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THE SPIRITUAL BODY; ITS NATURE, LIFE, AND APPELLATIONS.

It is

THE spiritual expression of life is the prerogative of MAN. the gift which distinguishes him from all other animals; just as the organic life is that which distinguishes those animals, together with plants, and his own material body, from earth and stone. By virtue of his spiritual life, man is an emotional and intellectual being. By virtue of this he thinks, speaks, sings, worships, loves, pities, weeps, hopes, laughs, marries;-performs, in a word, the innumerable actions, internal and external, which the observation of thousands of years has never once detected in any of the inferior orders of creation, but has established as the noble diagnosis of human nature. Flowing into him from God cotemporaneously, the spiritual and the organic life, as we have seen, are the same in essence; the difference between them being simply one of expression, and coming solely of the difference of the receptacles. As received into and played forth by the body, it is Organic life; as received into and played forth by the soul, it is Spiritual life. Man, while a resident in the material world, is a recipient therefore, not merely of one, nor even of two, but of three expressions of the Divine, Omnipresent life. Chemical affinity, cohesion, molecular attraction, &c., which are its lowest expression, sustain the elemental ingredients of his frame; the carbon, water, lime, and so forth, Organic life arranges and builds up those ingredients into apparatus, and impels the several portions to the due performance of some fixed duty. Spiritual life, which is the highest expression, vitalizes and energizes his soul; impelling it, after the same manner, to the continual exercise of its intellect and affections. The knowledge of the lowest expression of life constitutes Physics; that of the organic, Physiology; that of the highest or spiritual, Psychology. The latter may be defined as the science of the Life of God in man's soul; physiology as that of the Life of God in his body. And as that life is essentially One, psychology and physiology in their high, philosophic idea, are connected as soul and body, and each is an exponent of the other. What in relation to physiological life, are called the functions of the body,' or the functions of organization,' re-appear in relation to the spiritual life, as the intellectual powers,' the operations of the mind,' &c., which are the same thing essentially, only expressed after a higher manner, according to the law of discrete degrees. Functions in the body, faculties in the soul. The terms alter as the theatre changes.

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The spiritual expression of life is thus a perfectly distinct thing from the soul itself;-quite as distinct as the organic life is from the body. For the soul is no mere principle,' either of intelligence, as regards this world, or of immortality as regards the next; but a definite, substantial entity, as much a part of created nature as a flower or a bird: and so far from being Life, or even possessing any inherent or separate life, depends for existence, no less than the body which encloses it, on continually renewed supplies from the Creator. The inner man drops into metaphysical dust, as the outer man into physical, unless the parts be kept in coherence by some sustaining life; and that latter is no other than the life of the living God.'. In itself, the soul is neither im mortal nor indestructible. However common such epithets may be in books and sermons, the Bible knows nothing of them; though it unquestionably teaches that God having once created a soul, it pleases. him to sustain it with life for ever; and to allow it to exercise that life freely, as if it were its own, just as the free exercise of the organic life is allowed to the body. The possession respectively of independent life and of derived life, constitutes the grand characteristic by which we distinguish at all times and in all places, between the CREATOR and the created. If not a generally received distinction, even among philosophers; that the soul is one thing and its life another, it is at least the doctrine of the New Testament, where the Divine, vitalizing essence is discriminated as Coon, while the vessel into which it is communicated, is called by some such name as ψυχη. Thus πνεῦμα ζωῆς ἐκ τῶν Θεόν eloñλÕev év avtôis, the spirit of life from God entered into them ;' (Rev. xi. 11.) τὰς ψυχὰς τῶν πεπελεκισμένων, the souls of them that were beheaded.' (Rev. xx. 4.*) The body is distinguished as oopa, as in Matthew x. 28, Fear not them which kill to oopa, but are not able to kill my pun, but rather fear Him who is able to destroy both yuxn and oopa in hell.'0

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Rightly to conceive of the spiritual life, it is needful, accordingly, first to obtain clear ideas of its receptacle, the soul; just as in order to the conception of physiological life, it is needful first to inquire into the composition of the body. If we are to judge by the loose, indefinite notions ordinarily entertained respecting the soul, even by intelligent people, a positive, coherent idea of it is one of the greatest desiderata of the age. How common is it, for instance, to hear the soul alluded to as mere abstract intellection; an ethereal, unimaginable, immortal something, located nobody knows where, but surmised to be

See the critical proofs that this is the true sense of yuxas in this verse, in Mills' Sacred Symbology, page 230. 1853. Also Clissold's Apocalypse.

in the brain, and capable of subsisting, in the trans-sepulchral world, in the most independent and isolated condition, free from any kind of connection with any kind of body. This is not philosophical, to say the least of it. Granted, the nature of the soul is a mystery; a mystery too, of which all the most grand and sacred part futurity alone can reveal. We shall compass it, and not before, when our eyes behold the King in his beauty,' Him who is the end of problems and the font of certainties.' We should be thankful, indeed, that we feel it to be a mystery, for the mind that repudiates or is insensible to the mysterious, is inaccessible to the sublime. But to be mysterious is not necessarily to be inscrutable. The prime feature of mystery is that it recedes before wise and calm interrogation. Mystery, therefore, should never be allowed to deter. It ought rather to incite, especially when, as in the present instance, Revelation stands ready to shed its clear and willing light, and assures us that to the earnest disciples of truth it is given to know the mysteries of the kingdom of heaven,' (Matt. xiii. 11.) of which the Soul is indisputably one of the sublimest. It is the essential mark of the true philosopher,' says Coleridge, to rest satisfied with no imperfect understanding, so long as the impossibility of attaining a fuller knowledge has not been demonstrated. While we reverently attempt not to be wise above that which is written,' one of our highest duties is to strive, and that most studiously, to be wise up to that which is written. The reward is abundant, if we do but discover the nature of the difficulties, and what is within, and what beyond, the scope of our powers.

