Last Updated on : November 23, 2014 | |||
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Have I An Immortal Soul?
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IF I ask this question of almost any minister or clergyman, he will reply, "Yes". If I listen to sermons I gather the same answer. If I consult religious literature, I am assured that I have A never-dying
soul to save I have met with a man who tells me it is all a mistake. You say, "Oh, he must be an infidel!" No: he is no infidel: he believes in God and in the Bible as His inspired word: and yet he tells me that there is no foundation for the idea of having an immortal soul. This has made me open my eyes and think. I have looked into the matter, and find that what he told me is right. 1. I cannot find anything about "immortal soul" in the Bible. I read about "soul" often enough, and I read the word "immortal", but I do not find the two words joined as in popular preaching; and what the Bible says about the two things separately, is out of keeping with the idea that a soul is an immaterial thing as I have been taught, or that immortality belongs to anybody now.
If every living thing has a soul, and a soul can eat, and be handled and can die, and if immortality be some thing that men have to seek for now, and to put on when Christ comes, it follows that the notion I have been brought up in -- that the soul is an invisible thing that cannot die -- must be a mistake. 2. I read that man is mortal now; that death has entered the world by sin; that where sin is death must be, and that death will only be destroyed with Christ's final triumph upon earth..
If all this be so, how can the doctrine of the immortality of the soul be true? Because if man is mortal, then he is not immortal; and if death has passed upon all men, then it must be wrong to say that he is never-dying and cannot die. And if death be not a fact, how can Christ take it away? 3. I read that the hope of immortality is to be realized by a change of the mortal body if alive when Christ comes, or by a resurrection of that body if in the grave for a similar change.
How could this be if I were already immortal, and if that immortality resided in an invisible spirit which goes away from my body when I die? 4. I read that the dead are to be judged at the coming of Christ; that the righteous are to be rewarded, and the wicked punished at that time.
How am I to understand this, if I am to believe that when men die they "go to judgment", and if accepted enter heaven to be rewarded, or descend to hell to be punished? What is the meaning of a day of judgment if it is all settled before the day arrive? 5. Then I read that in the death state men are without feeling, or memory, or consciousness, and that they are incapable of exercising any faculty or rendering any praise; that in fact, they "know not anything".
I can understand this if man is a poor mortal, whose being dissolves in death, and who, when dead, is really dead; and then I can understand the need for resurrection, and the suitableness of its happening at Christ's re-appearing. But how am I to reconcile such teaching with the idea that when I die, I shall not be dead, but more alive, and know more than I now do? I cannot reconcile the two things; and as one must be right and the other wrong, I conclude that the Bible is right, and popular teaching wrong, and that therefore I HAVE NOT AN IMMORTAL SOUL
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