Why We Reject It

OUR reasons for rejecting the common doctrine of the immortality of the soul and conscious state of the dead are many and strong. 1. We reject it because the Bible nowhere teaches it; and this is sufficient ground for the rejection of any doctrine. 2. We reject it because it is the very corner-stone and foundation of the blasphemous doctrine of modern spiritualism. The assumption of the immortality of the soul and conscious existence after death, is the thing upon which spiritualism is built. Spiritualists are simply carrying out the legitimate results of Christian teaching upon this point.

Ministers often say that our departed friends are not dead, that their departed spirits are hovering around us, that they know what we are doing or saying. They often relate cases where they claim that departed spirits have been seen and talked with. If this is so, why should not these friends seek to communicate with the living? Why is it unreasonable that they should? Why is it wrong? Having gone thus far they cannot reasonably refuse to go farther and admit just what spiritualists claim. Thousands and millions of them are rapidly doing this.

3. We reject it because it is the very foundation of the doctrine of eternal torment, a doctrine which is no less unscriptural, unreasonable, and a blasphemy against the character of God, one which has driven millions to infidelity. Reader, did you ever seriously consider the horrors of an orthodox hell, such a hell to last eternally, and conscious, senitive souls, embracing the majority of mankind, to be kept in a burning hell millions upon millions of ages? What is the use of such a hell? It certainly cannot benefit the bad for they are lost beyond hope. Can the merciful God delight in such a scene? Will it add to the happiness of the angels? Is it necessary in order to keep the saints in subjection? Who can defend this awful doctrine and still justify the ways of God to men? Reader, you know that the enlightenment of this age will not tolerate this horrid doctrine longer. It has got to be given up either tacitly or squarely. Few ministers openly preach it any more. Why not be frank and honest, and squarely renounce what no one believes, but what is a reproach to God and the Bible? What is more reasonable than that God should destroy the wicked, turn them back to dust, and let their miserable existence cease. Let us reason together saith the Lord.

4. We reject it because it is the foundation for universalism, a doctrine which is squarely subversive of the Bible, and the pure religion of Jesus Christ. It justifies sin and lulls the sinner into fatal security. But universalism is the natural rebound from eternal torment. Granting the immortality of the soul, it is the only escape from an endless hell. But it is the hight of presumption and absurdity, as well as a square contradiction of the plainest Bible teachings. The assumption that vile, hardened, and unrepenting sinners, who have spent their life in cursing God and abusing his people, should be taken right into the joys of Heaven, we reject in the name of the Bible and reason.

5. We reject this doctrine because it is the very foundation of purgatory, that abominable doctrine upon which priests and popes have fatted for ages. If the dead are sleeping in their graves, then purgatory is a lie.

6. We reject the doctrine of the conscious state of the dead because it is unreasonable and undesirable. It teaches that the body is not the real man, that the real person is an immaterial, invisible sort of an essence, thinner than the lightest air. What can there be desirable in such an existence? Who delights to think of a friend in such a form? You can neither handle them, touch them, nor embrace them. Again, what kind of a Heaven must it be for our dead friends if they know all that is transpiring upon the earth. A mother dies, leaving a family of small children in poverty. They are scattered here and there, left to hunger and suffer. They are whipped and abused, and knocked around from pillar to post. They come up without education, and they learn only vice and crime. They live disgraceful lives which end in shame. How must that mother feel if she sees all this? She sees them hungering, but cannot feed them; sees them abused, but cannot interfere; hears their cries, but cannot relieve them. She sees them coming up in a way which she knows will end in shame here and eternal torment hereafter, yet she is powerless to lift her finger or speak a word. That were hell itself to the heart of a loving mother.

Again, a mother is saved, but her children, bone of her bone, flesh of her flesh, whom she has nursed, fed, cherished, and loved dearer than life itself, these children are cast into the burning flames before her eyes. She knows it, she sees it. While she is in Heaven she knows they are in hell. After she has been there one thousand years she thinks of her children. Where are they? Writhing in the torments of hell. Ages roll on, and still she remembers that down there in a lake of fire are her offspring at this very moment suffering untold agonies of devouring fire. Reader, is that desirable? No; indeed. We have a better God than that.

7. We reject this doctrine because the doctrine of the sleep of the dead is not only scriptural, but reasonable and beautiful. It teaches that at death, all, both old and young, both saint and sinner, quietly rest in the grave till the resurrection. While the saints are not in Heaven, the wicked are not in torment. What is there so terrible about this? To those in sound sleep there is no lapse of time. Abel's sleep will seem no longer to him than to the saint who has been dead but a year. See that anxious mother watch over her restless, crying baby. She rocks it and sings to it till at last it falls into a sleep. Softly she lays it in the cradle, and remarks, the little dear has now forgotten all its troubles. It is asleep. Is that terrible? Is that something to be dreaded? After the cares, labors, and anxieties of the day, how sweet to lie down and forget it in quiet slumber! Do you dread that? Do you call it awful? No. Why, then, should we think it a strange thing, a thing to be dreaded, that we should quietly, sweetly sleep in death till the Life-giver comes? Then when the trump of God shall sound, all the saints of every age, and from every nation, shall awake and come up again. Husbands and wives, parents and children, brothers and sisters, shall all arise together to meet the Lord in the air. Then with Jesus and all the holy angels, they shall ascend to the shining gates of Heaven. At the same time and all together, the redeemed hosts march into the celestial city. What a grand day of triumph that will be! How much more beautiful this than for the saints silently to pass off to Heaven one at a time, and leave their friends behind as the common theory teaches. Brethren, the doctrine of the sleep of the dead is one of the most reasonable and beautiful of all the doctrines of the Bible.

8. We reject the conscious state of the dead because it utterly subverts other fundamental doctrines of the Bible. First; The Judgment. Nothing is more plainly, emphatically, and repeatedly taught in the Bible than that there will be a day of general Judgment in the end of the world, in which all men, good and bad, shall be judged, and then rewarded according to their deeds. But if the righteous go immediately to Heaven at death, and the wicked to hell, what is the use of a future Judgment. How absurd the idea that, after a soul has been in hell or Heaven for thousands of years, God should call it up to Judgment, and solemnly set in judgment upon it to decide whether it should be saved or damned! Such a scene could be nothing but a solemn farce. No, brethren, God's word is more consistent than that. Secondly. The second advent. If the righteous go to Heaven at death, right into the presence of Christ, and God, and glory, what care they for the second advent of Christ. They are saved, they are immortal, they are with the angels, they are in the presence of God and their Redeemer; they are pure and happy. Then why should they long for the second advent of Christ to the earth? No; they would not.

It is a noticeable fact that those who hold this doctrine are gradually but surely coming to ignore the doctrine of the personal second coming of Christ. They have no place for it in their theory, and hence, consistently drop it out. But how different when we come to the Bible. There it is everything. There it is longed for, and prayed for. There it is held up as a terror to the wicked, and the great hope of the righteous. A theory which subverts such a great fundamental doctrine as this should be rejected, and by the grace of God we do reject it. Thirdly: The resurrection. If the soul can live separate from, and independent of the body; if it can think, and live, and act; if it can be like the angels; if this body is simply a prison house, a cage in which it is tied down; if the soul is more free separate from the body than in the body, then when the spirit has once gained its freedom from this clog of clay, why should this body ever be resurrected, and the soul thrust into it again? Of what use will be the resurrection? There could be no sense in it whatever. Hence, again, those who believe in the immortality of the soul place but little stress upon the resurrection.