VI. THE MIND INDESTRUCTIBLE AND IMMORTAL. "A living soul." GEN. ii, 7. "Who knoweth the spirit of man that goeth upward." ECCLES. iii, 21. "Not able to kill the soul." MATT. x, 28. "Life and immortality are brought to light in the Gospel." THE indestructibility and immortality of mind are among the sublimest ideas that ever dawned upon the human soul. How it increases the range of its vision! How it multiplies and enhances the objects of its creation! How much grander the destiny it reveals! How it alleviates the dark and gloomy aspect of this world, where changes are incessant and death universal! "The sun is but a spark of fire, A transient meteor in the sky, When we assume that the soul in its very nature is indestructible and immortal, we do not mean that it has this nature independent of God, but that the Divine Being has thus endowed it. What God wills it to be that is its nature. If God has made it to be immortal, then is it naturally immortal. The self-existent eternity of matter was a theory of the Epicurean philosophy; and some who have opposed the doctrine of man's immortality represent the Christian philosopher as occupying this old heathen ground. But the distinction is obvious. The one made matter eternally self-existent; the other assumes that neither matter nor soul is self-existent, but that the being, and all the attributes or properties of each, have been derived from the Creator of all; and, further, that each is possessed of such a nature as he has given it. We assume, then, that immortality is the heritage of the race. On the same grounds that I claim immortality for myself, I claim it for all my kind; for God "hath made of one blood all nations of men to dwell on all the face of the earth." (Acts xvii, 26.) Weakness and darkness, brutality and degradation, do not change this essential characteristic of mind. They may cloud the pathway of the life to come as they do that of the present life, but they have no power to rob the soul of its being. I. OUR FIRST ARGUMENT FOR THE INDESTRUCTIBILITY OF MIND IS DRAWN FROM THE ACKNOWLEDGED INDESTRUCTIBILITY OF MATTER. Matter is incessantly changing its form. The particles of which bodies are composed, though now solid, impervious, may be resolved into their original liquid or gaseous elements may be dissipated so as to become invisible and impalpable. The process of evaporation may go on till not one drop of water is left in the pool, and yet the existence, nay, even the identity, of those elements is not lost. They may float over continents and oceans; they may widely separated as the poles, but not one of them is annihilated. The fire may consume the forest oak till all that is left, distinguishable to sense, is the handful of ashes gathered upon the hearth. All the rest has disappeared― passed away in smoke or been evaporated into air—and yet no single particle of the oak has suffered annihilation. be as Thus the process of change is perpetually going on in the forms and relations of matter. The atoms that now pile up the rugged mountain were once, every single one of them, not as they now are. The time will come, away in the ages of the future, when, one by one, each shall have changed again and no longer appear in their present form. But in all this wonderful transformation there is no annihilation. Not a single atom has ceased to be; not one has lost its identity even. That little particle of limestone which nestles so snugly in the bones of the living man is the same particle which once uplifted the mountain's ponderous weight. In regard to the created universe, then, annihilation is no part of the plan of the Creator. The minutest particle to which he has given existence shall never cease to be. It may pass through ten thousand transformations, but its being is untouched. This indestructibility of matter affords, to say the least, a strong presumption for the indestructibility of soul. Can. it enter into the mind of any one that a higher destiny is awarded to the insensate atom than to the "living soul?" Was not the material world created that it might become the training-place of the soul, a handmaid to its early growth and development? To suppose, then, that God has appointed to the former a being that should outlast the latter is to reverse all our ideas of the divine plan of wisdom of proportionate order and ends-in the universe. We have Lot found it necessary to urge the immateriality of mind as a proof of immortality; for matter itself, we have seen, is indestructible; so that had materialists been able to show that the soul of man is a material substance it would not have disproved the immortality of the soul. God, for aught we know, could have endowed a material soul with an unending existence. Its heritage would then have been immortality. Nor would this have been more wonderful than the kindred endowment bestowed upon the elementary atoms of material nature. Still, when the fact of the soul's immaterial essence is established, as it is by the most undoubted evidence, the question of immortality rises from mere presumption to the region of demonstrated fact. We can join with the poet in saying of our departed friends "There are no dead. 'T is true, many of them are gone; Singly they came, singly they departed; When their work was done, they lay down to sleep But never one hath died; Forms may change, but spirit is immortal." II. OUR SECOND ARGUMENT IS DRAWN FROM THE CONCURRENT BELIEF OF ALL AGES AND ALL PEOPLE IN A FUTURE STATE. There seems ever to have been a remarkable uniformity in the opinions and traditions of the race concerning a future state. Amid all the darkness that has enveloped the human mind, there have never failed to be seen some gleams of light in regard to a future life. "Never," says Dr. Blair, "has any nation been discovered on the face of the earth so rude and barbarous that, in the midst of their wildest superstitions, there was not cherished among them some expectation of a state after death, in which the virtuous were to enjoy happiness." "Man," says Sidney Smith, "in every stage of society, civilized or savage, has universally believed that he is to live hereafter." If the facts shall be found to justify these broad statements, how are we to account for them? Are they to be traced to an instinctive principle implanted by the Creator? Then must they have some basis in truth, or But let us "Nature, there, Imposing on her sons, has written fables Man was made a lie." recur to some of the data which settle the question of fact. The ancient Egyptians represent the soul as being brought at death into the presence of its Judge, and that attendant spirits were present to bear witness for or against it. The ancient Persians represent the wicked as being sent away into "everlasting darkness," and the good as being restored to the bosom of "the universal Father." The poet of Bokhara-Rodski-when speaking of the death of Muradi, embodies this thought in most exquisite and delicate language: "Muradi, alas! is dead! But no, he certainly can not be dead! It is not so easy for death to triumph over such an illustrious man. He has only restored his noble soul to our universal Father; he has only resigned his sordid body to our universal mother."* The Greek and Roman mythology—which stood to them in the place of theology-represented the soul, when separated from the body at death, as being ferried over the River Styx by Charon, where they were judged according to the deeds done in the body. Those "Who suffered wounds In fighting for their country's cause; and priests Did honor to Apollo; those who polished Life by invented arts, and such as made were at once admitted to "The realms of joy, Delighted haunts of never-fading green, The blessed seats in groves of happiness, Where ether more diffusive robes the fields But the wicked were cast down to hell-a place where hunger, toil, disease, fear, and nameless sorrows reigned supreme. "An hundred tongues, An hundred mouths, and speech by iron lungs Of all their punishments." Turner's Sacred History, I, p. 122. Note. |