Page:The Last Judgement and Second Coming of the Lord Illustrated.djvu/137

 The material body is simply the house in which he lives for a time, and wherein it is the Divine purpose he should be educated to participate in the uses and enjoyments of the heavenly kingdom. When the soul leaves the body, it may at once be seen that the body is not the man; and if it is not the man when the soul has passed away from it, how can it have been the man when he was present in it? It is simply the man's temporary residence, the material instrument for his operations in the material world. Hence Peter says, "I am in this tabernacle to stir you up, by putting you in remembrance; knowing that shortly I must put off this my tabernacle." Paul also writes, "We know, that if our earthly house of this tabernacle were dissolved, we have a building of God, a house not made with hands, eternal in the heavens." These passages no more contemplated the resumption of the earthly tabernacle which death puts off, than the Deity intended that the butterfly should return to the chrysalis from which it has emerged; the reason is, because the soul is the true and proper man, and this being the case, the resumption of the natural body is not necessary for his existence in the future life. The soul is not an aërial, unsubstantial something, which notion of it is very closely allied to the idea of nothing; if it is anything, it must be a spiritual substance in the human form; if it were not so, it could have no human entity. How plain is this. If the soul exist, it must be a substance; and if a substance, it must have a form; for existence without both substance and form is impossible. Hence we conclude that the substance of the soul is spiritual, and that its form is human. It is present in the physical structure during its manifestation in the world, something like a hand within its glove; hence the death of the body by no