Review and Herald, Vol. 53, No. 7. (2/13/1879)

Review and Herald

Feb 13, 1879

Seventh-day Adventist Publishing Association · Battle Creek, Mich. · Feb 13, 1879

Our Contributors.

Perihelia of the Great Planets, Indicating Coming Peril.

An article on the subject presented below, and containing the substance of it, was given some time since in the Review. But such is the attention this subject is commanding at the present time through the public prints, and such the interest manifested in it by the people, that another reference to it may not be out of place. The word of God has predicted great judgments upon the last generation; and if they should be brought about by the means here indicated, it would not alter the fact that they were subjects of prophecy. The writer does not seem to wish to have any one think that these things, should they occur, indicate the nearness of the end, and hence says, “The time for the earth’s destruction will not occur in the present generation.” And no doubt multitudes will feel so assured in this respect, that whatever judgments may herald its speedy coming, the day of the Lord will still overtake them as a thief. Unbelief will find some pretext upon which to base the cry of peace and safety; but the child of God will regard the warnings of prophecy, and earnestly prepare for whatever may come. The article is from the Providence Journal, copied by the Maine State Press of Jan. 23, 1879.

It seems unnecessary to have incurred the expense and trouble of a commission to investigate the causes of the pestilence that raged during the last summer in the Southern States, when astronomers tell us that the yellow fever was only a premonition of the dire calamities to be expected from physical disturbances shortly to be inflicted. The four great planets of our solar system, Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, and Neptune, have a mighty influence in the solar economy, even though they revolve at immense distances from the center of the scheme. When one or more of these planets are at their nearest point to the sun, great disturbances are sure to take place from the increased attraction of the masses upon each other. Agitation on the solar surface is reflected to the system’s remotest bounds, and our planet bears witness to the solar outburst in terrific storms on land and sea, long-continued drought, failure of crops, and consequent disaster, and pestilence in myriad forms. Jupiter, being the largest and nearest of the giant brotherhood, produces the greatest disturbances. So well is this fact established, that the sun’s maximum year for spots and general commotions is coincident with Jupiter’s nearest approach to his surface. Many observers will remember the last recurrence of this period about 1869, when brilliant auroras illuminated the heavens, rosy protuberances flashed from the sun’s photosphere, and huge spots dotted his disc; while evidences of intense excitement were visible on the Jovian surface, and terrestrial tempests, hurricanes, and all manner of physical ills, bore evidence to the malignity of the celestial conjunction.

It takes Jupiter less than twelve years to complete a revolution around the sun, Saturn a little less than thirty years, Uranus about eighty-four years, and Neptune about one hundred and sixty years. The year of maximum sun-spots coincident with Jupiter’s perihelion is looked upon as an epoch when all manner of evils afflicting humanity may be anticipated, and this direful period is near at hand. A much more lamentable period is also near at hand; one of those eras that occur at intervals counted by thousands of years is about to take place. The four great planets reach their perihelia very nearly together, and the mighty planetary quartette will pull upon the sun with one accord. They will be at their nearest approach in the year 1880, or soon after, and the influence of their unwelcome union may continue for several years. Such a conjunction of forces has not occurred since the Christian era. What will the sun do, with his blazing surface tossed into such fiery commotion? What will the earth do as she responds to every troubled pulsation of the great luminary? There is a fearful prospect ahead, and it may be that the pestilence of last summer was but the shadow of events to follow in its train. There is nothing for poor mortals to do but to take wise precautions, and await results. Seed time and harvest have not yet failed, and the time for the earth’s destruction will not occur in the present generation.

A careful observer announces that the perihelia of three of the great planets took place at the same time in the sixth and also in the sixteenth century, and that the epochs were marked by the occurrence of the most pestilential periods on record. Every sensible person will understand that when Jupiter, a planet whose volume is thirteen hundred times that of the earth, reaches its perihelion, being then forty-six millions of miles nearer the sun than when in aphelion, the increased attraction must create a commotion in the sun’s seething mass, as well as in the chaotic elements of the planet. It is just as certain that our atmosphere and temperature will be disturbed, and that the disturbance will be unfavorable to health and prosperity. In the same way it will be seen that the coincident perihelia of the four great planets will vastly increase the untoward influence. This period we shall enter upon before another year closes, and we can only trust that science and observation will do their best to avert the calamities threatened by the malignant influence of the sun and the four remotest members of the system.

