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CHAPTER XIV.

INTERMEDIATE STATE.

DISCOURSING upon the end of life, the wise preacher said, "Then shall the dust return to the earth as it was, and the spirit shall return unto God who gave it."* Two solemn facts are here announced-the return of our mortal bodies to their kindred earth, and of our immortal spirits to God. The former is that great debt, which all who live must pay. The strong men must bow themselves, and all the daughters of music must be brought low. The silver chord of life, which held together, as in wedlock-bands, the spirit and the body, must be loosed; the golden bowl, filled with earth's choicest dainties, must be broken,-the pitcher at the fountain, about to bear a refreshing draught to the parched lips, shall be suddenly dashed ; the light of the eyes shall be quenched, desires shall fail, and the icy hand of death embrace the quivering frame. Man goeth to his long home, and the mourners go about the streets. But is this all? The Scrip

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* Eccl. xii. 7.

tures assure us not. While the dust returns to the earth, the spirit returns to God to give up its account.

We are now to speak of the INTERMEDIATE STATE between death and the resurrection.

An opinion has extensively obtained, that between death and the resurrection the soul has no conscious existence. Are we then to believe, as we look upon the solemn and placid face of the corpse, after the death-struggle is over, that the intelligent spirit, which a moment before communed with us, has ceased to act, or is locked up in that frozen form, to descend with it to the grave?

The advocates of this opinion are divided between two theories; the one, that the soul is a vapory, aerial, or fluid substance, pertaining to the body, and dependent on its physical organization. This is the theory of materialism. The other theory is, that the soul is a separate existence from the body, but falls asleep at death, to wake not till the resurrection. They amount to the same thing-the annihilation of conscious existence.

Others

This opinion has obtained extensive currency. It was maintained by the celebrated Dr. Priestly, the champion of liberal Christianity, and is still advocated by his followers of various names and sects. have no settled opinion on the subject;-and others still, who are convinced of the truth in their own minds, think that our condition between death and the resurrection is so trifling an affair, compared with eternity, as to be hardly worth contending for. Hence

it is that ministers have so seldom preached on this subject.

Grant that the period between death and the resurrection will seem as nothing to the righteous, when they awake from their oblivious sleep ;-it is on the living, not the dead, that God's revelation was designed to act. And what living man can persuade himself, that it is of little consequence whether Noah, Abraham, Lot, and Moses, have been for three or four thousand years in the glories of heaven, or in a state of annihilation? And all our friends who have died in the Lord, together with the millions of millions of his people who have finished their course on earth, can it be a matter of indifference with us whether they are now in a state of annihilation, or are glorifying and enjoying God in that brighter world? And with whom can it be a matter of small moment, whether he is himself to be, in a few days, in the world of retributions, or as though he had never been? What dying Christian can have the stoicism to consider it all one, whether he is going directly to see his Redeemer, and live with him, or to be petrified for unknown ages in the marble slumbers of the grave? On the dying vision of Stephen a dawn of the heavenly glory beamed: and is it of little importance whether the curtain of death intercepted it, and laid an oblivious night of ages on his soul, or whether his blest eyes are now drinking in the light of heaven and his spirit ranging its happy fields?

We wish to know, when death shall come to stare us in the face, and lay on us his icy fingers, what he

is commissioned to do with us ;-whether to hand us over to the warm embrace of our Saviour, and the sweet fellowship of angel-spirits, or consign our panting spirits for unknown ages to the horrible gloom of annihilation.

Let us see then what light the Scriptures shed on this subject.

The position which I am to demonstrate is thisThat between death and the resurrection the souls of men, disembodied, are in a state of living, active, conscious existence, enjoying or enduring the retributions of eternity.

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All but atheists admit that there is a God, who is himself a pure Spirit. He is independent of all material organization. He created celestial spirits, like himself, which the Scriptures call angels. Not that angel-spirits are, like God, independent. They live not by underived strength, they shine not with unborrowed lustre. In this respect, God, the infinite Spirit, is unlike all created spirits. While he receives aid from none, all the worlds of matter and of mind hang on his omnipotent will;—while all created lights are too feeble to reach him, he throws, like the sun, the beams of his throne over the universe.

But that he has peopled the heavenly worlds with a race of spirits, like himself in respect to independency of material organizations, is a plain matter of revelation. Evidently he could then, if he chose, create another order of spirits, and place them in connection with material bodies. This is what we believe he has done. Man considered as an animal, and man consid

ered as a rational soul, is of two natures,―the one he holds in common with the brute creation, the other, with the angelic tribes. Although they are here, for purposes of probation, placed in connection, yet the existence of the one does not depend upon that of the other. It is certain that God can create a living body, and endow it with all the properties of intelligent animal life, without placing it in connection with an immortal soul. This he has done in the case of the brute creation. It is equally certain that he can create an immortal spirit, and endow it with all the properties of intelligent spiritual life, without placing it in connection with a mortal body. This he has done in the case of the angelic creation. Now man upon earth is a complex being, partaking of both the mortality of the animal, and the immortality of the angel.

Animal life can exist only under some organized form; but spiritual life can exist in the highest degree of intensity, as in God, independently of all material forms. On awaking from profound sleep, or a state of suspended animation, the soul often makes no report of the interval, because its communication with the present organized mode of existence has been intercepted ;-at other times, however, this communication is allowed to go on, and then the soul brings back the most thrilling reports of its visions of bliss or of wo. Indeed the highest activities of the soul ever known, have been in the feeblest states of the body, and even when the body was apparently dead. The brightest light ever poured on the mental eye, the richest melodies that ever charmed the ear, have been enjoyed

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