to its parentage; for he it was who announced it to our
first parents in these words: "Ye shall not surely die!" Gen. 3:4. When
men began to die, it was a shrewd stroke of policy on the part of him who
had promised them that they should not die, to try to prove to those who
remained that the others had not really died, but only changed conditions.
It is no marvel that he should try to make men believe that they possessed
an immaterial, immortal entity that could not die; but, in view of the
ghastly experiences of the passing years, it is the marvel of marvels that
he should have succeeded so well. The trouble now is that men take these
meanings which have been devised and fostered into stupendous strength
outside the pale of Bible teaching, and attach them to the Bible terms of
"soul" and "spirit." In other words, the mongrel pago-papal theology which
has grown up in Christendom, lets the Bible furnish the terms, and
paganism the definitions. But from the Bible standpoint, these definitions
do not belong there; they are foreign to the truth, and the Bible does not
recognize them. They are as much out of place as was the inventor of them
himself in the garden of Eden. Let the Bible furnish its own definitions
to its own terms, and all will be clear. The opinion of John Milton, the
celebrated author of Paradise Lost, is worthy of note. In his "Treatise on
Christian Doctrine," Vol. I, pp. 250, 251, he says:--

"Man is a living being, intrinsically and properly one individual,
not compound and separable, not, according to the common opinion,
made up and framed of two distinct and different natures, as of
body and soul, but the whole man is soul, and the soul, man; that
is to say, a body or substance, individual, animated, sensitive,
and rational."

In this sense the word is employed many times; but whoever will trace the
use of the words "soul" and "spirit" through the Bible, will find them
applied also to a great variety of objects; as, person, mind, heart, body
(in the expression "a dead body"), will, lust, appetite, breath, creature,
pleasure, desire, anger, courage, blast, etc., etc., in all nearly fifty
different ways. But it is a fact which should be especially noted, that in
not a single instance is there the least hint given that anything
expressed by these terms is capable of existing for a single moment, as a
conscious entity, or in any other condition, _without the body_! This
being so