IMMORTALITY—CONSTITUTIONAL OR CONDITIONAL?
We smile complacently at our colored brother whose astronomy, learned from Joshua, makes sun, moon, and stars revolve around a flat earth. The smile of the next generation at our notions of man's constitution and destiny may be through tears. Terror, despair, death, have resulted from teachings now spurned by many noble Christians. Our conflicting creeds and sects prove the existence of grave, perhaps fundamental error. A glance at some of these creeds may quicken our zeal to find and banish it. The duality of man's nature has been long and widely taught, viz: That he has an immaterial, indivisible, immortal soul—the seat of thought, emotion, will, consciousness—the real man; and a body, the servant, instrument of the soul. To these two, some prefix an immortal spirit, filling the Pauline catalogue of "spirit, soul, and body," thus making man as well as God a trinity. A smaller, but rapidly augmenting number, think man a purely material, organic unit, composed not only of gross, but of those subtle elements which manifest the phenomena of light, heat, electricity, etc., etc. Is asserted to be the final extinction of all at death; the extinction of sinners only; unconsciousness until the resurrection; dim consciousness; vivid activity because freed from clogging bodies; immediate entrance to heaven for all, or for the good only, while the bad enter hell; these results only after the judgment; purgatorial, restorative pains; a second probation which transmits all to heaven, or a part to heaven, leaving an incorrigible balance for endless woe or for annihilation. Let me close this imperfect list with the teachings of a learned, eloquent, earnest evangelist, lately deceased, who long held, with the title of D. D., a professorship in a theological seminary: The sinner is justly punished after death. Since he is beyond grace, his sufferings cannot tend to his reformation. He rebels, blasphemes, increases his guilt. Justice demands heavier inflictions which only augment the rebellion and blasphemy, and this process goes on, "until, in the ages of eternity, the period will arrive when God will be compelled to exert the utmost of his infinite power to hold the wretch in existence, while he wreaks upon him the utmost of his infinite vengeance." The words marked as quoted made so vivid an impression that nearly the exact language has been remembered. The preacher's false theories, worked up by inexorable logic, with unflinching courage, faith, and zeal, bore a natural harvest of terror, insanity, and death! Yes, the smile will be through tears. It is well for some to have changed their theories, and for others to take a deep interest in the present discussions of immortality. Thirty-six years ago an educated, beloved, Christian friend astounded me by showing a tendency toward rejecting the almost universal belief in man's immortal soul. I searched long and zealously for arguments to save him. Was not I, like Dr. Haven, proudly conscious of a soul whose communion with Nature and its Author had been my chief joy? Surely, I held the truth, and that truth must save my friend. The brief space allotted to this article permits only a very imperfect statement of facts and results. Many centuries before Christ, taught "immortal-soul-ism," supposed by some to have been based on corrupted traditions of Eden. Others think that it arose from a God-given longing for immortality, necessarily given to a race about to be invited to "seek for glory, honor, immortality, by patient continuance in well-doing." Candidates for "the crown of life" must have innate aspiration for it. We sometimes mistake this noble aspiration for the actual possession! This Pagan philosophy, backed by pride of heart, by ignorance of material forces, and by fixity of opinion from lifelong training, has made it well-nigh impossible to read nature and the Bible aright. Manfully dismissing prejudice, let us read 1. The babe has a small, soft brain, a feeble mind; then both grow, mature, decay together. If immaterial soul only can evolve mental action, that soul, being constitutionally incapable of growth and material nutriment, would always abide in unchanging vigor. Is it asserted that thought and mind are joint products of soul and brain? Then brain is the senior and ruling partner of the firm; the soul does naught without brain, the facts soon prove that brain does all without soul. 2. Mental and moral qualities are hereditary. Our supposed immaterial, indivisible, immortal soul cannot be a product of physical generation, which is a purely material process. Each soul must be a new creation, coming pure from the Divine hand, and the dogma of derived depravity is (on this theory) a blasphemy! Does depravity inhere in the inherited brain, and through it contaminate the new-made soul? Then, verily, brain is master, and soul is slave. Such a soul is quite unnecessary. 3. Let a person be in perfect mental and muscular repose; then arousing his attention increases the heat of his brain and the amount of carbonic acid expelled from his lungs. Mental activity can be so excited as to cause a great flow of blood to the brain with rapid combustion of blood-nutriment, and an increase of heat which may require even ice to reduce it. If matter cannot think and feel and will, why all this commotion in the brain? 4. We are conscious of brain-weariness after severe mental toil, just as of muscular exhaustion after hard muscular toil. 5. The common terms, "a man of brains," "a brainless fool," "shallow brained," etc., indicate a conviction that brain secretes thought. 6. It is confidently asserted that consciousness, the most subtle and sublimated of all mental products, cannot have a material origin. Yet, pressure of my finger tip on the scalp of my young friend Hooker, who had lost the upper, frontal portion of his skull by a kick from a horse, would quickly render him as unconscious as a marble statue. I know experimentally, and all ought to know by observation or unimpeachable testimony, that concussion and disease of brain often produce utter unconsciousness, in which the lapse of days, weeks, months, has no known duration to the patient. A marine, wounded at Trafalgar, remained unconscious eleven months. Then he was trepanned, the skull raised off the brain, and the surgical wound dressed. In two hours thereafter he sat up in his cot, looked around and asked how the battle was getting on! If that oak splinter had crushed his brain, he must, perforce, have remained unconscious until the resurrection brain were given. To him, a delay of ten thousand years would not have been one second. 7. Stimulants carried by the blood currents into the brain quicken, and sedatives suppress, thought. 