COVETOUSNESS

In a recent address at a missionary meeting of the M. E. Church, New York, Rev. Dr. Fowler, editor of the Christian Advocate, gave utterance to some very plain truths about penuriousness. What he said of his own (the Methodist) church is equally true, we fear, of almost, if not every other church. He said: “Brethren, I desire you to bear with me. I wish to utter a deep conviction in great gentleness and sorrow of spirit. It is this: While I have full faith in our people as compared with any other people in this vital matter of giving, I am yet persuaded that more men will go from the Methodist church to hell for the sin of covetousness than for all other sins put together. It is a respectable sin. It kills in the dark. It strikes with dry rot. It consumes the center, leaving the outer appearances unscarred. May God save us from the sin of covetousness! In this great cause God gives you a chance to secure the gold of Heaven. Actual giving is the only cure for penuriousness. If you feel that it is hard work to give, that is a bad sign. The enemy is eating out your spiritual life. You must awake, and cast him forth. Giving is the sure remedy. Keep giving till you like it; then you will keep giving because you like it. Then God will open the windows of heaven, and pour out upon your heart all wealth.”—Selected.

IMMORTALITY OF THE SOUL.

By Dudley Marvin Canright

ELD. D. M. CANRIGHT.

ONLY FABLES.

That the popular descriptions of hell were mere fables of poets, designed to scare the common people into obedience, was freely confessed by all writers. That great historian and geographer, Strabo, thus gives the reason why the torments of hell were invented by the lawgivers. He also shows the influence poets have had in the matter. He writes thus:—

“So numbers of our citizens are incited to deeds of virtue by the beauties of fable, when they hear the poets in a strain of enthusiasm recording noble actions, such as the labor of Hercules or Theseus, and the honor bestowed on them by the gods, or even when they see paintings, sculptures, or figures bearing their romantic evidence 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. The great mass of women and common people cannot 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 the terrible. For what are the thunderbolts, the ægis, the trident, the torches, the dragons, the barbed thyrses, the arms of the gods, and all the paraphernalia of antique theogony but fables employed by the founders of States as bug-bears to frighten timorous minds? Such was mythology.”

Yes, indeed, such it was, a mass of frightful fables and bug-bears to scare the people into submission.

Of the ancient Brahmins, this writer says, “They invent fables also after the manner of Plato, on the immortality of the soul, and on the punishment in hades, and other things of this kind.”

What Plato and others said about the immortality of the soul, punishments in hades, etc., were understood to be only fables.

Another eminent Greek historian, Polybius, B. C. 203, bears a similar testimony thus: “Since the multitude is ever fickle, full of lawless desires, irrational passion, and violence, there is no way to keep them in order but by fear, and terror of the invisible world, on which account our ancestors seem to me to have acted judiciously, when they contrived to bring into the popular belief these notions of the gods, and of the infernal regions.”

Dr. Horne bears this testimony: “For, though the poets have prettily fancied, and have portrayed in beautiful and glowing verse, the joys of elysium, or a place and state of bliss, and the miseries of tartarus, or hell; and though the ancient philosophers and legislators were sensible of the importance to society, and also of the necessity of the doctrine of future punishments, yet they generally discarded them as vain and superstitious terrors.”

Watson says the same. Says Warburton, “They enforced the belief of a future state of rewards and punishments, by every sort of contrivance.”

Referring to the punishment of the wicked in hades, or hell, Cicero says, “If these things are false, as all men understand them to be, what has death taken from him but a sense of pain?”

Gibbon, the historian, says: “The description of the infernal regions had been abandoned to the fancy of painters and poets, who peopled them with so many phantoms and monsters who dispensed their rewards and punishments with so little equity that a solemn truth, the most congenial to the human heart, was oppressed and disgraced by the absurd mixture of the wildest fictions. The doctrine of a future state was scarcely considered among the devout polytheists of Greece and Rome as a fundamental article of faith.”

PRIESTS AND LAWGIVERS.

Another cause, and perhaps the chief one which aided in developing and supporting a belief in this doctrine, was the interest and authority of priests and lawgivers. Commonly these two offices were united in one person. Of course, the more importance the priest could attach to the soul, and to rewards and punishments after death, the greater influence he would have with the people, and the more readily would they support him. Hence it was for the interest of the priests to build up this doctrine at every opportunity, and history shows that from the Egyptians to the Roman Catholic priests they have not been slack in doing this. So also the magistrate found that to threaten the people with the wrath of the gods and future torments for disobedience to his laws, greatly aided him in controlling them, and in keeping them under. “Hence also,” says Dr. Horne, “the most celebrated legislators of antiquity, Zoroaster, Minos, Pythagoras, Solon, Lycurgus, Numa, etc., etc., all thought it necessary to profess some intercourse with Heaven in order to give the greater sanction to their laws and institutions, notwithstanding many of them were armed with secular power. Hence he also united his interest with the priests in helping forward this doctrine.” Volumes might be and have been written showing that this was the case.

The very learned bishop Warburton, in his “Divine Legation of Moses Demonstrated,” has abundantly proved by copious quotations from ancient writers that what was said about the infernal regions, elysium, etc., was all invented by the priests and lawgivers to frighten the people, and keep them in subjection.

