One would scarcely expect that the writer, after so judicious a criticism, should hesitate to condemn Dr. Nisbet’s view; and yet he seems afraid of passing too severe a judgment on it, as he immediately adds: “Not that this proves him to be in the wrong, but only that, if he is in the right, no dogma, however venerable, is safe from attack.”
The conception that a man who professes Christianity may not be in the wrong while he throws discredit on the most venerable dogmas of Christianity is a monstrosity not only in a religious but also in a logical point of view. Unless the expressions of our critic can be construed as a figure of speech conveying under a mild and civil form the merited censure, every Christian reader will say that the critic himself is in the wrong. A pagan, or a man absolutely ignorant of the divine origin and glorious history of Christianity, might hesitate about the right or wrong of tampering with our revealed dogmas, for he would have to learn first how the fact of divine revelation has been ascertained; but a man who has read the New Testament, who lives in a Christian atmosphere, who knows the life, the miracles, the death, and the resurrection of Christ, and who consequently cannot conceal from himself the great fact of revelation—such a man, we say, astonishes us when he assumes that a Christian doctor may not be in the wrong, though he deal with revealed truth in such a loose manner as to expose every dogma, however venerable, to the attacks of our modern pagans. But let us proceed. To show how suicidal is Dr. Nisbet’s method of interpretation the reviewer says:
“In fact, men more daring and less respectful than Dr. Nisbet have employed his method of reasoning against the resurrection of what he calls the grave-flesh to controvert the idea of any resurrection at all. He assumes as unquestioned the proposition that human beings must in some way survive the death of the body, and is only solicitous to determine what that way is. But just as he shows the irrationality of expecting that the cast-off flesh and blood which served the soul for a tabernacle during life shall be taken up again, so do sceptics undertake to show the irrationality of expecting any kind of future existence whatever.”
The reviewer is perfectly right. If the teachers of Christianity are to be free to twist the word of God as they please, why shall their followers and other men be denied the same privilege? And what can be the ultimate result of such a reckless meddling with truth but universal unbelief? Faith must rest on unquestionable authority; when this latter is shaken, faith is replaced by doubt, opinion, perplexity, despondency, and all the vagaries of a weak, distracted reason. The present growth of unbelief is therefore nothing but the logical development of the Protestant method of free interpretation, which has engendered a thousand conflicting opinions and thwarted all honest efforts of its followers in the search after truth. The Catholic Church alone has a remedy for this plague of religious scepticism, for she alone has the power to teach with authority, as she alone has faithfully preserved in its primitive entirety the sacred deposit of revealed truths.
And now the reviewer comes to the most important part of his article, which consists of the objections urged by the modern unbelievers against both resurrection and immortality. He says:
“Let us briefly state some of the various reasons which they adduce, in the hope that Dr. Nisbet, or some other writer of ability, may be led to meet and overthrow these reasons, and to furnish the world at last with a solid and impregnable philosophical demonstration of the doctrine of immortality.”
It was after reading this passage that we resolved to write the present article. Not that we consider ourselves “a man of ability”; but we are in possession of truth, and are confident that we can vindicate it successfully, though we may lack the ability of our opponents. Let us proceed, therefore, without further observations, to the reviewer’s arguments.
“In the first place,” he says, “those who deny that there is any immortality of the individual human soul say it is contrary to all the analogies of nature to suppose that the death of the body does not end its individual being. Throughout creation, whenever any organization is destroyed, it is destroyed for ever. A new organization may arise similar to the old one, but it is not that one. A crystal crushed into powder ceases to be a crystal. Its particles may be dissolved and be crystallized anew; but they will form another and not the same crystal. Every vegetable runs its career from the seed to the mature plant, and, when resolved into its elements, perishes as a plant. If those elements be made to constitute a new plant, that plant begins its round as a new plant, and not as the old one. In like manner, when animals die and their bodies decay, they never reappear as the same animals. They may furnish materials for new forms of mineral, vegetable, and animal organisms, but these organisms are essentially new, and not the old ones under the new forms. And, in the same way, these sceptics contend, so far as our observation goes, human beings die once and finally, other men are born and succeed them, but they are other men and not the men who have died. Whether their dissolution took place yesterday or thousands of years ago, it is alike, so far as our ordinary experience goes, complete and irreparable.”
To answer this argument it suffices to point out that the resurrection of the flesh and the immortality of the soul are two distinct truths, of which the first is known to us by divine revelation only, the second by revelation and by reason. To say that “throughout creation whenever any organization is destroyed it is destroyed for ever,” is to say that we find nothing in the order of nature that authorizes us to infer the resurrection of our bodies. This, of course, is true; but what of it? No one pretends that the future resurrection will be brought about by natural causes acting in their natural manner and obeying natural laws. Resurrection will be the work of the Omnipotent. We believe it, not because it agrees with the analogies of nature, but because God himself, infallible truth, has informed us that he will raise us from death against all the analogies of nature. We concede, then, that whenever an organization is destroyed, it is, in the natural course of things, destroyed for ever; and consequently we concede that the course of nature affords no proof of our resurrection. But the course of nature is not the standard by which we have to judge of things supernatural. The analogies of nature did not prevent the resurrection of Lazarus, of the son of the widow, and of others of which we read in the Gospel and in other Scriptural books; nor did Christ respect the analogies of nature when he rose glorious from the tomb, as he had promised. Hence the argument from the analogies of nature has no strength whatever against the dogma of the resurrection.
Has it at least any weight against the immortality of the soul? On the contrary, it proves that the soul is naturally immortal. For, though nature can destroy the organic form, it has no power to destroy the substances of which the organism consists. The organic compound is destroyed, but all the components remain. If, then, no substance is ever destroyed by nature, how can we fail to see that the human soul, which is a substance, cannot naturally perish when the organism of the body is destroyed? We may be told that the sceptic does not concede that our soul is a substance; he rather believes that what we call the soul is a mere result of organic movements which must cease altogether when the organs are destroyed. But we answer that, if the sceptic honestly desires to be enlightened on this subject, he must not rely on the assertions of ignorant or perverse scientists who profess to know nothing but matter and force; he must read and meditate what has been written on the subject by competent men. If he has sufficient ability to understand their philosophical reasonings, he will come to the conclusion that the substantiality of the human soul is a demonstrated truth; if, on the contrary, he has too little stock of philosophy to be able to follow such reasonings, then he has no right to be a sceptic, and it becomes his duty humbly to recognize his incompetency, and to accept without demonstration what more cultivated minds consider a demonstrated truth. This last remark is very important. Scepticism and unbelief are the offspring of pride. Men pretend to see the why and the how of everything; but they often forget that they are born in ignorance, and that, as their knowledge of material things is the fruit of long and varied experience so, the knowledge of supersensible things is the fruit of long and methodic study. He who has not studied astronomy, may say very honestly that he does not know how to determine the mass of the sun or the distance of the moon; but he cannot honestly deny what astronomy teaches on the subject. To do this, to declare himself sceptic, would be accounted folly. How, then, can those be justified who, without having applied to philosophical studies, refuse to accept the soundest conclusions of philosophy about the nature of the soul? If they are at all anxious to know how to prove the substantiality of the soul, let them apply to philosophy; and they will learn that matter, owing to its inertia, cannot think, and that the organic movements cannot be the thinking principle.