GLADSTONE
Spiritual life is the soul unincumbered by material bondage.
To prove that extinction or enfeeblement of the body does not impair the soul, we will consider the life of Gladstone, for if we find an isolated case whose mind did not weaken along with the body, it is positive proof that all so-called dotage or drowsiness of the aged is simply the effect of the live soul impeded in its effort to recall familiar occurrences through impaired organs. This is obvious from the fact that when the object has been recalled the spiritual vision of the object appears in all its original minuteness.
Everyone who reads knows that Gladstone when he carried the Home Rule Bill in the House of Commons, at the age of eighty-four, was as elegant, scrutinizing, and powerful in his debates as when forty-four years old. Still at that age his sight, hearing, power of recall of names, and tottering form were incessantly passing away.
Is not this evidence that two distinct agencies were at the time involved, life and death.
According to James' no-soul theory, his speech was involuntary reflex action, governed by neither will nor memory, while according to reason the spirit which controlled this wonderful man's feeble, tottering form was as clear and bright as it had been in days gone by.
Falling asleep in death is not a new venture. We are unconscious through life of all we know except as momentary knowledge comes forth through the organs, which in sleep as in death are unconscious of surrounding existence.
Jesus said, "I go that I may wake him out of sleep." "She is not dead but sleepeth."
If man is simply a creation of animated matter, he dies like a vegetable, if he is a dual creature, soul and body, when one part ceases to be, the other is not self, but if man is a spiritual being temporarily inhabiting and partially controlling a creation of animation the dissolution of the animated form must set him free and leave the spiritual being intact.