they might be accounted
superfluous. What is the good of tormenting a soul in Hell for ages, and
then whirling it back to the body in order to rise again and receive a
solemn public condemnation? Better leave it in the Inferno and save
trouble, especially as the solemn trial is meaningless, seeing that a
part of the sentence has already been undergone and that there is no
hope that any portion of it will ever be remitted. Truly the tender
mercies with which the theologians have credited the Almighty are cruel
indeed!"

But, by the irony of progress, the orthodox churches are gradually
coming around to the one much-despised Platonic conception of the
naturally Immortal Immaterial Soul--the "pagan and heathen" idea, so
much at variance with the opposing doctrine of the Resurrection of the
Body, which doctrine really did not teach the "immortality of the soul"
at all. As Prof. Nathaniel Schmidt says, in an article in a standard
encyclopedia: "The doctrine of the natural immortality of the human
soul became so important a part of Christian thought that the
resurrection naturally lost its vital significance, and it has
practically held no place in the great systems of philosophy elaborated
by the Christian thinkers of modern times." But still, the letter of the
old doctrine persists on the books of the church and in its creeds,
although opposed to the enlightened spirit now manifesting in the
churches which is moving more and more toward the "pagan and heathen"
conception of a naturally Immaterial and Immortal Soul, rather than in a
Resurrection of the Body and an eternal life therein.

It is scarcely worth while here to contrast the two doctrines--the
Immortal Immaterial Soul on the one hand, and the Immortal Body on the
other. The latter conception is so primitively crude, and so foreign to
modern thought, that it scarcely needs an argument against it. The
thought of the necessity of the soul for a material body--the same old
material body that it once cast off like a worn out garment--a body
perhaps worn by disease, crippled by "accident" or "the slipping of the
hand of the Potter"--a body similar to those we see around us every
day--the Immortal Soul needing such a garment in order to exist! Better
accept plain Materialism, and say that there is no soul and that the
body perishes and all else with it, than such a gross doctrine which is
simply a materialistic Immortality. So far as this doctrine being "the
highest con