Immortal soul

“ What has time to do with our immortal soul? and if the soul be immortal, will not the best part of our life, our love, all that we have striven, and yearned for be purified and increased, and remain ours for ever. ”

“ In the bowels of love and mercy, let me beg thee to ask thy soul this question, How long will this life and the comforts of it last? Thy soul is immortal, and must never die, but it must have a being somewhere to all eternity. ”

“ But God bestowed upon us an immortal soul, to watch as a guardian angel over the body, and placed it in the loftiest part of our frame, to teach us to look upward, and remember our birth,—that men are not creatures of clay but children of God and heirs of immortality. ”

“ We watched the women, drank a great deal, and conversed on the immortality of the soul.
“It’s foolish,” said one of my comrades who was older than I, “it’s foolish to believe that it would be a blessing to have an immortal soul. Look at that old harridan dancing there, whose head and hands tremble if she stays still a moment. One sees directly that she is wicked and ugly and entirely worthless, and that she’s getting more and more so every day. How ridiculous it would be to imagine that she had an immortal soul! ”

“ Swept on and up in ecstasy, perception becoming ever clearer, he beheld the so-called soul-self of man unravelled into its component parts and laid before him like the unwoven threads of a garment, and behold in these was no durability nor immortality, for there is but one Immortal, one Infinite, and the man who claims his own, his separate immortality, is dying and reborn through the ages and but the fierce desire of life gives him its simulacrum and the long-linked chain of births and deaths and griefs immeasurable. ”

“ The grave is their house, and so must be till the trumpet shall sound, and the heavens pass away like a scroll. Now, I say, the immortality of the soul shows the greatness of it, as the eternity of God shows the greatness of God. It cannot be said of any angel but that he is immortal, and so it is, and ought to be said of the soul. ”

“ And yet the Lord takes more thought for the immortal soul than for the body,—the soul which, if it once gains clear sight, according to him who says, Open thou mine eyes shall never again be blinded, and once cured shall never have wrecked health. ”

“ But here's the thing I could never get out of the way—and if I only could! If my soul is immortal, why did it have a beginning? If I'm to know eternal life, why don't I reach out to infinity behind as well as before? How can a thing be immortal that has its moment of birth? ”

“ First of all, because, be it gentle or simple, the same great Creator breathed into it the breath of life, that gave me 'life and breath and all things.' An immortal soul is God's trust to those who have to train it, or help in nursing it for Him. ”

“ The final destiny of an immortal soul, after its transition into the other world, must be either unending progress towards infinite perfection, or the reaching of its perihelion at last and then revolving in uninterrupted fruition. ”

“ Yes, and that it was immortal, too! You see a body, and therefore you believe in it. You see that it is mortal and therefore you believe in its mortality. You do not see the soul--therefore you believe in one? ”

“ But do you not think this should strengthen one’s faith in the soul’s immortality? Are we not spirits living in material bodies? And when the material body dies, if our spirits are immortal, why should not they seek to manifest themselves to their friends on earth? ”

“ But in those skyey spaces what dread change!
⁠Thus have we seen the mortal turn immortal;
⁠So doth the day's soul die, as through death's portal
The soul of man takes up its heavenward range.
⁠A million orbs endue
⁠The unfathomable blue—
Till, the long miracle of night withdrawn,
The world beholds once more the miracle of dawn. ”

“ Upon such a tissue of absurdities is built the marvellous opinion of the immortality of the soul. If I ask, what are the motives for believing the soul immortal, they immediately answer, that it is because man naturally desires to be immortal: but, because you desire a thing ardently, can you infer that your desire will be fulfilled? By what strange logic can we dare affirm, that a thing cannot fail to happen, because we ardently desire it? Are desires, begotten by the imagination, the measure of reality? ”

“ Can parts, be they two or many more, ever be unmixedly what the whole is? There is immortality, then, yet nothing, not the body nor the soul, is wholly or selfishly immortal. Reflect, to take an illustration from the practice, if not from the conscious thinking of men, how through the centuries of the dualistic view of human nature, the saving, or the losing, of the separate soul has been a keen human interest, and how the separate body, living, has been neglected and despised, and, dead, has been cherished and honoured. ”

