The Spirit World and a Future Life
By Geo. W. Rine
I. Life the Instinctive Hope of Humanity
DEAN SLATTERY, of Fairbault, Minn., recently wrote: “It is a significant fact that the peoples of the world have been born with the instinctive hope of life after death.” The fact is significant, but not in the least strange. Man, being the child of God, is the child of Life, for God is life. With God is the fountain of life (Ps. 36:9). And God in Christ is our life (Col. 3:4). God is Life, and Love, and Light. Hence, He created man, not for death, but that he might ever live and love and shine. “God is love;” hence, He created man not only for His own glory, but also for man’s everlasting happiness and good. Of course neither happiness nor any other blessing is conceivable apart from life. Inevitably, then, man was created unto life. Deep down in man’s soul, therefore, is divinely implanted the inextinguishable love and hope of life—not temporal life only, but endless life. Hence it is as natural for the normal man to love life and to hope for life beyond this life as it is for grass to grow, for flowers to bloom, and for stars to shine. “All that a man hath will he give for his life,” said even man’s adversary. One who reads the ancient and modern documents of human experience must know that death has always been abhorrent, and a ceaseless life, the desire of desires. Men have lived on this planet for thousands of years. In the earth are found the records of old civilizations and ancient barbarism. These records attest the fact that all peoples ignorant of divine Revelation believed in immortality. Not infrequently such testimony consists in nothing more than the mute eloquence of ancient burying places. With the ashes of the dead are found crude vessels used as receptacles for food to satisfy the needs of the departed. Here we have the pathetic testimony that those remote peoples conceived the theory that their dead were, after all, not dead. Emerging from the shadows of the most distant past, the student finds in the record of historic times the unbroken tradition of a life surviving bodily death. Nothing is more certain than that there is in humanity an ineradicable instinct which reaches out with ardent hope toward life beyond life. The Meaning of This Universal Hope
True it is that the unsophisticated human heart was never content to face death as an irrevocable ending. The shuddering dread of “going down into the pit” shows infallibly that all wish for endless life. The normal human heart comes back inevitably to the world-old cry, “I do not wish to stop with death. I long for life, life, life.” This instinctive, irrepressible longing for existence beyond this fleeting life of three score years and ten, possesses a divine significance. It is a primal, God-given instinct. It is the expression of the original “enmity” that the Creator put between the serpent of (Satan) and the woman and between the seed of the former and that of the latter. Gen. 3:15. God’s instilling into the human heart this insistent craving for life was an act of transcendent mercy. Our heavenly Father, who yearns to save all men, knew that an implanted love of life would tend to constrain men to flee from death and its author and to seek life in and through its Author—to shun the devil and flee to Christ. Tho, in the sovereign goodness of God, man was created for life with all the glory and happiness that life implies, yet death passed upon all men, since all have sinned. Rom. 5:12. But, praise the Lord, man is not irreclaimably lost to life. “God is love,” fathomless love. Hence, naturally, He so loved sinners that He gave His only begotten Son an atoning sacrifice for human sin, in order that whosoever believeth on Him should not perish (die), but have everlasting life. Accordingly, we have the supremely precious assurance, “He that hath the Son hath life.” 1 John 5:12. Ah, dear reader, do you sometimes find yourself shuddering at the thought of endless death, and, conversely, do you find your heart instinctively reaching out after life—life eternal? Do you find the thought of extinction abhorrent; the thought of endless life irresistibly fascinating? Yes, you answer. Well, it is the Father drawing you to Christ—the only source of life for sinful man. Would you seek life? Then you must seek Jesus; for “he that hath not the Son of God hath not life.” 1 John 5:12. Again, Jesus Himself declared, “He that believeth on the Son hath everlasting life: and he that believeth not the Son shall not see life.” John 3:36. Then, assuredly, if you yearn for the life that knows no end, and if you believe the testimony of God, you will love Jesus; and, loving Him, you will trust Him for the realization of the timeless life you crave. This Instinctive Hope Perverted
The vast majority of men, either because they knew not God, or because, in their pride and self-worship, they refused to believe God’s testimony, have construed this universal love of life to mean that man possesses an inherent deathless principle—an immortal soul. They reasoned thus: God placed within man an instinctive craving for endless life. God being infinitely good could not fail to provide for the satisfying of this universal craving; therefore, He must have endowed man with a deathless personality called the soul or spirit. Hence, according to this dogma the human consciousness or soul survives the death of the material body. More and more, however, men are coming to see that this hypothesis has absolutely no warrant in the word of God. In truth, it is in absolute conflict with the plain, positive teaching of Holy Writ. The Holy Spirit expressly characterizes man, in his present state, as mortal. Job 4:17; 1 Cor. 15:53, 54. The same divine Witness testifies in the clearest possible terms that God ONLY has immortality. 1 Tim. 6:15, 16. In words that can not be misunderstood, the Spirit of truth declares that life and immortality have been brought to light through the Gospel. 