Uriah Smith

“ We look abroad upon the earth and admire its multiplied forms of life and beauty; we mark the revolving seasons and the uniform and beneficent operations of nature; we look to the heavenly bodies and behold their glory, and the regularity of their mighty motions--do these answer our questions? They tell us something, but not all. They tell us of the great Creator and upholder of all things; for, as the apostle says, “The invisible things of him from the creation of the world are clearly seen, being understood by the things that are made, even his eternal power and Godhead.” ”

“ Is it not rather when the spirit of a man through the eyes of that man looks upon us, through his mouth speaks to us, and through his hands handles us? Outside the hell-doomed hosts of spiritualists, will any one say that we enjoy more intimate relations with a spirit when it is out of the body than we do while it is in the body? A consideration of this point must convince any one that the idea of coming to the spirits of just men made perfect cannot possibly be applied to spirits out of the body. ”

“ Faith in immortality may enlarge and intensify the motives to prudent and noble conduct; it does not create new ones. The denial of immortality may pale and contract those motives; it does not take them away.
“Knowing the burden and sorrow of earth, brooding in dim solicitude over the far times and men yet to be, we cannot recklessly utter a word calculated to lessen the hopes of man, pathetic creature, who weeps into the world and faints out of it. It is our faith--not knowledge--that the spirit is without terminus or rest. ”

“ The important inquiry now arises respecting the popular view, If the real being, the intelligent, responsible entity, ceases not its life and consciousness at death, but continues on in a more enlarged and perfect sphere of existence and activity, what need is there of the resurrection of the body? If the body is but a trammel, a clog to the operations of the soul, what need that it should come back and gather up its scattered particles from the silent tomb, and re-fetter itself with this material robe? ”

“ Every man knows by experience that there are a multitude of powerful motives, entirely disconnected with future reward or punishment, causing him to resist evil and to do good even with self-sacrificing toil and danger. When the fireman risks his life to save a child from the flames of a tumbling house, is the hope of Heaven his motive? When the soldier spurns an offered bribe and will not betray his comrades nor desert his post, is the fear of hell all that animates him? ”

“ Let the theory of annihilation assume its direst phase, still, our perception of principles, our consciousness of sentiments, our sense of moral loyalty, are not dissolved, but will hold us firmly to every noble duty until we ourselves flow into the dissolving abyss. But some one may say, ‘If I have fought with beasts at Ephesus, what advantageth it me if the dead rise not?’ It advantageth you everything until you are dead, although there be nothing afterwards. As long as you live is it not glory and reward enough to have conquered the beasts at Ephesus? ”

“ The hypothetical fact that man perishes with his body does not destroy God, does not destroy man’s dependence on God for all his privileges, does not annihilate the overwhelming magnificence of the universe, does not alter the native sovereignty of holiness, does not quench our living reason, imagination, or sensibility, while they last. The soul’s gratitude, wonder, love, and worship, are just as right and instinctive as before. ”

“ Chateaubriand says bluntly, ‘There can be no morality if there be no future state.’ With displeasing coarseness, and with most reprehensible recklessness of reasoning, Luther says, in contradiction to the essential nobleness of his loving, heroic nature, ‘If you believe in no future life, I would not give a mushroom for your God. Do, then, as you like. For if no God, so no devil, no hell: as with a fallen tree, all is over when you die. ”

“ The soul. At death, the body, that part which is mortal, does not become immortal, but loses all its life, and goes into the grave to crumble back to dust. And the soul, which was immortal before, is no more than immortal afterward. Is there any swallowing up of mortality by life here? Just the reverse. Mortality, or the mortal part, is swallowed up by death. There is not so much life afterward as before; for after death, the soul only lives, while the body, which was alive before, is now dead. ”

“ The day shuts down in darkness, but is not forever lost; the morn returns again, and the bright sun comes forth rejoicing as a strong man to run a race. Nature is bound, cold and lifeless, in the icy chains of winter; but it is not lost in absolute death. Anon the spring approaches, and at its animating voice and warm breath, the pulse of life beats again through all her works; her cold cheek kindles with the glow of fresh vitality ”

