfect conception of a human life. Who could believe that Christ could become forever extinct? (2) By actually coming back from beyond the grave. There were many speculations about a trans-Atlantic continent before 1492, but these were of little worth compared with the actual word which Columbus brought of a new world beyond the sea. (3) By providing a way through which his own spiritual life and victory may be ours; so that, though we pass through the valley of the shadow of death, we may fear no evil. (4) By thus gaining authority to teach us of the resurrection of the righteous and of the wicked, as he actually does. Christ's resurrection is not only the best proof of immortality, but we have no certain evidence of immortality without it. Hume held that the same logic which proved immortality from reason alone, would also prove preËxistence. “In reality,” he said, “it is the Gospel, and the Gospel alone, that has brought immortality to light.” It was truth, though possibly spoken in jest.

There was need of this revelation. The fear of death, even after Christ has come, shows how hopeless humanity is by nature. Krupp, the great German maker of cannon, would not have death mentioned in his establishment. He ran away from his own dying relatives. Yet he died. But to the Christian, death is an exodus, an unmooring, a home-coming. Here we are as ships on the stocks; at death we are launched into our true element. Before Christ's resurrection, it was twilight; it is sunrise now. Balfour: “Death is the fall of the curtain, not at the end of the piece, but at the end of the act.” George Dana Boardman: “Christ is the resurrection and the life. Being himself the Son of man—the archetypal man, the representative of human nature, the head and epitome of mankind—mankind ideally, potentially, virtually rose, when the Son of man rose. He is the resurrection, because he is the life. The body does not give life to itself, but life takes on body and uses it.”

George Adam Smith, Yale Lectures: “Some of the Psalmists have only a hope of corporate immortality. But this was found wanting. It did not satisfy Israel. It cannot satisfy men to-day. The O. T. is of use in reminding us that the hope of immortality is a secondary, subordinate, and dispensable element of religious experience. Men had better begin and work for God's sake, and not for future reward. The O. T. development of immortality is of use most of all because it deduces all immortality from God.” Athanasius: “Man is, according to nature, mortal, as a being who has been made of things that are perishable. But on account of his likeness to God he can by piety ward off and escape from his natural mortality and remain indestructible if he retain the knowledge of God, or lose his incorruptibility if he lose his life in God” (quoted in McConnell, Evolution of Immortality, viii, 46-48). Justin Martyr, 1 Apol., 17, expects resurrection of both just and unjust; but in Dial. [pg 998]Tryph., 5, he expressly denounces and dismisses the Platonic doctrine that the soul is immortal. Athenagoras and Tertullian hold to native immortality, and from it argue to bodily resurrection. So Augustine. But Theophilus, IrenÆus, Clemens Alexandrinus, with Athanasius, counted it a pagan error. For the annihilation theory, see Hudson, Debt and Grace, and Christ our Life; also Dobney, Future Punishment. Per contra, see Hovey, State of the Impenitent Dead, 1-27, and Manual of Theology and Ethics, 153-168; Luthardt, Compendium, 289-292; Delitzsch, Bib. Psych., 397-407; Herzog, Encyclop., art.: Tod; Splittgerber, Schlaf und Tod; Estes, Christian Doctrine of the Soul; Baptist Review, 1879:411-439; Presb. Rev., Jan. 1882:203.

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