Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 15.djvu/691

Rh, and that the thinking power and faculties are the result of a certain organization of matter," was the eloquent preacher and writer, Robert Hall. It is true that he abandoned this opinion at a later period of his life; indeed, his biographer tells us with much satisfaction that "he buried materialism in his father's grave"; and a theological professor in an American college has in a recent article exultantly claimed this fact as triumphant proof that the materialist's "gloomy and unnatural creed" can not stand before such a sad feeling as grief at a father's death. One may be excused, perhaps, for not seeing quite so clearly as these gentlemen the soundness of the logic of the connection. On the whole, logic is usually sounder and stronger when it is not under the pressure of great feeling.

The truth is, that a great many people have the deeply-rooted feeling that materialism is destructive of the hope of immortality, and dread and detest it for that reason. When they watch the body decay and die, considering furthermore that after its death it is surely resolved into the simple elements from which all matter is formed, and know that these released elements go in turn to build up other bodies, so that the material is used over and over again, being compounded and decompounded incessantly in the long stream of life, they can not realize the possibility of a resurrection of the individual body. They can not conceive how matter, which has thus been used over and over again, can remake so many distinct bodies, and they think that to uphold a bodily resurrection is to give up practically the doctrine of a future life. It is a natural but not a necessary conclusion, as the examples of Milton and Robert Hall prove, since they, though materialists, were devout believers in a resurrection of the dead. Moreover, there are many vehement antagonists of materialism who readily admit that it is not inconsistent with the belief in a life after death. Indeed, they could not well do otherwise when they recollect what the Apostle Paul said in his very energetic way, addressing the objector to a bodily resurrection as "Thou fool!" and what happened to the rich man who died and was buried; for it is told of him that "in hell he lifted up his eyes and cried and said, 'Father Abraham, have mercy on me, and send Lazarus that he may dip the tip of his finger in water and cool my tongue, for I am tormented in this flame.'" Now, if he had eyes to lift up and a tongue to be cooled, it is plain that he had a body of some kind in hell; and if Lazarus, who was in another place, bad a finger to dip in water, he also must have had a body of some kind there.

Leaving this matter, however, without attempting to explain the mystery of the body celestial, I go on to mention a second reason why materialism is considered to be bad doctrine. It is this: that with the rise and growth of Christianity there came in the fashion of looking down on the body with contempt as the vile and despicable part of man, the seat of those fleshly lusts which warred against the higher