Eld. Cottrell's Ninth Reply.
By R. F. Cottrell
Dear Brother,—If Baptists would apply the same rules of evidence in the investigation of the Sabbath question that they use in defense of immersion, they would certainly become Seventh-day Baptists; and if Seventh-day Baptists would follow the same principles in deciding the questions of man's nature and destiny, they insist on when baptism or the Sabbath is in dispute, they would as surely come to the conclusions, that man is mortal, that "the dead know not anything," and that "the wages of sin is death." "Give us the Bible," say the Baptists, when baptism is the subject in dispute, while their opponents are searching church history, or rather the history of the apostasy, for some historical meaning of the term. But present them the subject of the Sabbath—ask them to examine that in the light of the Bible—and you will find them appealing to the sciences of geography and astronomy for objections, and to human testimony and the history of the apostasy for proofs of the abolition of the only weekly Sabbath of the Bible, and of the institution of another, of which the Bible says nothing. You, my dear brother, are a Bible man on both these subjects; but on the subject of man's nature, the Bible will not answer your purpose, unless you can find some historical and fabulous definition of its words, and bring to your aid human wisdom concerning the nature of matter and spirit—a point on which the inspired record has given us no information. We say, Give us the Bible on this, as well as on every other point of theology, and we will be satisfied with the result. This book, though given to teach us man's nature and destiny, giving us a particular account of his creation and redemption, says not one word of an immortal soul or spirit in man, nor of any soul or spirit of man, mortal or immortal, that can exist in conscious being out of the body. On the contrary, it teaches that men die and are buried—that they go into the grave at death, and come forth from the grave at the resurrection. Your strongest proof of the duality or double entity of man, is drawn from Matt. x, 28. Soul and body are there contrasted. Man can kill the body, but cannot kill the soul. You give "animal life" as the "exact" definition of this term. This is separated from the body at death. It is not destroyed, but is it a living being? No; it is, as you define it, the "vital essence," or principle of life. Man can not destroy it; for God can and will give it to him again. But God can destroy both life and body, so that there will be no remedy—no resurrection. This is a threatening of the "second death." So Luther understood it. He says, "What matters it to me if the Pope should condemn me and put me to death. He cannot call me from the grave and kill me a second time."—D'Aubigne's Reformation, vol. 3, p. 41. The soul (psuche) of Matt. x, can be lost for Christ's sake, and yet saved in the end—in the resurrection. Verse 39. "He that findeth his soul shall lose it; and he that loseth his soul for my sake shall find it." But I call your attention to another scripture, where the Saviour speaks of the soul and body as distinctly as in Matt. x, 28. "Therefore I say unto you, take no thought for your soul, what ye shall eat, or what ye shall drink; nor yet for your body, what ye shall put on. Is not the soul more than meat, and the body than raiment?" Matt. vi, 25. I have put soul for psuche, as it is in Matt. x, 28. Let your argument for duality be applied to this text, and we should infer that the soul, in distinction from the body, eats and drinks, while the body cares not for food, but only wants comfortable clothing. If soul and body are two distinct entities anywhere in the Bible, they surely are here. But I imagine I hear you reply,138"The soul is merely the animal life in this text. Eating and drinking sustain life, not an immortal soul, while raiment, though it cannot of itself sustain life, covers and protects the body. Hence food is for the life, and clothing for the body." Very well. In popular phrase, food and raiment "keep soul and body together;" but separate them, and does this soul become a conscious and immortal being? In reply to your last communication, I remark, that the Scriptures reveal two classes of spirits which have not flesh and bones like human beings—the angels of God and the angels of the Devil. Therefore there is no necessity to infer, when the term spirit occurs, as in Acts xxiii, 8; and Luke xxiv, 37–39, that human spirits are meant. Hence what is wanting to sustain your theory is the qualifying terms human and disembodied—a sad deficiency, which the Scriptures utterly fail to supply. You say very truly, that "neither Jesus nor Paul affirm the doctrine of the Pharisees as to the condition of these spirits, but only as to their existence." They do not so much as tell us that they are human spirits. You say, "That the Sadducees denied the existence of human spirits after the death of the body, is as much a matter of historic notoriety, as the existence of the sect itself; and as a necessary thought, they denied also the resurrection." If the Pharisees got their idea of the existence of human spirits in a conscious state from their inspired scriptures, we have those scriptures, and can find the doctrine there. But if they received it from the heathen with whom they were brought in contact by their captivity, as is abundantly evident, I care no more for the "historic notoriety" of their departure from the Bible faith, than you do for the historic notoriety of the change of the Sabbath since the New Testament was completed. The historic notoriety that Josephus affirms the doctrine of the Pharisees to be that "the souls of good men are removed into other bodies," and the fact that he himself was led by his "Greek culture and philosophical tincture" to reject the doctrine of a bodily resurrection, and made "no allusion to that doctrine in his account of the Pharisees," (as I have before shown,) does not prove that transmigration and no bodily resurrection was the true doctrine of the Pharisees, in contradiction of the writers of the New Testament. And it is not "a necessary thought," that the denial of these mythological fables involves also the denial of the resurrection of the dead. On the contrary, it is this natural immortality fable that makes the resurrection of the body unnecessary. I have made no attempt to prove that spirit always means life. I have no objection to the passages you quote. My spirit is sometimes willing, sometimes rejoices, and sometimes is stirred within me, as was Paul's, at the superstitions of the heathens; but in saying so I do not desire to vex your soul or spirit. Would to God you could view these things as I do. It is, to my mind, so much better. Do try to forget all educational bias, and weigh the evidences again.