EMINENT MEN WHO REJECTED THE SOUL'S IMMORTALITY.
On examination we find that most of the eminent orators and authors of antiquity have recorded themselves as unbelievers in the soul's immortality. Among these, Cicero stands prominent as a great orator and statesman. Though in some of his writings he argues for the immortality of the soul, yet after all he confesses that he did not really believe it. Of him Warburton says, "He professes his disbelief of a future state of rewards and punishments in the frankest and freest manner." (Divine Lega., vol. ii. book iii. sec. 3, p. 182.) Virgil, Horace, and Seneca were all disbelievers in the immortality of man." (See Enfield, Hist. Phil., pp. 310-313.) After showing that Cicero was full of doubts on the subject, Dr. Horne says: "All which gave Seneca just occasion to say that 'immortality, however desirable, was rather promised than proved by these great men.' While the followers of these great philosophers were thus perplexed with doubts, others of the heathen entertained the most gloomy notions,—either imagining that they should be removed from one body to another, and be perpetual wanderers, or contemplating the grave as their eternal habitation, and sadly complaining that the sun and stars could rise again, but that man, when his day was set, must lie down in darkness, and sleep a perpetual sleep." (Horne's Intro., vol. i. p. 18.) No wonder that Paul said that the heathen had no hope; for it was really true. Gibbon, the celebrated historian, says: "The writings of Cicero represent in the most lively colors the ignorance, the errors, and the uncertainty, of the ancient philosophers with regard to the immortality of the soul. When they are desirous of arming their disciples against the fear of death, they inculcate, as an obvious though melancholy position, that the fatal stroke of our dissolution releases us from the calamities of life, and that those can no longer suffer who no longer exist." (Dec. and Fall, vol. i. p. 527.) So then, the belief of the ancients was against the immortality of the soul.