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Untitled Article
rily suggested by Scripture , is by far the most easil y reconcileable with the most important class of facts to which we can appeal . On this supposition , man is and ever shall be material , his frame being made susceptible of change according to his change of state : as expressed by Paul , there is a natural body , and there is a spiritual body : " or as we may explain it , there is a gross body , and there is an etherealized body . The unconsciousness of death may thus last only while the ethereal body is evolved from the gross inanimate one , and we have at once an explanation of most of the Scripture expressions which have been given over as inexplicable by one or other party or both , and thus the facts also of Scripture present comparatively little difficulty .
A while ago , this doctrine would have been objected to on the ground of physical impossibility ; but the extraordinary advancement of chemical science within a short period has made men cautious of pronouncing on physical impossibilities . The evolutions which have been detected of invisible substances from bodies which thenceforth tend to dissolution , the transmutations of various substances into one another and into others wholly different , the apparent transformations when known elements are combined in new modes , present results which would formerly have been far less credible to the ignorant , than the doctrine in question need be to us who are confessedly
as much in the dark about some elements of the human frame as the peasantry of a century ago respecting various subtile substances with which science has rendered us familiar . By the doctrine in question , the phenomena of disease and death are made easy of explanation on the grounds which the materialist has ever firmly occupied , while the objections to the state ensuing , on which the immaterialist has seldom been satisfactorily answered , do not apply . The body is , as he supposes , destined to decay without any design of revival ; it need not , as he says , perplex us to see it pass through a succession of forms , the same particles , perhaps , constituting in turn the limbs , the heart , the brain , of many living creatures ; it need not , prospectively , give us concern to imagine that what was once Alexander may bung a beer barrel , or that " Imperial Caesar , dead and turned to clay , might stop a hole to keep the wind away . " It remains to compare the supposition with Scripture facts , and afterwards with Scripture reasonings .
There is evidently nothing to contradict it in the cases of the daughter of Jairus and of the young man of Nain , and of those who were raised by the apostles from death which had just taken place : and though it may appear vain to speak of what seems most natural in miraculous cases , it will be acknowledged to be more easily conceivable that the process of bodily change should be delayed or reversed in such instances , than that the spirit should be recalled from a new state of which it retained not the slightest impression . We are not destitute of something like evidence that this change does not begin at once , or is at first slow , or easily reversible . Persons apparently drowned have been revived when every indication of life had some time ceased ; and inferior animals , if not men , have been restored by galvanism when they had been confidently pronounced dead ; in the case of
small animals , we know , to the astonishment if not the horror of the operator . It will be said they were not dead . Certainly , according to our common notion of death , because they lived again without miraculous intervention . But what is it then to be dead ? Where can the line be drawn short of the obvious commencement of decay ? Would these bodies , if not acted upon , have given any further sign of change previous to decay ? Was any token of death absent , any intimation of lingering life discernible ?
Untitled Article
Physical Considerations connected with Man ' s Ultimate Destination . 221
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Citation
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Monthly Repository (1806-1838) and Unitarian Chronicle (1832-1833), April 2, 1831, page 221, in the Nineteenth-Century Serials Edition (2008; 2018) ncse.ac.uk/periodicals/mruc/issues/vm2-ncseproduct2596/page/5/
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