This being so, it is claimed that the deductions of reason as to the future immortality of man, and his risks and dangers beyond the grave, are indispensable to deciding multitudes of moral questions of the highest moment, while every person's standard of morality must be regulated by their decision of this question.
Chapter XXVIII. The Destiny of Man in the Future Life.
It has been shown, that the teachings of reason as to the immortality of the soul, and our risks and dangers after death, are indispensable to a true standard of morality, and to the decision of innumerable moral questions of the highest moment.
The next attempt, therefore, will be to set forth what can be learned by reason and experience, independently of revelation, in regard to the future destiny of man.
The first question relates to the existence of the soul after death, and its immortality. Here we have to guide us that great principle of common sense, which regulates mankind in all the practical business of life, viz., things are, and will continue according to past experience, until there is evidence of a change.
By the aid of this, we go forward in all practical affairs, believing that the beings and things around us are continued in existence till we have evidence that they are not. If any man were to talk and act as if every person was destroyed, and every town and village annihilated, as soon as the evidence of his senses failed, he would be deemed one who had “lost his reason.”
This same principle tends to the belief that the soul of man continues to exist after the dissolution of the body. We have no evidence that the separation of soul and body is an event that either injures or destroys [pg 171] the spiritual part. On the contrary, there are many analogies in nature that would lead to the impression that death gives new strength and powers to the disembodied spirit.
This being so, we have the same reason to believe that the soul of man exists after death as we have for believing that our friends are living when they leave us on a journey, and we have no evidence of their death. We can not see them, hear them, or feel them, and yet we believe they are living, we know not exactly where, because we have no evidence of their death. And so, after the dissolution of the body, though all evidence of sense as to the existence of their immaterial part ceases, we believe the same thinking, sentient spirits continue to exist, because we have no evidence that they have ceased to do so.
We have perfect evidence that the body ceases to exist as a body, for it moulders to dust. We have no evidence at all that the soul is either injured or destroyed. Such a thing as the destruction or annihilation of a spirit was never known or heard of from any quarter of earth or heaven.