ever," (!) "but to each person (according to this supposition) the moment of his closing his eyes in death, will be instantly succeeded by the sound of the last trumpet which shall summon the dead; even though ages shall have intervened; and in this sense the faithful Christian may be, practically, in paradise the day he dies." (!!) "The promise made to the penitent thief, and the Apostle Paul's wish to depart and to be with Christ, which he said was far better than to remain any longer, in this troublesome world, would each be fulfilled to all practical purposes, provided each shall have found himself in a state of happiness in the presence of his Lord, the very instant (according to his own perception) after having breathed his last in this world.""If (it may be said) he expected to remain in a profound sleep from death till the resurrection, why should he speak of his impatience to be with Christ"? "Since his dying sooner or later would make no difference as to the time when the last day shall arrive? "+-Can it be said to be a satisfactory answer which the pastor gives to this his own question, that the Apostle knew that when he was dead he would be unconscious of his insensibility, and that however soon he died, he did not expect to be in the presence of Christ, or happy in spirit, before those who died long after him, or indeed, till the general resurrection. If the pastor be right, St. Paul's wish to be gone, and his impatience to be so, could only have arisen from a desire to be insensible, for that was all he would have attained sooner than other men, if he had preceded them; but the Apostle's expression is an explicit contradiction of such an expectation, for he desired to arrive sooner than his friends in the presence of Christ, and while they remained in this world, else his impatience was without the motive he assigned to it. An eminent divine, who may now be said to be at the * Practically and actually he shall be so, but it is not the paradise of heaven but of the middle state. + Scripture Revelations concerning a Future State. head of the Scottish Presbyterian Church,-Dr. Chalmers, -thus speaks of the state of the departed :-"Time with its mighty strides will soon reach a future generation, and leave the present in death and in forgetfulness behind it. The grave will close upon every one of us, and that is the dark and silent cavern, where no voice is heard, and the light of the sun never enters."* If the soul is, as it ought to be, considered as the principal part of man, and is that part of him which thinks, feels, wills, and continues its consciousness after the body has undergone the change which soon follows death, this is surely needlessly disheartening language to use, as it must tend to mislead those who wish to know the state of the soul immediately after death. The same power which in life could remember, does not sink into forgetfulness on death, and Dr. Chalmers must not perhaps be seriously imagined to believe in the sleep of the soul during the dissolution of its earthly habitation, when such a doctrine is in direct opposition to the tenets of the church of which he is so esteemed a member; but a similar style of writing is too often indulged in by those who do not at the time reflect on its tendency, and on the inferences which may be drawn from it as to their own opinions, and as a guide to those of others who look up to them as expounders of our faith on so important a point. While under the power of death we are not, therefore, in a state of forgetfulness, for the mind still remains active, and remembers the vicissitudes of life on this globe. The soul cannot lose remembrance and consciousness if it still remain a soul in its disembodied state, else we must suppose it made up of parts, and be capable of existence when the most essential of them are wanting! How can the grave be said to close over us, when the immortal and unconscious principle is not there, and when the spirits of the just are represented as abiding in the dazzling light of paradise, conversing with their fellow saints and with angels, putting up their prayers to God, while awaiting in joyful but impatient expectation the rising * Sermon on the transitory nature of visible things. of a renewed body from the tomb? In some passages of the Old Testament there is a certain degree of obscurity as to the present state of the dead, but a clearer light broke through the gloom by the New, which showed that those, who believed the soul was conveyed in the first place to Hades, were right, and that it could there see, speak, and remember. As to the notions of the Jewish nation in regard to the place they so denominated, it is not my present object to inquire, all I now aim at establishing is, that the soul does not at death enter on a state of insensibility, and is then set free from the body. Some may here exclaim against the supposition of any person in these enlightened times, who are good Christians, imagining that the soul sleeps in the grave; as poetical language, they may think, alone represents it to do; but if it sleeps at all during the time the body is there, where is it supposed to sleep? In what dormant region does it slumber? Is it believed that sleeping souls are laid side by side, like embalmed mummies in the Egyptian catacombs? or mixed without any individuality in one common mass of a spiritual nature? Is there a general Necropolis for separate souls? Do the Scriptures speak of such a city of the senseless departed? Never.