p. 181 | The Hindoos Believe in the Annihilation of the Soul

Seventh-day Adventist Publishing Association · Battle Creek, Mich. · May 24, 1870

The Hindoos Believe in the Annihilation of the Soul.

By Dudley Marvin Canright

Some time ago I offered some testimony showing that this was so. In The Methodist, April 16, 1870, I find additional evidence of this fact. The late Bishop Thomson has a sermon in that paper, in which he says:

“As to the existing systems of India, China, and Japan, Hindooism, Confucianism, and Buddhism, are all, as every intelligent man knows, decaying and ready to perish, without satisfying the wants of mankind. They hinder human development, and must be swept from the earth by human progress. Nor need we lament; nay, we should rejoice in the prospect, for they offer no salvation to man in this life, but by the extinction of all interest in this life, its duties, responsibilities, and possibilities, and no salvation beyond the grave but annihilation, the blowing out of the soul as the blowing out of a candle,”

This shows that the Bishop understood them to teach the annihilation of the soul after death. Then they cannot believe in the immortality of the soul. In the same paper I find still further unquestionable proof of the Hindoos’ belief on this point. A new sect has lately originated in India called the “Church of the One God.” Says The Methodist: “Representatives of the ‘Church,’ learned in the Sanscrit, were sent to the sacred city of Benares to study more fully the Vedas—the supreme scriptures of Brahmanism—in order to ascertain if the new movement could not be reconciled to the primitive and purest faith of the country; but they reported that these ancient documents taught Pantheism, Metempsychosis, and Annihilation of the Soul.”

No better evidence than this could be asked upon this point. These nations and sects constitute a majority of the human race, and always have. They have always believed in the annihilation of the soul. Then what becomes of the oft-repeated assertion that all nations in all ages have believed the immortality of the soul? It shows that there is no truth in it.

D. M. CANRIGHT.

Sigourney, Iowa.