THE ARABIANS DID NOT BELIEVE IN THE IMMORTALITY OF THE SOUL by Dudley Marvin Canright

Seventh-day Adventist Publishing Association · Battle Creek, Mich. · Aug 3, 1869

THE ARABIANS DID NOT BELIEVE IN THE IMMORTALITY OF THE SOUL.

By Dudley Marvin Canright

Dr. Good, M. D., F. R. S., &c., some years ago, delivered a course of lectures before the Surrey Institution, London, at the request of Dr. Adam Clarke, and others. Those lectures were on the “Science of Nature,” and were attended by popular and crowded audiences. These he has written out in his “Book of Nature,” from which I quote. He was a firm advocate of the soul’s immortality, hence his testimony is of the greater weight.

He says: “If we turn to the oldest hypothesis of the East, to the Vedas of the Brahmins, and the Zendavesta of the Parsees,—to those venerable but fanciful stores of learning, from which many of the earliest Greek schools drew their first draughts of metaphysical science, we shall find, indeed, a full acknowledgment of the immortality of the soul, but only upon the sublime and mystical doctrine of emanation and immanation, as a part of the great soul of the universe; issuing from it at birth, and re-absorbed into it upon the death of the body; and hence, altogether incompatible with individual being, or a separate state of existence.” Series 3, Lecture 2, p. 372.

Of the Arabians he says: “If we turn from Persia, Egypt and Hindostan, to Arabia, to the fragrant groves and learned shades of Dedan and Teman, from whence it is certain that Persia, and highly probable that Hindostan, derived their first polite literature, we shall find the entire subject (of the immortality of the soul) left in as blank and barren a silence, as the deserts by which they are surrounded; or, if touched upon, only touched upon to betray doubt, and sometimes disbelief. The tradition, indeed, of a future state of retributive justice, seems to have reached the schools of this part of the world, and to have been generally, though perhaps not universally, accredited; but the future existence it alludes to, is that of a resurrection of the body; and not of the survival of the soul after the body’s dissolution. The oldest work that has descended to us from this quarter (and there is little doubt that it is the oldest, or one of the oldest works in existence) is that astonishingly transcendent composition, the book of Job; a work that ought assuredly to raise the genius of Idumea above that of Greece, and that of itself is demonstrative of the indefatigable spirit with which the deepest, as well as the most polished sciences were pursued in this region, during what may be comparatively called the youth and day-spring of the world. Yet in this sublime and magnificent poem, replete with all the learning and wisdom of the age, the doctrine upon the subject before us is merely, as I have just stated it, a patriarchal or traditionary belief of a future state of retributive justice; not by the natural immortality of the soul, but by a resurrection of the body. And the same general idea has, for the most part, descended in the same country to the present day.”—Ibid.

This is a good testimony as to the faith of that ancient nation, and also as to their faith since that time. He also acknowledges that the book of Job does not teach the immortality of the soul.

D. M. CANRIGHT. Sigourney, Iowa.