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REV. A. E. WHATELY, D.D., ON IMMORTALITY. 



For all this, I believe a false psychology to be largely responsible. 

 "Theology," save the mark, has made the natural man a spiritual 

 and moral image of his Maker, by the "breath of lives"; but a 

 careful study of Genesis iii, i Cor. xi, 7, and of I John iii, 9, and 

 V, 18, must cause us to reject this idea, and to hold that the male 

 bodily shape and corresponding mental faculties of man {homo 

 sapiens) are what constitute his likeness to Deity. 



After showing great mental talent in naming the animals, the 

 first things that we hear of Adam, when he has a mate of his own 

 kind, are moral weakness and disobedience, two witnesses that the 

 '* breath of lives " was not God's own Spirit. 



I believe that the anti-scriptural idea of never-ending torment has 

 taken away men's minds from the revelation of a glorious and never- 

 ending, because a Divine, life. But for this false notion, which has 

 debased the motives for preaching the Gospel from Divine to 

 Humanitarian, viz., the baling " immortal souls " out of an endless 

 hell, Immortality, with all the glory and blessing which Scripture 

 connects with it, would probably have laid a much greater hold on 

 Christian minds, and caused them to proclaim a more scriptural 

 gospel than has generally been the case since the second century 

 A.D., when the heresy of natural immortality appears to have first 

 crept into the professing Church. 



Kev. J. J. B. Coles said : " God, Man, and the Universe " are 

 ultimate terms for Philosophy, Science, and Eeligion — but when 

 we consider the union of God and man in the Person of the Lord 

 Jesus Christ, and see how inscrutable a subject we have before us, 

 when we speak of Him as an individual man — we see that the 

 Metaphysics and Psychology of Holy Scripture must necessarily 

 transcend that of all merely human systems of Philosophy. 



The Bible deals with both Oriental and Western processes of 

 thought. Take the question of personality. 



The " Whosoever " of the Pauline Epistles is an individual 

 doubtless, but not the " unique existence " of the Scottish 

 philosopher, which is " perfectly impervious to other selves " — such 

 is not the individual of the New Testament, for the words of 

 John xvii, 23 — "I in them and Thou in Me that they may be 

 made perfect in One " — sets aside the exclusively Western idea of 

 " impervious spiritual atoms," as being contrary to Christianity and 

 psychologically false. 



