p. 224 | Should Not Surely Die

Pacific Press Publishing Association · Mountain View, California · Apr 14, 1914

FromSigns of the Times, Vol. 41, No. 14.

Should Not Surely Die

A MAN in Boston who claims that he used to be a minister in one of the evangelical churches, has recently been relating some of his visits, in spiritistic séancés, to other spheres.

On one of these visits, he said, he had the privilege of hearing Plato address an audience. He said that Plato talked in quite an ordinary way, but he expressed most extraordinary thought. Of all the mythological delusions, there is no other so absurd and foolish as the belief that we may converse with the dead.

God said in the beginning, that if man partook of the forbidden fruit, he should surely die, and men from that day to this have been dying in spite of themselves. But there was a master deceiver who contradicted God by saying that man should not surely die, and in order to make good his deceptive offers in the Garden of Eden, he has had to invent the myth that there is consciousness in death. But God's word consistently teaches that "the living know that they shall die: but the dead know not anything." Eccl. 9: 5. One of the greatest delusions of the time is the teaching of those doctrines that are based upon the conscious state of the dead. God's word should be our guide in this doctrine as in everything else.