ing form. It has not rested on a basis
of reason, but on one of asserted revelation and authority. It
originated in the fact that the only life of which we now have
any experience is a life in the body, and, therefore, this is the
life which we instinctively love and prefer; also in the fact
that this is the only mode of life which we are able to
represent to ourselves in any satisfactory, apprehensible image.
It then bolstered itself up by arbitrary theological theorizings,
and proclaimed itself with sanctions of a pretended supernatural
authority. Slowly the minds of its disciples were drilled to a
familiarity with it, and to a habit of implicitly believing it,
which grew strong enough to make them hold to it in spite of its
difficulty as a sheer and violent miracle having no connection
whatever with the natural order of things. Authority and passive
habit long maintained the belief in unbroken sway. They still so
support it in the Mohammedan world, where there is almost no
science, but little skeptical thought, and a common uniformity of
abject submission to the word of the Koran. But in Christendom it
fares differently. Here, the knowledge of modern science and
habits of free inquiry are almost universally diffused. The
consequence is, since the chief Christian belief in immortality
has been identified with the notion of a general physical
resurrection of the dead at the last day, and since all
philosophical and scientific thinking refutes that notion by
setting its arbitrariness and monstrous abnormality in high and
steep relief against the consensus of demonstrated knowledge and
moral probability, that the popular belief of Christendom in
immortality itself is depolarized and swiftly dropping into decay
with a large class of persons. But this spread of doubt and
denial, while a natural process, is yet an illogical and
unnecessary one. The competent thinker will extricate the question
of the immortality of the soul from its accidental entanglement
with the doctrine of the resurrection, and, rejecting the latter
as incredible, still affirm the former on its own independent
grounds. To prove and illustrate these statements we must here
give a little additional study, fresh and independent study, to
the subject.

The doctrine of the resurrection of the flesh is bound up with the
whole fabric of the Catholic and Orthodox dogmatic theology of
Christendom, and cannot be removed without logically shaking that
system o