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to take a particular point, His eternity, He could have left man in entire 
ignorance of human spiritual being, so that man should have been left only 
to infer, or hope for, his own immortality; as correlative merely in his reason 
to his knowledge of God’s eternity. If we believe that man could have 
known God, as unquestionably in very remote times he did know Him, only 
by revelation, we must also believe that that revelation could only have been 
intelligible in reference to man’s own spiritual. constitution. A revelation 
of God as to His own nature and character seems, therefore, to imply a 
revelation as to man’s immortality. 
This, of course, is & priori: but as we trace our way through man’s religious 
history these convictions seem forced upon us. As we travel backwards we 
seem to reach a time, when we have escaped and left behind us such strange 
doctrines as that of metempsychosis, the Buddhist idea of an immortal 
Karma in place of an immortal identity of person, and other, surely mani- 
fest, perversions of original truth, until we find a simple belief in man’s 
immortality, as for instance in the Rig-Veda, and other ancient records, 
some of which I have quoted. We are forced to the conclusion that man 
began his religious history with many broad and true principles, as broad 
und true in many respects as the principles that we bow to now, and amongst 
them the immortality of the soul. We conclude that man must have begun 
well, from whatever cause. It is significant too that we can trace not a 
few of these primitive truths, and with them the doctrine of the immortality 
of the soul itself, through their subsequent decay and degradation under the 
manipulation of man’s (so-called) philosophy. This alone would seem to 
stamp them with a noble origin. If that origin was in human nature, and 
not above it, then human nature has philosophised away many of its own 
grandest thoughts. It may no doubt be so, for men have destroyed the noble 
works of their ancestors many times in the world’s history. But the doctrine 
of the immortality of the soul seems to claim an origin above man’s mere 
intuition or reason. And I am the more confirmed in this view by the 
words of Moses. If we take the Pentateuch only asa very early expression of 
religious belief (and most will concede that it is at least that), we are at a loss 
to understand the intention of the writer in his description of the commission 
to Adam in the garden of Eden, and the nature of the doom pronounced 
upon him—we cannot connect together the “image of God,” the “tree of 
life,” the “living for ever,” the death described as being the “ return” of the 
body only “to the ground,” except on the supposition of at least the writer’s 
belief in the intrinsic immortality of man’s soul. And, if the words describe 
the actual facts of an intercourse between God and the first man, the words 
addressed to that man could only have been intelligible to him, surely, in 
proportion to his apprehension of the nature of his own spiritual constitution, 
and its prospects. He must very early in his own history either have con- 
cluded from his own reason that his soul was immortal, a result implying in 
him already an intellectual perception which many of his descendants might 
not be capable of sharing ; or he must have received that knowledge as part 
of God’s revelation to him. If, as I believe, the latter be the true suppo- 