Alger truthfully observes: “The doctrine of the soul’s survival and transference to another world, where its experience depends on conditions observed or violated here, conditions somewhat within the control of a select class of men here—such a doctrine is the very hiding-place of the power of priestcraft, a vast engine of interest and sway, which the shrewd insight of priesthoods has often devised, and the cunning policy of States subsidized.”

The above author thus sums up the causes which operated to establish the heathen nations in these doctrines: “Finally,” says he, “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 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 physical tortures, drawing in vast majorities of the human race, became established in the ruling creeds, and enthroned as an orthodox dogma.”

EGYPT THE MOTHER OF THE DOCTRINE.

That such a doctrine is now largely believed is well known. That it is not taught in the Bible has been fully shown many times; hence it did not originate there. Then where did it originate? All evidence, both ancient and modern, points to Egypt as the mother of this doctrine. Here are a few testimonies. The first is from the historian Herodotus, than whom there could be no higher authority on this question. He was a Greek, born B. C. 484, and is regarded as the father of profane history. He traveled in Egypt and many other countries, and carefully studied the customs and doctrines of those ancient nations; hence he was well qualified to speak the truth on these points. He says, “The Egyptians were also the first who asserted the doctrine that the soul of man is immortal.”

Bunsen, in his learned and elaborate work on Egypt, says, “The Egyptians were the first who taught the doctrine of the immortality of the soul, a fact mentioned by all Greek writers from Herodotus to Aristotle, and one brilliantly confirmed by the monuments.”

This declaration from such high authority should be well considered by all lovers of truth. Bishop Warburton confirms these testimonies thus: “The Egyptians, as we are assured by the concurrent testimony of antiquity, were among the first who taught that the soul survived the body, and was immortal.”

Egypt, then, and not the Bible, is the mother of this doctrine. So says the voice of all antiquity. Balfour bears this testimony: “Mr. Stanley says the Egyptians were the first who asserted that the soul of man is immortal, and cites in proof Eusebius, Diodorus Siculus, and Halicarnassus.”

Ralph Cudworth, D. D., is probably the highest authority we could quote upon this subject. Mosheim says of him that he had all the ancient authors by heart. In his immortal work, “The True Intellectual System of the Universe,” he says of the Egyptians, “They were the first assertors of the immortality of souls, their pre-existence, and transmigration.” Again: “The immortality, pre-existence, and transmigration of souls, which doctrine was unquestionably derived from the Egyptians.”

Here, then, is the fountain-head from whence the doctrine of the immortality of the soul first flowed. Its origin is heathen, not divine; Egyptian, not Biblical. He that denies this assertion must do it with all the evidence from history against him.

THE LIFE OF THE SOUL DEPENDENT UPON THE PRESERVATION OF THE BODY.

Generally, no error is born into the world fully grown and perfectly developed; but it has a gradual growth, and passes through different stages of development till it becomes a regular system. Some truth, either natural or revealed, is always taken as the foundation on which to build up a system of error. The counterfeit must at first be very nearly like the genuine, or it would not be received as all would detect the fraud; so we may expect to find this the case with the doctrine under consideration.

It is a doctrine relating to future life. Let us look a moment at the doctrine of a future life as revealed in the word of God. The Lord told man in the beginning, that if he sinned he should surely die. (Gen. 2:17.) When man had sinned, God said to him, “Dust thou art, and unto dust shalt thou return.” Gen. 3:19. Christ came into the world, died, went into the grave, and rose again, that man might have a resurrection from the dead. (Rom. 14:9; 1 Cor. 15.) A future life could only be had by a resurrection from the dead. For this resurrection all the ancient worthies, from Abel to Paul, looked with earnest anticipation. (Heb. 11:4–13, 32–40; Phil. 3:10, 11.) This resurrection, the angel in the bush taught Moses. (Luke 20:37.) Job, and David, and in short all the ancient people of God, rested all their hopes upon it. (Job 19:25–27; Ps. 17:15.) This was the first and true doctrine of a future life as revealed by God to man.

Now it is an undeniable fact that the first theory which finally led to the doctrine of the immortality of the soul was that the soul would live as long as the body was preserved. If the body perished, then the soul was destroyed too. If the body could be preserved, it would be resurrected, and live again some time in the distant future. They thought the soul would live in the body again; hence the immense expense and untiring pains to embalm the dead body so that it should not decay. It is a well-known fact that the ancient Egyptians, and after them many other nations, embalmed the dead. This they did at great expense, and so effectually that many bodies are preserved in quite a perfect condition to the present day. Their object was to preserve the body so that it would live again. On this point all the best authors agree, as witness the following:—

Calmet, in his Dictionary of the Bible, article “To Embalm,” says: “The ancient Egyptians, and the Hebrews in imitation of them, embalmed the bodies of the dead. . . . The art of physic was by the Egyptians ascribed to Isis, and in particular the remedy which procured immortality, which, in my opinion, was no other than that of embalming bodies, and rendering them incorruptible.”

