Infidelity is Infidelity Still.
By R. F. Cottrell
MAN without the Bible is like a mariner upon a vast ocean without chart or compass, whose point of destination is utterly unknown to him, and, consequently, having no port to gain and no means of finding it if he had, he is the sport of every wind until he is wrecked in some storm or sinks to the bottom from a leak. And yet proud man, fancying himself immortal while he rejects his only hope of immortality, that which is brought to light through the gospel and offered to him through a crucified Redeemer, endeavors to philosophize away the dread reality of death, transform it into a friend—a most benignant arrangement to break the monotony of earth-life, and afford them a delightful transition to a higher life on the peaceful shores of immateriality, where pleasures never cloy and where the freed spirit, which is now puffed up nigh to bursting with pride, may expand to all eternity without danger of ever coming in contact with any thing else! While Satan has been persevering in his efforts to persuade men that the first lie he ever uttered to our race, namely, "Ye shall not surely die," is the truth, he has been equally laborious, and successful too, in inflating the mind with the other idea advanced at the same time: "Ye shall be as gods." Pride, self-exaltation, is the natural attendant of the doctrine of natural immortality; and this is a chief reason why men are unwilling to hear the Bible on this question. Their self-conceit makes them unwilling to learn the fact that they are "but men," but "dust and ashes," whose "days are as grass," whose life is "a vapor that appeareth for a little time, and then vanishes away." They think they are degraded—brought down to a level of the brutes,—when they are told that they have no immortality out of Christ: and this fact, appearing more and more apparent to the Bible student, furnishes a new pretext for discarding that sacred Book. Infidelity, which was wont, in time past, to deny the existence of God and consign man, at death, to blank nothingness, denying a future life altogether, has, in these last days, seized upon the popular fable of the natural immortality of the soul, and is battling against the Bible and its Divine Author, with all the assurance and audacity of conscious immortality independent of Christ and the resurrection. Instead of denying the existence of God, now everything is God, or there is a certain something or nothing called immateriality, which pervades every part of the universe, and this is their God—everywhere in general and nowhere in particular—a thing of naught—nonentity. It amounts to the doctrine of no God. But they themselves, in their fancied immortality, are the greatest gods they know of or care for; and they bid defiance to every power that would bring them to an account. Such is the full-ripe fruit of the doctrine of the natural immortality of man. Christian, pause and consider whether you are sustaining the foundation of this last phase of infidelity.