trine as a most ingenious discovery. But the hope of mental dissolution is an hope which agrees best with the inclinations of sensualists and reprobates. I know a man who comforts himself under a course of adultery in his old age with this persuasion, that when we are dead, we are all one as if we were dogs. He means, that we sink into a state of insensibility.

If this doctrine were examined by the light of Reason alone, it would be found repugnant to the most generally-received principles of human Philosophy *; and it is certainly inconsistent with Revelation. The Scripture hath taught us, that there are two different principles in the Christian, distinguished by the names of the outward man and the inward man; the latter of which may be increasing in vigour, while the former is hasting to its dissolution, 2 Cor. iv. 16. The inward principle is that which is born again in baptism; and, being born of God, is of a divine nature. Consequently, whatever may be said for or against the natural immortality of the soul, this principle cannot be subject to death in common with that nature which is born of the flesh.

The body is also described as the clothing of the Spirit; so that the soul is with respect to the body, what the body itself is with respect to the garment that is worn upon it: in conformity to which expression, death is described as the putting off of the body. Therefore, as the man, who puts off his clothes, doth not also throw off his body, and lay it aside with his clothes in a wardrobe; so neither doth the Christian at his death put off his spirit to sleep in the grave with his body. It is the dust only, the earthly part,

Hæc vero sive a meo sensu post mortem abfutura sunt, sive, ut sapientissimi homines putaverunt, ad aliquam animi mei partem pertinebunt, &c. Cic. pro Arch.

:

which returns to the earth, while the Spirit returns to God that gave it. If both are supposed to sink into death together, there will be no sense in that distinction-fear not them that can kill the body-because men in such a case are able to kill the soul just so far as they kill the body and as they both will rise at the resurrection, the soul will have no privilege left but what is common to the body; so that our Saviour's distinction, instead of being the source of any comfort, will have no meaning. The soul therefore is not dissolved with the body and that it may subsist in a state of separation from the body, and actually does so subsist after death, is plain from the words of St. Paul; who observes concerning himself, when he was caught up to the third heaven, that whether he was in the body or out of the body, he could not tell. But there could have been no possible doubt, unless he had been well assured, that the soul might be taken out of the body and still retain its sensibility. The same Apostle, in one of the most weighty and striking passages of the New Testament, places the spirits of just men made perfect amongst the other spiritual and invisible members of the heavenly Jerusalem or invisible Church; such as the living God, Jesus the Mediator, and the innumerable company of Angels. Commentators in general, without any view to this argument, understand the spirits here mentioned as the souls of good men separated from the body: and the word TETEλεwμɛvwv may well be rendered, who have finished or perfected the course of this life.

This Arabian Philosophy was therefore no part of St. Paul's religion: and God forbid that it should have been; for then the confident hope expressed by himself, in common with all the other ancient and modern martyrs of the Church, who died in the faith

of Christ, and under the assurance of being present with him after death *, would have been a delusion, like that of the Turks, who die fighting for their absurdities and blasphemies, in hope of an immediate translation to a sensual Paradise.

I have here said nothing concerning the appearance of Moses and Elias in an intermediate state of Glory at the Transfiguration of Christ: because this, and many other facts and expressions of the Scripture, will offer themselves to those who consider the subject more at large †.

Ditton, in his book on the Resurrection, hath an Appendix on Matter's thinking, wherein he argues very solidly against the Materialists, a sort of Philosophers, to whom the Arabianists are very nearly related; the death of the Soul together with that of the body being a necessary consequence of Materialism; and it doth not appear to be consistent with any other principle. The Anabaptists were sensible of this, who, to prove their notion, affirmed that God made every part of man of the dust of the Earth. Men have generally concluded that the Substance of the Soul must be spiritual because it thinks; and that it must be immortal because it is spiritual. So far as the Scripture is concerned, this Author pronounces all the Advocates for the Sleep of the Soul to be either Deists or Sceptics; for which reason he doth not argue with them as Christians, but as an eccentric

One Wishart, a good man, who suffered under Hen. VIII. had been charged with this heterodoxy, but affirmed it at the stake to be a slander, and that he was assured his Soul should be immediately with his Saviour. Collier's Eccl. Hist. vol. ii. p. 206.

+ See Bp. Bull's Sermon on Acts i. 25. and View of the Times, Vol. III. p. 250, &c. against Dr. Coward, who wrote largely on the mortality of the Soul, in 1707.

species of Philosophers: the matter, in his judgment, being too plain in the Scripture to admit of any dispute. Yet they who plead for this gloomy philosophy, are persuaded that nothing but the prejudice and bigotry of the age hinders it from being generally received: a persuasion as groundless as their philosophy itself.

Some Arabians are commonly supposed to have been the first amongst Christians who asserted the Soul's mortality: but it was certainly a member of that monstrous system, which came very early from the School of Valentine; because I find it very distinctly refuted by Irenæus, who has an excellent Chapter under this title-Resurrectio nobis promissa ad spiritus naturaliter immortales referri non debet, sed ad corpora ex se mortalia. Lib. v. c. 7

DISSERTATION III.

A

COMMENTARY

ON REV. XIV. 13.

IN WHICH THE NATURE OF DEATH IS FARTHER
CONSIDERED.

THE Power of Sin is too manifest from the universal corruption of the world; and the dominion of Death is the certain and visible effect of it.

These two articles made a great figure in the Religion of Heathenism; the ground of which (so far as it can be separated from Tradition) was little more than an experimental knowledge of Sin and Death.

In the primitive temptation, when the Devil moved us to eat of the forbidden fruit, he pronounced a knowledge of good and evil as a consequence of the act of disobedience.

As he was a Liar who made this promise, it is little to be wondered at, that one half of it hath fallen short. The knowledge of good (whether virtue or felicity be understood by it) is hidden from us: and the knowledge of evil, that is, of the evil of sin, and the evil of punishment, is all that is now left to us. Nothing is more common than for great Liars to make