That a most partial and defective interpretation of the mystery is all that purely secular philosophy can achieve, may be as readily conceded as the enigmatical character of the theme itself; and recognizing this, it is no matter of surprise that Pagan antiquity bequeathed to us nothing but a mass of shapeless and contradictory hypotheses. † The ancients' ignorance of physiology was likewise a serious, perhaps fatal, impediment. That a people claiming to be enlightened Christians, in a country like England, should not hold a single fixed and positive opinion. on the nature of the soul, to say nothing of an established doctrine, is, however, truly astonishing, and not a little reproachful. One would think that though no one else cared to do it, those at least whose entire solicitude is presumed to have reference to the soul, and whose studies

+ A summary of these hypotheses is given by Barclay in his 'Inquiry into the Opinions, Ancient and Modern, concerning Life and Organization,' chap. 1st. 1822. For details, see the Histories of Ancient Philosophy.

and occupation so peculiarly qualify them, namely, the priests and ministers of religion, would never rest till they had enabled themselves to propound something intelligible and satisfactory. So far from it, the pulpit is mute, and its companion literature is barren.* Affirmations of the general fact of immortality are plentiful enough, we are aware. But this is not the question, nor is it a question at all. No one from his heart disputes the general proposition of immortality; and it is notorious that even those who affect to deny it with their lips, confess it in their fears. The belief in immortality is a natural feeling, an adjunct of self-consciousness, rather than a dogma of any particular theology, or of any particular age or country, and is concurrent with the belief in an Infinite, presiding Spirit, which is allowed to be spontaneous and. universal. What we want to be instructed in is not that man is immortal, but what the Soul is; and this not so much as regards our future, as our present existence. This is the knowledge with regard to which, intelligent curiosity seems dead, and which is so beclouded by error, yet which even the pulpit takes no trouble to purify and correct, and place before the world in its proper, illustrious beauty. As if it were quite unimportant to it that what is philosophically false can never be theologically true.

The soul of man, considered in its true character, namely, the continent of his emotional and intellectual life, is his SPIRITUAL BODY. The body of flesh and blood is only one half the human being. Another body underlies it. There is a natural body,' says the Apostle, and there is a spiritual body.' By 'spiritual body' he plainly means a body altogether different from the natural,' which is the material, or as Wiclif calls it, the 'beestli' body; yet by speaking of both in the present tense; saying of each that it now is; he gives us to understand that the two bodies are cotemporaneous and co-existent, so long, that is, as the natural one may endure. By adding that it is to be raised,' he intimates that this spiritual body' is the immortal portion of our being. In this glorious revelation is thus furnished the key to the mystery;' for every thing which philosophy asserts to be constitutional to the soul is involved in the idea of a spiritual body, of a nature superior to the material one, and continuing to exist after that body expires; and conversely, every thing which is said by the Apostle concerning the

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* With the exception of the writings of Swedenborg, and the Rev. J. Clowes' 'Letters to a friend on the Human Soul, as being a Form and Substance deriving its life continually from God,' 1825, and the excellent little work of the Rev. W. Mason On the Human Soul.' See also the tract on that subject in the Manchester Series.

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spiritual body, is exactly what we should expect from an inspired writer, seeking to communicate a general notion of the soul and its destiny. But so far we have little more than a substitution of one name for another. What is this spiritual body?' Here historical Scripture comes to our aid. It is an admirable characteristic of the Bible that there is not a single doctrine enunciated in its didactic portions, but what is somewhere illustrated in its histories, either in the actual histories, including the biographical notices, or in the quasi-histories, as the parables. Thus, at the time of the Transfiguration there were seen by the disciples, avdpes dvo, two men, which were Moses and Elias, who appeared in glory.' (Luke ix. 30.) The event in question took place more than eighteen hundred years ago; the bodies, therefore, in which the patriarchs appeared, could not have been the resuscitated and trans formed material bodies which it is commonly supposed will be re-attached to the soul at the day of judgment, when the graves are opened, and the sea gives up her dead.' They must, nevertheless, have been real and substantial bodies, or they would not have been identified as Moses and Elias by spectators, who it is expressly stated, were awake.'* So in the parable of Lazarus and the rich man; the several actors are represented as being perfectly well known to one another, and as holding the perfect human form, implied in their possessing the customary corporeal organs. The time of this parable is laid, it will be remembered, as prior to the day of judgment,' and the resurrection of the body,' as popularly thought of, (suggesting, by the way, an enormous discrepancy between the popular notions and the doctrine of the parable,) the rich man's father and brethren being still alive upon the earth. Here again, therefore, there is no material body present; nothing but the soul; yet all the circumstances of the narrative imply bodies no less real, and no less truly organized and sensitive. What, then, is the inference to be drawn from these facts and divine teachings? Clearly this; that what is called popularly the soul' is what the Apostle terms the spiritual body; and that the latter is a substantial, organized form, exactly correspondent with the external, physical frame; that it possesses a precisely similar series of parts and features; and that when disengaged from it at death, it still holds intact both the human configuration, and every lineament on which personal identity depends, and by which individuals are recognized and distinguished from one another.

*The wonderful occurrence of Elijah being taken up into heaven by a chariot and horses of fire,' will be at once evident to the enlightened reader of the Word of God as not a literal, but a spiritual phenomenon. See Noble's Appeal, Section iii.