“ It is not that they have to choose between annihilation or eternal torture. Had they this privilege, some might perhaps choose the former; others would not. But the cause of their woe is not that they are to receive a certain kind of punishment when they would prefer another, but because they have lost the life and blessedness which they now behold in possession of the righteous. The only conditions between which they can draw their cheerless comparisons are, the blessed and happy state of the righteous within the city of God, and their own hapless lot outside of its walls. ”

“ Life and death are set before you. The Saviour bids you look unto him and live. Mercy entreats you to destroy not yourself. The spirit and the bride bid you come and partake of the water of life freely.
You can no longer take refuge from an awakened conscience under the idea that the threatenings of the Lord are not understood, and may not therefore be so terrific as supposed. The sinner’s doom is unmistakably declared; and in the justness of that sentence, however slightly you may now realize the heinousness and just desert of sin, your own reason can but heartily concur. ”

“ Says Massillon, in his famous declamation on immortality, ‘If we wholly perish with the body, the maxims of charity, patience, justice, honor, gratitude, and friendship, are but empty words. Our own passions shall decide our duty. If retribution terminate with the grave, morality is a mere chimera, a bugbear of human invention.’ What debauched unbeliever ever inculcated a viler or a more fatal doctrine? ”

“ Chalmers utters an injurious error in saying as he does, ‘If there be no future life, the moral constitution of man is stripped of its significancy, and the Author of that constitution is stripped of his wisdom, and authority and honor.’ The creative Sovereign of fifty million firmaments of worlds, ‘stripped of his wisdom and authority and honor,’ because a few insects on a little speck are not eternal! Can egotistic folly any further go? The affirmation or denial of immortality neither adds to nor diminishes the numerical relations and ingredients of our nature and experience. ”

“ A superadded, independent soul could not have been put into man, and be said to have become that soul. Yet it is said of Adam, that he, on receiving the breath of life, became a living soul. An engine is put into a ship, and by its power propels it over the face of the deep; but the ship, by receiving the engine, does not become the engine, nor the engine the ship. No sophistry, even from the darkest depths of its alchemy, can bring up and attach to the word “become” a definition which will make it mean, as applied to any body, the addition of a distinct and separate organization to that body. ”

“ Is an eternity of torture so intense that the severest pain a person can suffer on earth is but a faint shadow of it, any just punishment for any conceivable amount of sin committed by the worst of men, during the brief period of our mortal life? ”

“ Ere you reach the delusive phantom, the earth may suddenly open beneath your feet, and Hades receive you to its fixed embrace. Ere you overtake the beckoning form, ere the good intention be carried out, ere you grasp the prize now held only by the uncertain tenure of good resolve, the glory of the coming Judge, descending through the parting and dissolving heavens, may suddenly burst upon your unprepared soul. ”

“ Meanwhile it is clear that, while he lives here, the best thing he can do is to cherish a devout spirit, cultivate a noble character, lead a pure and useful life in the service of wisdom, humanity, and God, and finally, when the appointed time arrives, meet the issue with reverential and affectionate conformity, without dictating terms. Let the vanishing man say, like Ruckert’s dying flower, ‘Thanks to-day for all the favors I have received from sun and stream and earth and sky,--for all the gifts from men and God which have made my little life an ornament and a bliss. ”

“ Though our days be fourscore years, yet is their strength labor and sorrow; for it is soon cut off, and we sink away, go to the grave, and are wrapped in the darkness of death. Viewed thus, David’s language is consistent, and his reasoning harmonious; but his language we pervert and his logic we destroy, the moment we try to make his words prove the separation from the body, of a conscious soul at death. ”

“ The torments of hell will not be in one part only, but in every part, not in a weaker degree, but in the greatest extremity; not for a day, or a month, or a year, but forever: the wicked will be always dying, never dead; the pangs of death will ever be upon them, and yet they shall never give up the ghost; if they could die they would think themselves happy; they will always be roaring, and never breathe out their last; always sinking, and never come to the bottom ”

“ The vital point, to which they bend all their energies, is somehow to show that a distinct entity, an intelligent part, an immortal soul, was brought near to that body as it lay there perfect in its organization, and thrust therein, which immediately began through the eyes of that body to see, through its ears to hear, through its lips to speak, and through its nerves to feel. ”

