Page:The City of the Saints.djvu/403

Rh are unable ever to fill a greater or a lesser—in fact, to believe otherwise would be impossible. They hold to different kinds of matter, for instance, the fleshly body and the spiritual body, which differ in quality as iron and oxygen. Mind and spirit, therefore, are real, objective, positive substances, which, like the astral spirit of the old alchymists, exists in close connection with the component parts of the porous, material body. Immaterialism is, with them, simply absurd; it is a belief which requires a man to put faith in a negation of time, space, and matter; in fact, in the zero of existence, in an entity whose ens admits no proof, and which can be described only by negative conditions and qualities, by saying what it is not. They contend that the materiality of spirit once taken away would negative its existence; that an "immaterial being" is a contradiction in terms; and that immateriality is another name for nothing; therefore, that the spirituality of spirit "is an unphilosophical, unscriptural, and atheistical doctrine." The theses supported by Mr. Orson Pratt, the apostle of materialism, are the following:

I. That Immaterialism is irrational opposed to true philosophy.

II. That an Immaterial substance (i.e., a something existing which is not matter and is distinct from matter, which is not dependent upon matter for its existence, which possesses no properties nor qualities in common with matter, and which possesses properties and qualities all entirely different from those of matter) can not exist.

III. That a real material unchangeable spirit, possessing parts and extension, inhabits the body.

Immaterialists who believe in "an inexplicable, incomprehensible, imaginary something without extension or parts, as taught in the first of the Thirty-nine Articles," are therefore the worshipers of an immortal Nihil—of a Nothing clothed with almighty powers.

It is abundantly evident that the partition between the spiritualist and the materialist is mainly philological, a dispute of words, a variation of terms, spirit and matter differing about as much as azote and nitrogen. The deductions, however, from the Mormon's premises lead him, as the following extracts prove, far.

"The Godhead consists of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit. The Father is a material being. The substance of which he is composed is wholly material. It is a substance widely different in some respects from the various substances with which we are more immediately acquainted. In other respects, it is precisely like all other materials. The substance of his person occupies space the same as other matter. It has solidity, length, breadth, and thickness, like other matter. The elementary mate-