2 Tim. 1:10. Again, the infallible Witness categorically asserts that believers, by patient continuance in well-doing, seek for immortality. Rom. 2:7. If immortality inheres in man, as is commonly taught, these divine testimonies can not be true. Whom shall we believe, dear reader, pagan philosophers or inspired prophets—man or God? Many earnest, sincere people do not seem to be aware that the devil, whom Jesus has branded as the father of lies, was the first to enunciate the doctrine that man can not die and is therefore immortal. See Gen. 3:4. Every pagan Religion the world has ever known has held and taught the dogma of human immortality as fundamental. And has not every pagan or false religion been fathered and fostered by Satan, the author of all error? The prince of darkness first erected the abominable mythology of ancient Egypt upon this pet lie of his—human immortality. From the blackness of Egypt this diabolic dogma made its way to Babylon, Assyria, Persia, Greece, and Rome, and became the basic principle of the horridly grotesque systems of mythology peculiar to all those heathen peoples. Through the agency of the so-called church fathers, who, in the early centuries of the Christian era, were proselytes from the paganism of Greece and Rome, this same dark doctrine wormed its way into the nominal Christian system. Once having infected the Christian church, it contributed no inconsiderable part to the evolution of that great system of apostasy known as the Papacy. The doctrine soon bore its baleful fruit, in the complete outflowering of such gruesome superstitions as belief in purgatory, Mariolatry, the worship of, and prayers for and to, dead saints. The great lay membership of the church being wholly barred from the study of the Scriptures for centuries, soon became completely inoculated with the satanic delusion of human immortality. Coming down to us from the Dark Ages, this world-old falsehood still clings relentlessly to the vast majority of Christian bodies. Physical Science versus Immortality
As a result of the marvelous discoveries made in the several fields of physical science during the nineteenth century the intellectual fashion became essentially materialistic, and therefore skeptical. Professor Wundt, of Germany, Professor Carpenter, of England, and Professors James and Ladd, of America, succeeded in completely discrediting the old or traditional psychology based upon the assumption that all mental life was simply the expression of the various energies of an indestructible, ethereal principle within man, named the soul. The above-named investigators, by the inductive or experimental method of research, elaborated a “new” psychology, ineradicably rooted in the tissue of the brain and other parts of the nervous organism. They proved incontestably that all mental phenomena are manifestations of nerve or brain energy, and that5therefore, without brain there can be no intellect. Hence, the new psychology is appropriately styled “physiological psychology.” Hence, psychology is no longer studied from the view-point of vapory Neoplatonism, but from that of the immovable rock of demonstrable science. This momentous achievement has naturally dealt an irreparable blow to the immortality hypothesis. That the immortal-soul dogma is hopelessly incompatible with true psychology has been verified again and again. Note the following argument from the writings of the late eminent thinker, Mr. John Fiske: “Injuries to the nervous structure entail failure of function, either in the mental operations themselves or in the control which they exercise over the actions of the body; there is either psychical aberration, or loss of consciousness, or muscular paralysis. At the moment of death, as soon as the current of arterial blood ceases to flow through the cerebral vessels, all signs of consciousness cease for the looker-on; and after the nervous system has been resolved into its elements, what reason have we to suppose that consciousness survives, any more than that the wetness of water should survive its separation into oxygen and hydrogen? So far as our terrestrial experience goes there can be but one answer to such a question. We have no more warrant in experience for supposing consciousness to exist without a nervous system than we have for supposing the properties of water to exist in a world destitute of hydrogen and oxygen.” This question, of course, is logically absurd, contradictory, stultifying. Yet, preposterous as the question is, it was made to do duty as the caption of a series of articles which recently ran through at least five numbers of the Delineator. The writer of those articles appealed for his answer to the question, to the results of the investigations into the phenomena of modern Spiritism, conducted by the Society for Psychical Research, during the past twenty years. What the above-named society has accomplished in its efforts, through the phenomena of Spiritism, to answer the vexed (?) question of life after death, I shall set forth in a later article of this series. Are the dead alive? Now, my dear reader, why should you and I not answer this momentous question right here and now, once and forever, by an appeal to the inspired testimony of Holy Writ. Why can we not accept God’s answer to the question? Can He be mistaken? He made man, and hence “knoweth our frame” (how we are constituted). As for me I am going to accept the answer of man’s all-wise Creator. Will you? God’s Definite, Clear-Cut Answer
Through His servant Solomon, God bears this unmistakable testimony: “For to him that is joined to all the living there is hope: for a living dog is better than a dead lion. For the living know that they shall die: BUT THE DEAD KNOW NOT ANYTHING. . . . Also their LOVE and their HATRED, and their ENVY is now PERISHED.” Does the human consciousness survive the death of the body if, as God declares, “the dead know not anything”? Are not love, hatred, and envy attributes of mind? God tells us that these attributes perish. Most assuredly, then, the mind perishes at death. Eccl. 9:4-6. See also verse 10, where it is explicitly stated that there is no work, nor device, nor wisdom in the place where the dead go. Note further what God has said through David respecting the condition of the dead: “Put not your trust in princes, nor in the son of man, in whom there is no help.” Why? Answer: “His breath goeth forth, he returneth to his earth; in that very day his THOUGHTS PERISH.” No mist or ambiguity here, is there? God never leaves any doubt as to what He means when He bears testimony. Again, in Ps. 6:5 and Ps. 115:17 and in Isa. 38:18, 19, it is declared that the dead can not render thanks to God, can not praise or celebrate Him. Only “the living, the living, he shall praise Thee, as I do this day,” exclaimed the inspired Hezekiah. (Read chapter 38 of Isaiah.) [Note.—In the next article I shall set forth the method by which God promises to satisfy the craving of His trusting children for everlasting life.—G. W. R.]