These words are used by Paul toward the close of his first letter to the Thessalonians, when speaking of their complete sanctification, and were not, I think, intended by the apostle, as our orthodox friends regard them, as a definition of the constituents of man's being. They were rather to be understood in precisely the same way as Moses' words to Israel, recorded in Deut. 6:5: “Thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thine heart, and with all thy soul, and with all thy might.” Israel's leader little thought, when he uttered those words in the ears of the people, that his language would be afterwards appealed to by religious teachers, to prove that heart, and soul, and might, were each a distinct, rational and intelligent entity, residing during the man's lifetime in his body, and at his death, being delivered from the body's thralldom, would continue to live as a disembodied heart, a disembodied soul, a disembodied might, for perhaps thousands of years; and Paul, I cannot help thinking, had just as little idea that the spirit, soul, and body, which he mentions as belonging to the Thessalonians, would be similarly treated. I do not say that this interpretation has ever yet been put upon the words of Moses, yet I do submit that they bear it as fairly as the paragraph from Paul. Moses, as all admit, meant neither more nor less than that his people should love the Lord their God wholly and heartily; and Paul, I have as little doubt, desired neither more nor less than the entire sanctification of his Thessalonian brethren. Hence his prayer that “your whole spirit, soul, and body be preserved blameless unto the coming of our Lord Jesus Christ;” as if he had said, “I pray God to preserve each one of you blameless, in mind and body, in thought, and word, and deed, wholly and entirely, in life or in death, till the appearing of Jesus.” But suppose that we look for a moment at the subject from the orthodox standpoint, and grant our friends all that they can reasonably claim from the peculiar phraseology of the text, and something more, namely, that spirit, soul, and body, are each separate and distinct entities—the body constituting the covering, or house, in which the soul and spirit live, and through which they manifest themselves. It follows, therefore, that when this wonderful being, who possesses both an immortal soul and a deathless spirit, dies, death cannot, of course, affect aught but the body. The immortal soul and deathless spirit both defy his power, and live on in their disembodied state as rational, conscious beings; now singing with melodious voices redemption's song, then sweeping in strains of matchless melody the strings of their golden harps in Heaven's choir; concluding, for the best of reasons, that death, commonly regarded as man's enemy, has been their best friend, their most glorious deliverer, and looking forward, no doubt, with considerable foreboding to the time when their former prison, the body, shall be raised again and a union effected between them and it for all eternity! Can our friends deny that this is a fair and honest representation of their theory? and if fair, the conclusion cannot be avoided that it completely subverts the hope of the gospel—the resurrection of the dead. They may, however, be unwilling to accept both a soul and a spirit, as surviving the body after the dissolution of the man. Their theory requires but one; and whether we call it an immortal soul, or a deathless spirit, is a matter of indifference to them. But we dare not give them less than Paul, and he says spirit and soul. If he teaches that the “spirit” survives the body as a personal intelligence, he equally teaches that the “soul” does the same; and hence we have two conscious personalities escaping from one body at its death. I am aware how readily my popular friends can substitute spirit for soul, and soul for spirit, when any particular exigency of their theory requires it, but in this (to them) very valuable text, the substitution is wholly inadmissible. Paul makes no wider distinction between body and soul here, than he does between soul and spirit; and as well might we conclude that body and spirit were one and the same, as that spirit and soul were identical. Paul has made all three separate and distinct, and we dare not alter his arrangement. Neither could we venture to prefix to either the very important terms, “deathless” and “immortal,” so constantly supplied by orthodox teachers, though not once mentioned by either prophet or apostle. The most thrilling gospel discourses which ever fell upon human ear from the great Teacher himself and his faithful disciples, contain no such word; and they certainly knew whether man or any part of him, could be truthfully described by such terms. Will our orthodox friends explain the omission? Meanwhile, we might inquire in what sense Paul uses the terms “soul” and “spirit” elsewhere . The noun psuche, usually translated soul, means breath, life, the life principle; and, in its adjective form, as used by the apostle in 1 Cor. 15:44, is placed in opposition to the spiritual, and in the common version is translated “natural.” “It is sown a natural body (soma psuchikon), it is raised a spiritual body (soma pneumatikon).” Now Paul certainly knew that the natural had no immortality of any kind about it, but was destined to pass away and give place to the spiritual and incorruptible; and knowing this, he described it by the term psychikon, the very term which our popular friends have translated “soul,” but evidently fearing that we might be perverse enough to disregard theirs and follow Paul's understanding of it, who knew it to be so perishable as to form a fitting contrast to the enduring and eternal, they introduced “deathless” and “immortal,” and sundry other very comprehensive adjectives to qualify it, though few phrases would have sounded more strangely in apostolic ears than “immortal soul.” Indeed, Let us now look at an instance or two, ere we close, of the sense in which Paul uses “spirit.” In his address to the elders of Miletus, recorded in Acts 20, he says: “I go bound in the spirit unto Jerusalem.” Who would suppose that the apostle meant by this expression that he was imprisoned within his spirit, or that the spirit was a conscious separate entity, keeping ward over him as its prisoner? The strict phraseology would warrant this conclusion quite as readily as that the “spirit” mentioned in Thessalonians was prisoner to him. His meaning doubtless is, that he was depressed in spirit—that his mind was painfully exercised with forebodings as to what awaited him at the capital. A somewhat similar expression occurs in the preceding chapter. The record reads: “Paul purposed in the spirit . . . to go to Jerusalem.” That is, a mental resolve was made to go there, rather than a declaration that he was inside of his spirit and forming purposes there. These are only some of the absurdities fairly deducible from the attempts of our popular friends to press such expressions as “spirit, soul and body,” of 1 Thess., into an inspired definition of man's constitution. That important information is given us by the most competent authority, just where we might expect to find it, in the opening pages of the Creator's revelation, and a fearful amount of religious error would have been avoided if the brief, though not very flattering statement of the divine architect, “The Lord God formed man out of the dust of the ground,” had been believed. Happy for the religious world if Platonic theories—which are only human fancies at best, regarded more as pleasing speculations than as ascertained facts, even by their authors themselves—had been discarded, and the old paths trod by the patriarchs, prophets and apostles, had been resolutely followed. Be it ours still, however, to press upon the attention of our erring brethren those good old paths, and to say to them in the Master's spirit: “This is the way, walk ye in it.”—Bible Banner.