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Untitled Article
nothing , as it appears to me , which is not perfectly reconcileable to either of these suppositions . If there be no resurrection of the dead , that is , if there be no future state , then those believers who have died in the faith are fallen asleep ; they are in a sleep from which they have no chance of being awakened , and are perished . That there is nothing in scripture decisively favourable to this latter conjecture , must certainly be admitted ; though , on the other hand , as little does
there appear to be any thing which requires us absolutely to reject it , or which precludes us from indulging it , if we can derive from it any pleasing or consolatory thoughts in the hour of affliction . It has been thought difficult to reconcile it with the opinion of those who maintain that the thinking principle is the result of bodily organization ; an hypothesis which is accordingly rejected by the greater part of the advocates of this view of the resurrection . At the same time , though the bodily frame which , according to the system of Materialism , constitutes the whole ; man , appears to our
senses to be dissolved , there is nothing inconsistent with this hypothesis , nothing inconceivable , or even improbable , in the idea that the mental faculties which constitute the essential part of a rational being , may be attached to some peculiarly subtle , and to our senses imperceptible , though still material principle , which escapes unchanged at death , and is not committed to the grave with our grosser and , properly speaking , mortal remains . This idea is not inadmissible , though there is no direct evidence for it ; and perhaps it may be found to comprise all that the bulk of mankind really
mean when they speak of the immateriality of the thinking principle . If this be so , St . Paul's analogy of the dissolution of the human frame at death , and that of a grain of wheat committed to the earth , may be more complete and precise than at first appears . " The cases , " says Dr . Priestley , " are not parallel ; because in the seed there is an apparent living principle or germ , the expansion of which makes the future plant ; whereas the body is entirely destroyed , and its parts dispersed . " But we do not certainly know
this . We have not , indeed , at present the means of detecting any permanent principle of life , which passes off unchanged at death ; but that may be merely because it is not obvious to any of the senses with which we are at present endowed ; and there is at least no proof that there may not be a thinking principle , forming part of the , mortal frame , which remains and constitutes the germ of the immortal frame , in much the same way as the radicle of the seed constitutes the germ of the future plant .
Mr . Belsham , as a declared and decided Materialist , is of course a partizan of an intermediate state of absolute insensibility previous to a general resurrection , when he appears to suppose that the prophetical representations which are generally considered as relating to that great event , will be literally and precisely fulfilled . Hence he takes it for granted that all the past generations of mankind , those excepted who are recorded either to have risen from the dead or to have been translated without suffering death , are at this moment , I was going to say , in a state of insensibility ; but in consistency
with his other views , regarding as he does the mind as being merely the result of a certain arrangement and collocation of particles , and consequently as no longer existing now that that arrangement is altogether destroyed , I ought rather to say , are not at this moment in existence . It would be easy to pursue this doctrine into certain metaphysical difficulties which are not readily disposed of ; with these , however , I have at present no concern . But granting him his principles , he seems to me in some instances to reason from them in a manner which can scarcely be admitted as conclusive .
Untitled Article
Thoiight * " on an Intermediate Stat # \ 241
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Citation
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Monthly Repository (1806-1838) and Unitarian Chronicle (1832-1833), April 2, 1830, page 241, in the Nineteenth-Century Serials Edition (2008; 2018) ncse.ac.uk/periodicals/mruc/issues/vm2-ncseproduct2583/page/25/
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