A STUDY OF THE SOUL by William Covert

Pacific Press Publishing Company · Mountain View, California · Sep 28, 1904

FromSigns of the Times, Vol. 30, No. 38.

A STUDY OF THE SOUL.

By William Covert

(Concluded.)*

BY WILLIAM COVERT.

A Shade or Shadow.

DR. KNAPP, in writing of how the ancients regarded the condition and abode of departed souls, says, “The souls there [under the earth], separated from their bodies, were regarded as a sort of aerial beings, or shades. Taken as a whole, the ancient eastern nations agreed in this point.” —“Christian Theology,” page 519. He further says, “The disembodied soul, as conceived by the Greeks, and after them by the Romans, is material; but of so thin a contexture that it can not be felt with the hands. It is exhaled with the dying breath, or passes through a warrior’s wounds. The sword passes through its uninjured form as through air. It is to the body what the dream is to the waking action. Retaining the shape, lineaments, and motion the man had in life, it is immediately recognized upon appearing. It quits the body with much reluctance. . . . It glides along without noise, and very swiftly like a shadow. It is unable to enter the lower kingdom, and be at peace, until its deserted body has been buried with sacred rites.” —Ibid., page 524.

Until the funeral rites of the dead had been celebrated, the soul was thought to be restlessly flitting about, denuded and sad. After that, it entered among the dull populace of ghosts; and, in a neutral, melancholy state, it flitted about through hades. Thus it was supposed by the ancient Greeks and Romans that, after death, the souls of all classes dwelt together without any special distinction or separation, in an underworld, where all the inhabitants were chill, aerial, or forceless beings. They could not properly be regarded as anything in particular, and yet they were supposed to have a real, conscious existence.

The Poets.

The minds of the people being filled with superstition, it was an easy matter for poets, as they reveled in fiction, to give forcible shape to whatever doctrine yielded the best harvest for their craft. These poets have shaped the ideas of mankind in a great degree, and partly, no doubt, for selfish ends. “Dante’s Inferno,” and all productions of its kind, deal in scenes of fiction which are most horrid. These have been sought after by the people, and their influence over the minds of the credulous and the uninformed have been very great. Herodotus says of Hesiod and Homer, “These were they who framed the theogony for the Greeks, and gave names to the gods, and assigned to them honor and arts, and declared their several forms.” —“Herod. Euterp., II, 53, page 116.

Strabo, in speaking of the power exerted over the common people by poets, priests, and lawgivers, through romance and fable, says, “Numbers of our people are incited to deeds of virtue by the beauties of fable, when they hear the poets, in a strain of enthusiasm, record noble actions, such as the labors of Hercules or Theseus, and the honors bestowed upon them by the gods, or even when they see the paintings, sculptures, or figures, bearing their romantic evidences to such events. In the same way they are restrained from vicious courses, when they think they have received from the gods, by oracles or some other invisible intimations, threats, menaces, or chastisements, or even if they only believe they have befallen others. . . . Common people can not be induced, by mere force of reason, to devote themselves to piety, virtue, and honesty; superstition must therefore be employed, and even this is insufficient without the aid of the marvelous and terrible. For what are the thunderbolts, the aegis, the trident, the torches, the dragons, the barbed thyrses, the arms of the gods, and all the paraphernalia of antique theology, but fables employed by the founders of the states, as bugbears to frighten timorous minds. Such was mythology.” —“Strabo,” Book I, Ch. 2, page 30.

Another writer, Mr. Alger, says, “The doctrine of the soul’s survival and transference to another world, where its experience depends upon conditions observed or violated here, conditions somewhat in the control of a select class of men here—such a doctrine is the very hiding-place of a power of priestcraft, a vast engine of interest and sway which the shrewd insight of priesthood has often devised, and the cunning policy of states subsidized.” —“Doctrine of a Future Life,” pages 39, 40, 512.

The foregoing quotations show clearly what causes combined in the establishment of these doctrines among the heathen nations.

“Finally,” says the same author, “by the combined power, first, of natural conscience affirming a future distinction between the good and the bad; secondly, of imperfect conceptions of God as a passionate avenger; thirdly, of the licentious fancies of poets, drawing awful imaginative pictures of future woe; fourthly, of the cruel spirit and the ambitious plans of selfish priesthoods; and, fifthly, of the harsh and relentless theories of conforming metaphysicians —the doctrine of hell, as a located place of manifold, terrific tortures, drawing in vast majorities of the human race, became established in the ruling creeds, and enthroned as an orthodox dogma.”

It appears that all mankind has longed for some tangible proof of a future life; but the heathen, being separated in mind from God’s revealed purpose, have formed many curious and fanciful notions concerning life and how it is sustained, which, in time, have become so firmly rooted in their minds that the person who questions their truthfulness is regarded as a heretic. Through their traditions they accept many theories as true, which have no foundation other than heathen fable. Multitudes of these fables are so hoary-headed that their beginnings are lost in the long-falling shadows of the dusky evening. The substance, if not the form, of numbers of these traditions have been incorporated into the creeds of Christendom. The thing is so positively asserted that the credulous reader is led to believe that the Bible surely teaches it. In this manner thousands are caused to receive erroneous views, thinking that the Bible upholds them.

But the only safe way for every Christian is carefully to study the Bible for himself, and to receive nothing for his faith, nor allow anything in practise, but that which is clearly taught in its pages. A false proposition affirmed in a thousand creeds of men, and transcribed ten thousand times, is not improved in the least by such usage. In fact, it would only be the more dangerous, because it would then be accepted by the masses without even a question.

Pythagoras, of the sixth, and Plato, of the fifth century, B. C., went from Greece into Egypt to study the doctrine of the Egyptian priests. After this schooling they returned to Greece, and, posing as philosophers, proclaimed the doctrine of the deathless nature of the soul. Of course these philosophers have advanced many contradictory things regarding the qualities and capacities of the soul; but from their philosophy sprang the literature of modern times relative to the undying nature of the soul, and the conscious state of man in death. The philosophy of Egypt and Greece teaches something very different from what is contained in the Bible.