44 MIND. 



tion to be " a mystery ." it must, in truth, be a miracle; and there- 

 fore the enquiry, " how can these things be," altogether fruitless. 

 The miracle of Christ's resurrection, to which the Scriptures refer 

 us as the foundation of the hope of a future state, would not have 

 been necessary to convince us of a necessary truth, discoverable 

 by sense and reason. That the promises of the New Testament 

 are the proper and only foundation of our hopes of immortality, 

 was the opinion of the late Regius Professor of Divinity in the 

 University of Cambridge, whose powerful intellect and sincere 

 love of truth render his opinions weightier than the decrees of 

 councils. " I have no hope of a future existence," says he, 

 " except that which is grounded on the truth of Christianity. "* 



x Anecdotes of the Life of Richard Watson, D.D. F.R.S. late Lord Bishop of 

 Llandaff. Vol. i. p. 107. See also a very decisive passage, beginning " As 

 a Deist, I have little expectation ; as a Christian I have no doubt, of a future 

 state," in his Apology for the Bible, Letter x. near the end. 



Bishop Jeremy Taylor, in his Doctrine of Original Sin, p. 24., assures us that 

 the words " Since by man came death, by man came also the resurrection from 

 the dead," and, " as in Adam all die, even so in Christ shall all be made alive," 

 directly affirm that a resurrection, or being made alive again, is granted, assured, 

 and executed by and in Christ alone ; and evidently suppose that the dead are not 

 made alive till the resurrection, and that, had not a resurrection been provided, 

 we should never, after death, have been made alive. 



Locke argues, " that all the great ends of religion and morality are secured 

 barely by the immortality of the soul, without a necessary supposition that it is 

 immaterial." First Reply, p. 34. 



Mr. Dugald Stewart concedes that " the proper use of the doctrine of the 

 immateriality of the soul is not to demonstrate that the soul is physically and 

 necessarily immortal." 1. c. p. 227. 



Dr. Rush, of America, remarks upon this subject, " that the writers in favour 

 of the immortality of the soul have done that truth great injury by connecting it 

 necessarily with its immateriality. The immortality of the soul depends upon the 

 will of the Deity, and not upon the supposed properties of spirit. Matter is in 

 its own nature as immortal as spirit. It is resolvable by heat and moisture into 

 a variety of forms ; but it requires the same almighty hand to annihilate it, that 

 it did to create it. I know of no arguments to prove the immortality of the soul 

 but such as we derive from the Christian revelation." Medical Inquiries and 

 Observations, vol. ii. p. 15. 



" I rather think," says Dr. Priestley, " that the whole of man is of some uni- 

 form composition, and that the property of perception, as well as the other 

 powers that are termed mental, is the result (whether necessary or not) of such 

 an organised structure as the brain. Consequently, that the whole man becomes 

 extinct at death, and that we have no hope of surviving the grave, but what is 

 derived from the scheme of revelation." First Introductory Essay to his Edition 

 of Hartley, p. xxiii. sq. 



