Above the nobler shall less noble rise?
Shall man alone, for whom all else revives,
No resurrection know? Shall man alone,
Imperial man, be sown on barren ground,
Less privileged than grain on which he feeds?”
Observe once more on this subject, there are manifold proofs that the soul has in this state only the dawn of its being. The animals reach perfection in a few years but men, at death, are only beginning to use their faculties. The principle of thought, reason, and hope within them has here only glimpses, outreachings, and aspirations of a higher life. Are not these yearnings, this sense of incompleteness, prophecies of a future life? Our lives here are not the tones of perfect harmony, but rather like stringed instruments being attuned for celestial melody. And, alas, what inequalities, what sufferings, what wrongs have some to endure here that require another state for vindication and rectification also! If, therefore, you find one argument against the immortality of the soul, you will readily find a hundred for it.
A further source of doubt is, a false impression respecting holy scripture. You may have thought that the Bible, being called a revelation from God, would be like a book written in heaven, and altogether different from human works. But, in infinite wisdom and mercy, this has not been God’s mode of revelation. He has condescended to reveal his mind through the history, the follies, the virtues, the sins, and struggles of men. This history is both human and superhuman. It is human, for the men who wrote it carried into it the peculiarities of their age and their culture. It is superhuman, for it truly and faithfully tells the dealings of God with the first races of men, and afterwards through Christ.
In the Old Testament history you have records of men who lived in an earlier and ruder period of humanity; but the writing or the compilation of these records has been controlled so as to teach the awfulness of sin, the safety of righteousness, and the faithfulness of Jehovah. Dreadful is it to be told of the incest of Lot; but it is merciful that we have a justification of the warnings against the licentious nations of Moab and Ammon, whose origin is thus narrated. It is painful to follow the history of Saul, but it is merciful that we have such a vivid picture of the miserable fruits of a self-love that poisoned otherwise noble impulses. Through all the records of men in the Old Testament, you are taught, as in the life of Jacob, that every wrong act has a seed of evil in it, whose bitter fruits the doer has to eat, and that God’s providence is perpetually controlling the good and the evil for the education of men and of nations.
Look at the book of Psalms, the liturgy of prayers and praises for all ages, the sacred ballads for humanity. There is much that is human in these Psalms; but if God had sent down to us songs composed by the angels, they would have been valueless by the side of those in this incomparable book. While I am in this world of fierce temptation, of suffering, and of moral weakness, what I want is, not so much angelic musings and raptures, as the prayers of a man tempted, struggling, suffering, fallen as I am; and yet a man ever reaching with such sobs of penitence and intense heart-cries after God. I mourn David’s sin and sufferings, but I feel grateful that the Scriptures have preserved to me his Psalms, which interpret the fiercest beatings of my heart, the lowliest confessions of my moral besetments, and the deepest aspirations of my nature.