Page:Letters on the Human Body (John Clowes).djvu/218

198 to assign the above idea of a dead soul, as the true cause and ground of all that alarm and painful apprehension excited in the minds of the bulk of mankind respecting bodily death? For how is it possible that a dead soul should think of bodily death otherwise than as an evil, and of an evil too of the most enormous size and forbidding aspect! We all feel a natural dread of a thief and a robber, and especially of an assassin in the dark. Yet what is bodily death, in the eyes of a dead soul, but such a thief, robber, and assassin,—since it is the proper characteristic of a dead soul, that it makes no provision for a life after death; and consequently, the death of the body cannot fail to be regarded by it as the plunderer of its property, and the murderer of its life and joys?

But turn now your eyes from this dead soul to a living soul, and mark with due attention how the above judgment of the dead soul, respecting bodily death, is completely reversed by this living soul. First, however, let me call to your recollection, that by a living soul I understand the soul of every Christian, who truly believes the gospel, and sincerely forms his life according to its Divine precepts. The soul of such a Christian is therefore called a living soul, because he regards his life as a stream from a living fountain, the and, and makes his provisions