AND SOUL ARE CO-ETERNAL. 17 we are at liberty to adopt it till a better one be suggested. It is certainly better than the senseless one that all came by chance, and that planets always describe equal areas in equal times by an accident. But that God is eternal, both in reality and in expression, is a very different thing from believing in the God of the Jewish dispensation or of the Christian theology. God, as we use the term, is the soul of which all souls are the offspring. These souls may be ancient Philistines, the "heathen Chinee," Jesus of Nazareth, all animals, the devil himself if such there be, the lichen on the rock, Jack the Ripper, and Mrs. Browning. These all have lived, live now, will live, spiritually, if not on this material planet; their life comes out from infinite life, and each and all are its offspring. Their outside form, their material expression, whether palpable to our present gross physical senses, with all worldsgaseous, in full development, or in decay-dazzling Mercury or distant Alcyone, wing of seraph or Yorick's skull, are all a part of the expression of infinite soul, or, in other words, a part of the body of God. "To this, no high, no low, no great, no small; Pope will pardon us for changing "he" to "it" in his admirable lines. From his present outlook he sees the absurdity of attributing sex to infinite soul, in which all fatherhood, all motherhood, and all products, are equally enclosed. The soul of the universe is not a being, subject to the passions of a man endowed with super human power, like the Greek Zeus. It is not a jealous, partial, vindictive conception, like the God who led the Jews into 18 PAUL AND THE ATHENIANS. Canaan. Nor is it a being unchangeable in cruelty, in whom a false notion of justice has usurped the feelings. of parentage, whose early mistakes in creation are to be atoned for in the blood of his son, like the God of Calvinism. It is rather the Deity whose conception came to Paul, when, with a larger outlook than was his wont, he stood on Mars' Hill, and told the eager minded Greeks that in him we live and move and have our being. Moved by the occasion, he departed from Jewish exclusiveness, and quoted from their own Aratus the expression, "For we are also his offspring." In this oration to Athenians he has not one word to say of blood atonement, but he appeals to the nobility of their natures quite in the spirit of Plato and Socrates. It was only when he spoke of rising from the dead that Greek skepticism arose. That the same body that had been dead should again walk and talk was against all the analogies of nature, and not to be accepted by an intelligent Greek. All souls, they doubted not, came from God, but that dead mens' bodies live again they found absurd. "So Paul departed from among them." When life, or soul, which is expressed in spirit life by the spiritual or psychic body, wholly leaves a physical body, as it did that of Jesus when the spear pierced his heart, it can never again take possession of it. The laws of nature are never broken, least of all by their author, and there is therefore no miracle. What seems miraculous to an ignorant age is seen to accord with nature's laws in an age more conversant with them. Had Paul told the subtle, intelligent Greeks what he wrote to the Corinthians some five years later, about the spirit body and the physical body as existing together in a human being. LIFE HERE AND THERE MUST COHERE. 19 they would have listened to what would have appealed to their inquisitive nature. Instead, he brought forward the Jewish materialistic notion that it was the physical body of Jesus that was seen after the resurrection, and his listeners rejected it as an absurdity, which it is. Had Paul followed his statement of the co-existence of these two bodies in Jesus, as well as in every human being, to its legitimate conclusion, he would have had less to say of the physical body and blood of Christ, and the church might not have sunk into the materialism of the Dark Ages. Man is in a physical body, amid physical conditions, under nature's laws. When a priesthood tells him of his soul, and describes spirit existence in a heaven or a hell, no longer under nature's laws, he does one of two things: he accepts with docility the supernatural, the miraculous, and a condition wholly freed from the physical, or he openly or secretly doubts the truth of what he is taught. There is no sincere middle ground between blind submission and positive infidelity for those who are told that life after the death change is wholly supernatural—wholly outside of and beyond the laws that govern the condition in which we now live. The only hypothesis that can suit an intelligent, unbiased, intuitive nature, in our age or in any other, must make life here and beyond coherent, consistent, and equally in accordance with natural law. These conditions being denied by ecclesiastical authority, we find that Anaxagoras, Socrates, the Greeks of Paul's time, Abelard, and our own scientists, were out of harmony with the churches of their time. They will not accept creeds which put human beings under a different regimen in the body and out of the body. And so science and free thought have been at odds with priesteraft in all the ages. But a better day is dawning. Midnight darkness has forever passed away. Glints of rosy light illume the edge of the sky. This dawning light will increase until the most intelligent as well as the most spiritual men will rejoice in a reasonable religion, which will bind the two worlds in one, because life there as well as here will be subject to the same great laws of infinite intelligence. "Of law, there can no less be said than that her seat is the bosom of God, her voice the harmony of the world: all things in heaven and earth do her homage, the very least as feeling her care, and the greatest as not exempted from her power; both angels and men and all creatures whatever with uniform consent admiring her as the mother of their peace and joy." RICHARD HOOKER. CHAPTER II. SOULS NOT DENATURALIZED BY DEATH. A reasonable mind rejects what is unnatural, and adopts for its motto, "If true, then certainly rational." In all ages of the world, men have been startled by strange occurrences, which seemed to contradict the regular on-goings of nature, and were therefore called supernatural. In this age, and in this alone, has the human mind begun to assume that these uncommon occurrences are just as accordant with nature as the everyday ones. And so the acceptance of these strange incidents is beginning to be considered an evidence of uncommon intelligence and reason, rather than of superstition. He who can find a place for the rare, the hitherto uncommon, somewhere in nature's laws, gives better evidence of a well-ordered mind, than does he who blindly relegates such occurrences to the supernatural. He who allows his boat to drift beyond the reasonable and the credible is without rudder or compass, and his mind becomes ready to accept any absurd or even wicked doctrines. Let us keep our craft close to the sensible, the natural, and therefore the reasonable, and then we need not fear the rule of blind superstition. All the religions of the world have been founded on events that were supposed at the time to be supernatural. On this account the philosopher, the reasoner of past ages, has regarded those early manifestations of supernal power with incredulity, and has paid more attention |