“ They believe the soul to be both immaterial and immortal. They say that it keeps fluttering about the lips during the pangs of death; and that then it ascends and mixes with, or, as they express it, is eaten by the deity. ”

“ I am dreaming ...? Let me dream, if this dream is my life. Do not awaken me from it. I believe in the immortal origin of this yearning for immortality, which is the very substance of my soul. But do I really believe in it ...? And wherefore do you want to be immortal? you ask me, wherefore? Frankly, I do not understand the question, for it is to ask the reason of the reason, the end of the end, the principle of the principle. ”

“ DOES NATURE TEACH THE IMMORTALITY OF THE SOUL?
We behold man a living, breathing, thinking creature, possessed of what we call the five senses--seeing, hearing, feeling, smelling and tasting. Viewing him as we see him in the exercise of his various functions, forbidding the play of imagination, and excluding the influence of theological training, do we find anything in him that may be set down as proof that he is possessed of an immortal, or immaterial soul? ”

“ Of course, a man bent upon holding to the doctrine of the soul’s immortality will continue to see in the return of the child’s soul the return of an immortal entity. But let us ask such an one, Do you find the word immortal prefixed to soul here? Since you do not why will you add it? Which is the child, the body or the soul? ”

“ Answer, if thou canst, or rather question thy heart, and thou wilt believe.
Secondly. If all die with the body, who has been able to persuade all men, of every age, and of every country, that their soul was immortal? From whence has this strange idea of immortality descended to the human race? How could an opinion, so distant from the nature of man, were he born only for the functions of the senses, have pervaded the earth? ”

“ With these facts before you, that man is mortal, and that the soul and spirit of man are never spoken in the Scriptures as immortal, we may now ask you to listen to the use of the word immortal, so that you may more fully see that immortality is in no sense man's present possession, and that therefore "immortal soul" and "immortal spirit" are invented phrases--not scriptural. ”

“ The immortal soul has its special abode in the head, which is both united to and separated from the trunk by the neck. The gods kept the two mortal [Pg 54] souls separate, so that the rational or immortal soul might be defiled by the contact as little as possible. ”

“ Still, again, there is immortality, and an infinitely hospitable immortality, which the hand and the whole body and the soul, be it yours or be it mine, all have a place and a part in. There is immortality, and, besides those things that were just named, divinity is also immortal. But even a God dies, this being just one of the things that make him God. Any man, then, or any being, or any thing, may say, "I am immortal." ”

“ As set forth in the various Scriptures we have given, when the word is used otherwise than of the person or being, it is always employed to express the variety of aspects in which a living being can be contemplated, such as life, individuality, mind, disposition, breath, etc.; but it never expresses the idea of immortality, and is never used in the popular form, "immortal soul." ”

“ We want to know if this soul, or spirit, is immortal. The Hebrew and Greek words from which they are translated, occur in the Bible, as we have seen, seventeen hundred times. Surely, once at least in that long list we shall be told that the soul is immortal, if this is its high prerogative. Seventeen hundred times we inquire if the soul is once said to be immortal, or the spirit deathless. And the invariable and overwhelming response we meet is, Not Once! Nowhere, though used so many hundred times, is the soul said to be undying in its nature, or the spirit deathless. ”

“ To many, the reasoning of the 'Spiritualists,' like that of the ancient, amounts to "It is quite possible that human beings are immortal;" and that is all. Many a man and woman are dying daily deaths from the fearful doubts that constantly arise as to the truth of the Immortality of the Soul ”

“ The soul, according to Chuang Tzŭ, if duly nourished and not allowed to wear itself out with the body in the pursuits of mortality, may become immortal and return beatified to the Great Unknown whence it came. ”

“ Only by losing the false sense of Soul can we gain the eternal unfolding of Life as immortality brought to light.
XX. Mind is the divine Principle, Love, and can produce nothing unlike the eternal Father-Mother, God. The one divine Mind Reality is spiritual, harmonious, immutable, immortal, divine, eternal. Nothing unspiritual can be real, harmonious, or eternal. ”