8. Monomania and partial insanity cannot occur in an indivisible unit-soul; they can and do in a brain composed of many organs. The rare and curious phenomenon of double consciousness may be manifested in a brain composed of two symmetric hemispheres, which, through disease, act alternately and not conjointly; thus practically converting one person into two, wholly strangers to each other. Will immortal soulists claim two independent souls to one body! 9. Anxious in my youth to attain practical knowledge of human nature, I gave attention to Locke, Brown, Reid, Upham, and other metaphysicians of that day. Vain labor! Next, with note-book and pencil in hand, I began some practical study of the specimens accessible. While busy thus, a child, aged only a few years was introduced. Its name was Phrenology, a thoroughly practical little genius. By hundreds of observations on heads the assertions of this child were carefully verified. Phrenology makes brain the complex organ of mind; faculties being manifested in strength or feebleness according to size and quality of organ. Experts described the character of utter strangers with wondrous accuracy. I once witnessed a strange confirmation of Phrenology in a case of brain lesion. The person was a Christian. The first symptom of disease was unusual religious fervor, with heat at the vertex of brain. Next, conscience and firmness were involved in the fever, and inflexible duty was the constant theme. Then caution became diseased, and anxious fears were distressing. At this point (reached in a few days) I understood the gradual descent of the inflammation, and made due preparation for the restraint and control of the patient when the dangerous organs of combativeness and destructiveness should be involved in this preternatural excitement. Medication did not, could not, avert this crisis of the disease, but the damage to person and furniture were made light. Ice, blisters, heroic treatment, subdued the disease, and in three months the patient was cured. Such cases demonstrate the truth of Phrenology—brain thinks. A veteran university professor of Natural Science once exclaimed: "The more I study matter the more I respect it." Organic brain-matter is specially respectable. It is objected that materialism is fatalism; that matter, subject to fixed law, cannot have freedom. If man has a soul, that soul is as much a creature made under fixed laws as matter is. We cannot even comprehend how God, a being of perfect law, can be free. Conscious of freedom of choice, having a conscience which approves or accuses, assured that God has not put a lie in our constitution, we believe ourselves free. Having read a few facts in nature, let us turn to the Bible. "God formed man of the dust of the ground." Air breathed into his nostrils caused him to live, to become a living soul. ("neh-phesh.") He did not receive a Pagan, Platonic soul, for this "neh-phesh" is applied to all water and land animals in the first chapter of Genesis, also to human corpses, etc. It here signifies a purely material organism. David believed this, saying: "He knoweth our frame, he remembereth that we are dust." His wise son declared that man, by constitution, "hath no pre-eminence above the beast; all have one breath, all go to one place, all are of the dust and all turn to dust again." Peter asserts the same, that the sinful, "like natural brute beasts made to be taken and destroyed, shall utterly perish in their own corruption." Adam was material and mortal, needing, even when sinless, the "tree of life" to heal disease and stay natural decay. This tree was accessible only while he obeyed. Tradition says Adam was a century old when he wedded Eve. She evidently was an inexperienced, guileless girl, at once imposed on by specious words; and having eaten of the forbidden tree, supposing she would confer a favor on her loved Adam, urged him to eat also. Adam saw the sad mistake at once. Eve must leave Eden, live in the rough, outside world, exposed to peril and toil, then at last die. But she must not go alone, unprotected. Adam loved too deeply for that; so he, "not deceived," understandingly ate, and thus linked his fate with hers. A few centuries of life and love with Eve were better to him than a lonely immortality in Eden. He well understood the penalty, for he had lived long enough outside the garden to know what death meant. To assert that the threatened death meant immortality in hell fire, or even an eternity of woe of any sort, is absurd. Exposing Adam to such a fate while left in utter ignorance of it, were exceedingly unjust. If Adam understood that to be meant, he was simply an idiot to incur the fearful penalty for the sake of Eve's society. In fact, finite man cannot comprehend eternal, i. e., infinite suffering; hence a just and benevolent God cannot have enacted such a penalty. Figures of rhetoric are justly discarded from the announcement of law and penalty, by both God and man. There is no figure in the law announced by God to Adam—"In the day thou eatest thereof, dying thou shalt die:" neither in the sentence, "Until thou (the sinner) return unto the ground; out of it wast thou taken; dust thou art and unto dust shalt thou return." That disposes of exactly all that sinned, not of a mere innocent body, the humble slave of an imperious soul. Then followed the glorious promise of a "seed" which should break the bonds of death and restore all to life by a resurrection—the righteous to immortality, the wicked to the penalty of the second death. "The wages of sin is death"—"everlasting destruction from the presence of God and the glory of his power," while "the gift of God is eternal life through Jesus Christ," that promised seed. That the death threatened the impenitent is extinction of conscious being, is unequivocally declared by the action of fire on stubble, chaff, tares, withered vine branches, felled trees useless for fruit. Immortality is conditional, to be sought by faith in Christ and "patient continuance in well-doing." 197Without a resurrection the sleep of death would be eternal. "There is no knowledge in the grave whither thou goest." Those "who sleep in the dust of the earth shall awake," but "the dead know not anything." The patriarchs, the fathers, Stephen, "fell asleep." All who sleep in Christ, who is the bread of life, shall wake to immortality. All others "perish," "shall be as though they had not been." Bible accounts of raising the dead make no reference to a disembodied spirit or soul. Christ took Jairus' daughter by the hand with the words: "Daughter, I say unto thee, arise!" To the widow's son, "Young man, I say unto thee, arise!" Lazarus sleepeth—is dead, corrupted, in the tomb, but the order is, "Lazarus, come forth." Peter, after prayer, turned to a corpse and said, "Tabitha, arise!" If the beloved Lazarus and Tabitha's souls were in Heaven, it were cruel to recall them to toil and death once more.—D. H. Chase, LL. D., in Northern Christian Advocate.