Page:A Compendium of the Chief Doctrines of the True Christian Religion.djvu/102

98 the world, had been a good man; but it is an evil spirit or a devil, if he had been a wicked man.

The spirit of a man, immediately after death, appears in the spiritual world in a perfect human form, exactly like a man in the world. He enjoys also the same faculties of seeing, hearing, feeling, and speaking, as in the world; the same faculties of thinking, willing, and acting, as in the world. In short, he is in every respect the same man as he was before, having neither lost nor gained any thing by the change, except the gross material body, with which he was encompassed in the world, as with an earthly clog, or as with something almost foreign to his intrinsic character of a man, and which, being once laid aside, is laid aside for ever. This continuation of life is what is meant by the resurrection.

The life of man after death is the life of his love and of his faith: hence whatever may have been the quality of these, during his abode in the world, such will his life continue to be to eternity, because in his spiritual state the acquired bias of his mind can never be changed. For in order to make any real and permanent change in a man, it is necessary that every principle belonging to him, from the highest or inmost to the lowest or outermost, be kept in a state susceptible of such change; because the renewing or regenerating process, like that of nutrition in the natural body, acts simultaneously as well as successively on the whole man. Now as the change here spoken of ought, in it's measure and degree, to affect every principle at once, it follows, that it is impossible for it to proceed when one of those principles, and that one the basis or ultimate plane of reception, is wanting, or at least quiescent, and thus incapable of alteration. Into this state the externals of the human mind are brought by the death and rejection of the