“ In the spirit's perfect air, In the passions tame and kind, Innocence from selfish care, The real Eden we shall find.
When the soul to sin hath died, True and beautiful and sound, Then all earth is sanctified, Upsprings paradise around.
From the spirit-land, afar All disturbing force shall flee; Stir, nor toil, nor hope shall mar Its immortal unity." [N] "'Tis well known that according to the sense of antiquity, these two considerations were always included in that one opinion of the soul's immortality—namely ”

“ Not to the curious or impatient soul
That in the start, demands the end be shown,
And at each step, stops waiting for a sign;
But to the tireless toiler toward the goal,
Shall the great miracles of God be known
And life revealed, immortal and divine. ”

“ Are you not aware, I said, that the soul of man is immortal and imperishable? ”

“ To those who Dream of Immortality.—So you desire the everlasting perpetuity of this beautiful consciousness of yourselves? Is it not [pg 225] shameful? Do you forget all those other things which would in their turn have to support you for all eternity, just as they have borne with you up to the present with more than Christian patience? Or do you think that you can inspire them with an eternally pleasant feeling towards yourself? A single immortal man on earth would imbue everyone around him with such a disgust for him that a general epidemic of murder and suicide would be brought about. ”

“ But what he spoke to him of immortality we need not here repeat, for the while he spoke out of the romantic eloquence of his heart, his matter-of-fact mind kept incorrigibly whispering to him that immortality is the theory that life is a rough ocean voyage and the soul a club breakfast. ”

“ How can the spirit of man, deprived of virtue, cognition, will, personality and life, remain immortal? Still more, how can he enjoy such immortality? The dim feeling of such eternal rest we all can understand, who have gone suddenly from a lighted room into the vast night, and have felt our souls suddenly invaded and possessed by a sense of mystery and silence. We have felt this; but in his final beatitude the Mystic must not feel: “He must be as one dead.” ”

“ And when he came to die, he gave this reason of his belief of immortality; "I cannot," said he, "persuade myself to think that the soul of man, after having sustained itself in a mortal body, should perish when delivered out of it, for want of it;" ”

“ Strong as the death it masters, is the hope
That onward looks to immortality:
Let the frame perish, so the soul survive,
Pure, spiritual, and loving. I believe
The grave exalts, not separates, the ties
That hold us in affection to our kind. ”

“ And as this fulfilment is uncertain, how can it be known that my divine is not really human, my human really divine?
Not until death lifts the veil can we truly know that this life is bounded at each end by an immortality to which the soul finally reverts. ”

“ Can it be? to live for ever! I have heard of enchantments, in which the victims were plunged into a deep sleep, to wake, after a hundred years, as fresh as ever: I have heard of the Seven Sleepers--thus to be immortal would not be so burthensome: but, oh! ”

“ It was the light of life and the vision of immortality bursting in upon the empire of death; elevating my soul above the desolation around me, to look for the Saviour, the Lord Jesus Christ, "who shall change our vile body, that it may be fashioned like unto his glorious body, according to the working whereby he is able even to subdue all things unto himself." ”

“ And how much more grand, how much more sublime, becomes the prospect of gain, if we reflect that, to each life thus called forth, there is a soul, a destiny beyond the grave, multiplied immortalities! ”

“ Once more, in the haunts of earth, thy soul charms me to thy side. Wiser now, in the moment when thou comprehendest Death, than when thy unfettered spirit learned the solemn mystery of Life; the human affections that thralled and humbled thee awhile bring to thee, in these last hours of thy mortality, the sublimest heritage of thy race,—the eternity that commences from the grave. ”

“ That blessing of a heavenly immortality, freely given by God, is nothing else but a celestial holiness, purity and perfection brought forth in the soul, by its having the eternal WORD and SPIRIT of God again restored to, and united with it: called immortality, not because of its eternal duration, but because eternally free from all that, which is death, or the deadly evil of sin in the soul; called also so, in opposition to that natural immortality of devils, and damned souls, which tho’ never ceasing, is only an eternal death. ”