In harmony with this, Kitto’s Biblical Cyclopedia, article “Embalming,” says: “The feeling which led the Egyptians to embalm the dead, probably sprung from their belief in the future reunion of the soul with the body. Such a reunion is distinctly spoken of in the ‘Book of the Dead.’”

So Chambers’s Cyclopedia, article “Embalming,” states: “This art [that of embalming] seems to have derived its origin from the idea that the preservation of the body was necessary for the return of the soul to the human form.”

Bunsen, in his elaborate work on Egypt, bears this decisive testimony: “The real meaning of the celebrated passage in Herodotus (II. 123) about the reasons why the Egyptians bestowed so much care on the preservation of the body, and, as it were, on preventing it from passing away, must have been this: The belief in a resurrection of the body. . . . This doctrine we may now read in every page of the sacred books. Thence the popular notion in Egypt that unless its old human envelope was preserved, the soul would be subject to disturbances and hindrances in performing its destined course.”

Again: “It is only by considering how very deeply this sense of immortality was engrafted on the Egyptian mind, that we can comprehend the passion for the monstrous and colossal proportions of the pyramids, and at the same time the glorious emblematic and artistic character of those works of the old empire. As animal worship is merely the Egyptianized African form of an early Asiatic conception, so is also the combination of the care for the preservation of the body, and if possible its protection from destruction, connected with the doctrine of immortality. The soul was immortal; but its happiness, if not the possibility of its continuing to live, depended on the preservation of the body. The destruction of the body, consequently, involved the destruction of the soul. We assuredly owe the stupendous fabric of the pyramids to a superstitious fear of the destruction of the body, rather than to mere vanity or love of display on the part of the builders. . . . This inability, combined with the artistic impulses of the Egyptians, led to the colossal conservatories which arose out of a superstitious adherence to the notion of the value of the body, and which clung with a rigid grip to the materialistic principle.”

Several facts worthy of attention are stated in the above testimonies.

1. “The belief in a resurrection of the body” was what led the Egyptians to embalm the dead. 2. The belief that the soul would return to the body, and thus begin a new life as man. This shows that they connected the idea of a future life inseparably with the life of the body. 3. It was “a popular notion in Egypt that unless the old human envelope was preserved,” the soul would not be happy. Here, again, the soul depended upon the body. 4. The preservation of the body from destruction was connected with the doctrine of immortality, there being no immortality without the preservation and reliving of the body. “The soul was immortal; but its happiness, if not the possibility of its continuing to live, depended on the preservation of the body. The destruction of the body, consequently, involved the destruction of the soul.” The soul was immortal only as connected with an immortal body! This is so near the scriptural idea of immortality that we may easily recognize its origin. We have reason to thank God that in those early ages we can find so clear an idea still retained of the divine doctrine of a future life only by the resurrection of the body.

5. These writers say that the pyramids looked to the same object,—a preservation of the dead. 6. The old Egyptians were materialists.

Mr. Mitchell, in his “Ancient Geography,” confirms the above testimonies. He uses this language: “The priests adopted the doctrine of the transmigration of the soul, while the belief that it will continue as long as the body endures obtained with the people. Whence the care displayed in the preservation of embalmed bodies, or mummies, and the vast expense of excavating tombs in the solid rocks.”

One more testimony upon this important point must suffice: “Immortality is plainly taught, but bound up with the idea of the preservation of the body to which the Egyptians attached great importance as a condition of the soul’s continued life; and hence they built vast tombs, and embalmed their bodies as if to last forever.”

Here, then, we have the object of embalming, the object of the pyramids, and the fact of the immortality of the soul as taught by the Egyptians,—quite different from the present doctrine of the soul’s immortality.

ASPIRATIONS

By Eliza H. Morton

A child crept up a winding stair With merry look, and glee, And as he older, stronger grew, Would fain climb forest tree.

A youth sought light and knowledge true, With earnest look and wise, Bright glory, fame and worldly lore,— A dazzling far-off prize.

A man upon the summit stood, Yet longed to higher rise; He looked around, beyond, above, And fain would reach the skies.

O restless heart of mortal man! Forever and for aye Thy aspirations upward tend, All through life's fleeting day.

'Tis ever thus, and God has given His saints a hope all bright, That soars afar from earth to Heaven, And darkness turns to light.

O heights draw near! O Jesus come! These longings satisfy; Our future life knows no unrest— Blest immortality.

And far above, on “sea of glass,” The tired feet shall stand; The weary heart find endless rest In higher life and land.

ELIZA H. MORTON.

Allen's Corner, Me.

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