Immortality of the Soul a Fable.
By John B. Frisbie
THE immortality of the soul is not taught in the Bible; but it is a very ancient doctrine. It is asserted that man shall not die. "God said, Ye shall not eat of it, neither shall ye touch it, lest ye die. And the serpent said unto the woman, Ye shall not surely die: ye shall be as gods." Gen. iii, 3-5. This teaching of the old serpent compares well with the doctrine of Spiritualism, as taught by Judge Edmonds and Dr. Dexter. "But as the spirit arrives at that state it occupies when thrown off from the Godhead, it then is invested with certain attributes of which no spirit here can give you any knowledge. The soul then, as you have learned, is a part of the God himself, it is not an arbitrary creation—the soul is a God of itself; for it possesses the power of generating thought, &c. God, in his connection with matter has evolved it from nothing, is continually speeding it to its development. I do not believe, strictly speaking, that this kind of teaching is the most profitable kind for your minds, for say what I might, there would be a mystery still surrounding the subject which cannot be unfolded until your spirits see the dawnings of that eternity."—Spiritualism, Vol II. p. 314. If we are sure of the origin of the doctrine in the text, we may be equally sure of the other, as the sentiment of the one is contained in the other most exactly. We will next quote from R. P. Wilson's Lectures on Spiritual Science, pp. 43, 45, where he denies the resurrection of the material bodies as unphilosophical, and undertakes to tell of what the spiritual bodies are composed. "The old material idea, that man's immortality depends upon the resurrection of the physical form, subsequent to its decomposition, is opposed, not only to human desire truly educated, but is philosophically impossible." Not only to show that this immortal soul doctrine is serpentine, but infidelity, we will quote from Thomas Paine's Age of Reason, pp. 182, 185. "The doctrine he (Paul) sets out to prove by argument, is the resurrection of the same body; and he advocates this as an evidence of immortality. But all other arguments apart, the consciousness of existence is the only conceivable idea we can have of another life, and the continuance of that consciousness is immortality. Thought is capable of becoming immortal, and it is the only production of man that has that capacity." Then Paine introduces the butterfly argument that is so common, and calls Paul's reasoning [1 Cor. xv] a doubtful jargon. So much for Paine. The immortality of the soul was the doctrine of heathen philosophers as taught by Socrates, who said when about to die, "I shall go to the felicities of the blessed: you will not bury Socrates, I shall go to the gods." Plato taught that the soul was immortal, and that the divine nature was diffused through all souls, which imparted a kind of divinity to them, making them immortal. We now make an extract from Buck's Theological Dictionary, on the word soul, to give the popular idea as held by most Protestant churches. "Soul, that vital, immaterial, active substance, or principle in man, whereby he perceives, remembers, reasons, and wills. It is rather to be described in its operations, than to be defined as to its essence. Various, indeed, have been the opinions of philosophers concerning its substance. The rational soul is simple, uncompounded and immaterial, not composed of matter, and form." If a man blessed with much of the sublime, should set down to see how well he could describe a nothing, I think he could not do much better than the immaterial, non-existent soul has been described above. It starts on nothing and ends on nothing. Yet it is held out for effect by those marvelous persons, that those who do not believe that the immaterial nothing soul is something, when they define it to be nothing themselves, are no-soulists. But this shows that they do not understand the subject as well as they should. For not believing the soul immortal, is not believing but a man has a soul such as the Bible reveals. We believe that man has a soul, but not an immortal soul, because the Bible never says that the soul is immortal. It is only the spelling-books that say, "The soul is immortal, and it will never die." The spelling-book makers, it appears then, know more than ever God revealed in his word; for the Bible says, "The soul that sinneth it shall die." Eze. xviii, 4, 20. The Methodist Episcopal hymn book also, appears to know more than the Bible does about this subject. "A charge to keep I have,
A God to glorify,
A never dying soul to save,
And fit it for the sky." The same hymn ends,
"Assured if I my trust betray,
I shall forever die."
How can a never-dying soul forever die? Again,
"His sovereign power our bodies made;
Our souls are his immortal breath;
And when his creatures sinned he bled,
To save us from eternal death." Here the immortal soul of man was God's immortal breath, and so a part of God, and then God died and bled to save his immortal breath from eternal death. We are called upon to believe such unscriptural, contradictory, immaterial theology, or be branded with infidelity. Now the Bible reveals no such immortal thing in man. The Devil defines it to be electricity, and a mystery that cannot be explained to man here; and popular theology, if anything can be learned by words, defines it to be a substance, immaterial, uncompounded, not composed of matter or form, occupying no space, so that a thousand can just as well occupy the same space at the same time, and not crowd each other. Believe it who can. You have cause to tremble, if the Bible appears a common-place book.