Here we pause to interject a reflection. Ordinary Christians believe in
body and soul; Professor Stokes believes in body, soul, and spirit.
That is, he says man is made up of three instead of two. But in step
our Theosophic friends, who pile on four more, and tell us that man is
sevenfold. Now who is right! According to their own account they
are _all_ right. But this is impossible. In our opinion they are all
_wrong_. Their theories are imaginary. All they _know_ anything of is
the human body.

But to return to Professor Stokes's excursion in the region of Biblical
exegesis. Never have we met with anything more puerile and absurd. He
finds "soul" and "spirit" in the English Bible, and he supposes them
to be different things. He even builds up a fanciful theory on the fact
that the expression "living soul" occurs in the New Testament, but he
does not remember the expression "living spirit." Hence he concludes
that _spirit_ is not "living" but "life-making."

Surely a little knowledge is a dangerous thing, and Professor Stokes is
a capital illustration of this truth. We get "soul" and "spirit" in the
New Testament, as well as in the Old, simply because both words are used
indifferently by the English translators. This is owing to the composite
character of the English language. One word comes from the Greek, the
other from the Latin, and both mean exactly the same thing. The Hebrew
_ruach_, the (Greek _pneuma_), and the Latin _spiritus_, all originally
meant _the breath_; and as breathing was the most obvious function of
life, persisting even in the deepest sleep, it came to signify _life_,
when that general conception was reached; and when the idea of soul or
spirit was reached, the same word was used to denote it. All this is
shown clearly enough by Tylor, and is corroborated by the more orthodox
Max Muller; so that Professor Stokes has fallen into a quagmire, made
of the dirt of ignorance and a little water of knowledge, and has made
himself a laughing-stock to everyone who possesses a decent acquaintance
with the subject.

Whatever it is that Professor Stokes thinks a man has apart from his
body, he does not believe it to be immortal. The immortality of the soul
and a future life, he says, are "two totally different things." The one
he thinks "incorrect," the other he regards as guaranteed by Scripture;
in other words, by Paul, who begins his exposition by exclaiming "Thou
fool!" and ends it by showing his own fo