“ The true restraint from wrong and degradation is not a crouching conscience of superstition and selfishness, fancying a chasm of fire, but a high-toned conscience of reason and honor, perceiving that they are wrong and degradation, and spontaneously loathing them.
“Still worse, many esteemed authors have not hesitated to assert that unless there be a future life there is not only no check on passion within, but no moral law without: every man is free to do what he pleases, without blame or fault. ”

“ THE LIVING SOUL. Finding no immortality for man in the breath of life which God breathed into man’s nostrils at the commencement of his mysterious existence, it remains to inquire if it resides in the “living soul,” which man, as the result of that action, immediately became. “And the Lord God formed man of the dust of the ground, and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life, and man became a living soul.” ”

“ And if an argument may be based on the capacities of some, may not an equal and opposite argument be based on the incapacity of others? 332and in this case on which side would the weight of evidence lie? And as there is almost every conceivable gradation of intelligence, who will tell us whereabouts in this scale the infinite endowment of immortality is first perceptible? Looking at the human race, and the races immediately below, we behold a point where they seem to blend indistinguishably into each other. Will an utter lack of capacity be affirmed of the higher orders of the brute creation? ”

“ Life, what a mystery! Having commenced, will it ever end? Once we did not exist; are we destined to that condition again? Death we see 6everywhere around us. Its victims are silent, cold, and still. They give no outward evidence of retaining any of those faculties, mental, emotional, or physical, which distinguished them when living. Is death the end of all these? And is death the extinction of the race? These are questions which have ever excited in the human mind an intensity of thought, and a strength of feeling, which no other subjects can produce. ”

“ So with the dead. They are not aware of the lapse of a moment of time between their death and the resurrection. A wink of the eye shuts out for an instant the sight of all objects, but it is so instantaneous that we do not perceive any interruption of the rays of vision. Six thousand years in the grave to a dead man is no more than a wink of the eye to the living. To them, consciousness, our only means of measuring time, is gone ”

“ The phrase, ‘breath of life,’ is rendered breath of lives by all Hebrew scholars. Not only did animal life then begin, but another and higher life which constituted him not only a mere animal, but a ‘living soul.’ He was a body before,--he is now more than a body, a soul and body united. If he was a ‘soul’ before, then how could he become such by the last act of creation? ”

“ Now if David’s soul did live right on in consciousness; if it was not left in hades, no man can show that David, in that psalm, did not speak of himself instead of Christ; and then Peter’s argument for the resurrection of Christ would be entirely destroyed. But Peter, especially when speaking as he was on this occasion under the influence of the Holy Ghost, knew how to reason; and his argument entirely destroys the dogma of the immortality of the soul. But if David has not yet ascended into the Heavens, how is he ever to get there? There is no other way but by a resurrection of the dead. ”

“ And finally, Paul forever bars his teaching against the entrance of the conscious state dogma, by saying that when we are clothed upon with our house from Heaven, mortality is swallowed up of life. How can mortality be swallowed up of life? It can be only by having a principle of life come upon it which shall overpower and absorb it. Mortality can be swallowed up only by immortality or eternal life. Is this the passing of the soul from the mortal body at the hour of death? Let us look at it. What is there about man, according to the common view, which is mortal? The body. ”

“ It is for the sins done by human beings in the body, in this present life, not for what they will commit as lost spirits in hell, that they are to answer at the judgment seat of Christ, and for which they are to receive a just retribution. And if everlasting misery is thought to be too much for this, we are not at liberty to throw in post-mortem sins to balance the excessive punishment. If eternal torment cannot be defended as a just punishment for the sins of this present life, it cannot be defended at all. ”

“ The light of nature can never scatter the darkness in question. This light has never yet sufficed to make the question clear to any portion of our benighted race, whether the soul is immortal. Cicero, incomparably the most able defender of the soul’s immortality of which the heathen world can yet boast, very ingenuously confesses that, after all the arguments which he had adduced in order to confirm the doctrine in question, it so fell out that his mind was satisfied of it only when directly employed in contemplating the arguments adduced in its favor. ”