Immortality A Conditional Gift To Be Bestowed At The Resurrection, continued

Popular theory says that the mortality of common experience is related to condition, not to being; that it changes a man's place of existence, but does not touch the fact of his existence. Let us consider this a moment. It is a manifest truth that life in the abstract is indestructible; but are we to say that, therefore, a living being is indestructible? If so, it would prove the immortality of beasts, for they certainly live, as really as man, though their nature is inferior. Life is not a thinking individual power in its abstract condition, unless we take the sum total of all life as it exists in God, "the fountain of life." Subordinately to Him, the power or capacity of individual manifestation exists in the vast ocean of lifepower that subsists in the Great Eternal Fountain: but it is latent there, and can only be developed by what men have been pleased to call "organization."

The thing may seem a mystery; but certainly it is not more a mystery than the metaphysical view which attempts to explain a mystery by a greater mystery still. Mystery or no mystery, it is the teaching of experience and the declaration of the word of God. "They have all one breath" (or spirit-the same word) is Solomon's statement concerning men and animals (Eccles. 3v 19). Moses is equally decisive. Speaking of the flood, he says (Gen. 7v 23), "And every living substance was destroyed which was upon the face of the ground, both MAN, and cattle, and the creeping things." Again (Gen. 7v 21, 22), "And all flesh died that moved upon the earth, both of fowl, and of cattle, and of beast and of every creeping thing . . . and every man; ALL in whose nostrils was the breath of life . . . died." Here man is categorized with animals, as belonging to the same class of existence-being a creature of "living substance" inhaling the universal "breath of life" shared by ALL. "The spirit of God is in my nostrils," says Job (chap. 27v 3). "Cease ye from man whose breath is in his nostrils," is the command of inspiration in Isaiah 2v 22. God "gathering unto Himself HIS spirit and HIS breath," is Zophar's description of death in Job 34v 14. Mark, the "spirit" is spoken of as the Almighty's; and man-the substance creature-as the possessor of spirit; but philosophy has inverted this order of ideas. It has made the spirit into the possessor, and the body the thing possessed; and has opened the door for the concomitant doctrines of disembodied sky kingdom rewards, hell punishments, etc., etc.

The theory falls to the ground on the reception of the simple doctrine of the Scriptures that "God formed MAN of the dust" (Gen. 2v 7); that "the first man is of the earth, earthy," and that, "As is the earthy, such are they also that are earthy" (I Cor. 15v 47, 48); that the life that is in him is God's and returns to God when the man dies (Eccles. 12v 7). The opposite doctrine, which is but the offspring of human speculation, and not the teaching of the Scriptures-for whoever read of "immortal souls" in the Bible?-is a delusion which binds the understanding of all who labour under it, giving rise to many gratuitous difficulties as to God's moral government of the world, and preventing a proper apprehension of the doctrines of Christianity, which have for their very foundation the truth that man is an evanescent form of conscious life, to whom the day of death is appointed because of sin.

How comes it to pass that man, having strong instinctive desires for immortality and perfection, shall be found in a state so much the reverse, in all respects? There is an explanation. This explanation "nature" refuses to furnish. The condition of man as a natural accident is an impenetrable mystery. Nature establishes the strictest correspondence between instinct and condition in the case of every other species throughout her wide domain, but she refuses this happiness producing adaptation in the case of her noblest production-man, leaving him to the wretchedness of disappointed noble aspiration. It is impossible to account for this fact on natural principles. Unaided by revelation, human condition and destiny must ever remain an insoluble enigma.

Turning to the Bible, the mystery is explained. We are taken away back to the origin of our species. We are shown Adam and Eve, our first parents, in primeval innocence, the happy occupants of a paradise of heavenly planting. We need not be frightened away from the contemplation of this picture by Darwinism. The evolution of species is not only an undemonstrated, but an undemonstrable scientific guess. Nay, more; it is an untenable and self stultifying hypothesis. Though many scientific men endorse it, many other scientific men reject it altogether, on scientific grounds. Professor Owen, for example-a name great in science-is in the front rank of the rejectors of Darwinism.