-I know of no authority or ground of probability for assigning the disembodied soul any other place during its imagined torpor where it can even be said to repose without sense, than the grave; and there, like a bat in its winter quarters, it may be fancied sleeping as well as any where else, if sleep it really does. If it follows the fate of the body, it should be recollected, that many bodies are never in a grave at all, but are left to consume on the surface of the earth; or, (as is still a very common practice with some nations) are burned to ashes and scattered by the wind. Where sleeps the soul in such cases? Is it on the ground, liable to be trodden under foot? Does it in these instances burrow into the earth, or is it taken by divine command, the moment death, freeing it from the body, lays it to sleep, and then carried to a common place of insensible rest?-Such bewildering labyrinths of conjecture combine to confound those who hold the sleep of the soul as a natural consequence of death. One of the latest works which treat of the sleep of the soul after death, is "The Philosophy of Sleep," by Mr. Macnish, a chapter of which is so entitled, and we might expect to find there some light thrown on the subject, so as to direct our belief; but it merely tells us that the author is wholly at a loss how to decide on it.-"Theological writers," he says, "have never been able to agree upon the state of the soul during that period which elapses between death and the resurrection. Some conceive that on the decease of the body, it is at once transferred to the endless pains or bliss awarded to it by the fiat of the Eternal. Others imagine that it continues in a state of sleep till the day of judgment; when it awakes from the torpor which enchained it in forgetfulness; and, from that moment, enters, at once, either into everlasting punishment or everlasting felicity. These are the two great leading opinions on this subject; and each has been maintained with equal zeal, piety, and learning, by many of our most able divines. On a path where the views of the best and wisest men are at variance, and where the lights to guide us are so faint and obscure, it is perhaps most prudent not to venture very far; for, where their intellectual vision has proved insufficient to pierce through the veil of mystery in which it is shrouded, it is not likely that our far more limited faculties can succeed. Nor is this to be regretted; for whether the energies of the soul are suspended in a temporary sleep till the last day, or whether it springs at once into the state of joy or punishment destined for it by God, the question of its immortality remains unaffected; and the inducements to religion, and whatever may tend to bestow an eternity of happiness instead of sorrow, are in both cases the same." And this is the whole information which the author can give us, when writing on the sleep of the soul! Because a soul on awakening out of insensibility would not be conscious of the time it had passed in torpidity, it matters not to us, we are told, (and Mr. Macnish seems to think it of small importance,) whether our spirits shall pass several thousand years in the calm delights of paradise,—in a region of an opposite nature, or in oblivion altogether! Is it of no consequence also, whether we understand the Scriptures, or consider them full of inconsistencies and contradictions. I am inclined to think that most people will be of a very different opinion on these points from Mr. Macnish. When one belief is that the soul does not sleep after death, and another that it does,-only one of these must be wrong, and therefore those who maintain the other, must have discovered the truth; so it cannot be said, classing them together, (as Mr. M. does) that their intellectual vision has been unable to pierce the veil. One very "leading opinion," he takes no notice of, or that the soul exists in a middle state in one way or other, before it is consigned to its everlasting punishment or reward: The whole Roman Catholic Christians believing in the middle state of purgatory, while many Protestants hold that there is an intermediate region which is not purgatory. If our spirits dissipate into parts, losing their memory, feeling, and senses generally, till the body revive again, the question of the immortality of the soul may be truly said to be decided in the negative, and their future return to life would be rendered very doubtful; for such a state of unconsciousness would so plainly contradict many parts of the great Record on which we place our chief hopes of future happiness, that we could scarcely know what to depend on in it, when such explicit declarations as there are of a state immediately to succeed death, must be held of no meaning, or to indicate the very opposite of what they seem so clearly to imply. The motto, too, which Mr. Macnish has taken from the writings of the poet Campbell, and placed at the head of a chapter which professes to be unable to form an opinion, (and even shows no leaning to either side,) is particularly inappropriate for it justly assumes that the soul is not enchained insensibly in that terra incognita, the unknown land, as it is falsely called, of forgetfulness, if it is the soul itself which is thought to forget, and the body never remembered. : |