body, but are not able to kill the soul: but rather fear him which is able to destroy both soul and body in hell. What can be more clear? If the soul had such a necessary dependence on the body, that when this dies, itself must needs die with it; then he that kills the body would with the same stroke murder the soul too. But our Saviour tells us, that this is impossible for man to do; the soul remaining even after the death of the body, and being out of the reach of any created power that is able to destroy it. If it be said, that this is meant only of the utter destruction of the soul, which no man is able to effect, God having promised a resurrection to life again; this will appear to be only a wretched shift, to avoid the force of the plainest text. For in this sense our Saviour might have as well denied, that it is in the power of a man to kill the body of another man, that is, to destroy it utterly and finally, because God will raise it again at the last day. But our blessed Lord grants, that the body may be killed by man in the same sense, wherein he denies, that the soul can be destroyed by him; and therefore speaks not this only with reference to the resurrection.

The same our blessed Saviour assures our belief of this truth by his own example, when, being at the point of death, he said, Father, into thy hands I commend my spirit, Luke xxiii. 46.

He believed that he had a spirit, a superior soul, that after the death of his body, and the extinction of his animal soul, should still remain; and this he recommends to the gracious and safe custody of his Father. And lest we should think that this was a peculiar privilege of the soul of the Messias, St. Stephen, when dying, after the same manner com

mits his spirit to Christ himself, then exalted at the right hand of the Father, saying, Lord Jesus, receive my spirit, Acts vii. 59.

Again, how express are those words of Christ to the penitent thief on the cross; Verily I say unto thee, To-day shalt thou be with me in paradise? Luke xxiii. 43. This certainly is a plain promise to the thief, that on the very same day, wherein he died with Christ, his soul (for his body was to be taken down from the cross, and buried in the earth) should be with Christ in paradise. His soul therefore died not with his body, but, immediately after death, went with Christ's soul to paradise, eis tòv ïdiov tótov, to the proper place, for so great and illustrious a penitent. The subterfuges and shifts of heretics to evade this text are so perfectly ridiculous, that I must make myself ridiculous if I should mention them, much more if I should go about seriously to refute them.

Of

Farther, we read expressly in the New Testament of separate spirits of men, both good and bad. the spirits of good men departed, the divine author of the Epistle to the Hebrews speaks, when he tells us, that we Christians are joined not only to an innumerable company of angels, but also to the society of the spirits of just men made perfect, or that have finished their course, Heb. xii. 23. Of the spirits and souls of wicked men remaining after death St. Peter as expressly speaks, 1 Pet. iii. 19, 20. By which also he went and preached to the spirits in prison; which sometimes were disobedient, when the longsuffering of God waited in the days of Noah, &c. How and when Christ preached to those spi4 [τετελειωμένων.]

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[For the opinion of the Ante-Nicene Fathers concerning this VOL. I.

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rits in prison, is not my business at present to inquire but the text plainly enough affirms, that the spirits of those wicked men that were destroyed by the flood were then in being, and in prison too, that is, in the sad place of Judas, in the place and state of miserable souls, reserved, as in a gaol or dungeon, to the future judgment and execution.

St. Paul also most plainly teacheth, that a man (that is, his soul) may be absent from his body, and subsist without it, and in a state of separation from it, 2 Cor. v. 8, 9, 10. We are confident, I say, and willing rather to be absent from the body, and to be present with the Lord. Wherefore we labour, that, whether present or absent, we may be accepted of him. For we must all appear before the judgment seat of Christ, &c. The same St. Paul speaks of visions and revelations that he had seen and received in paradise and the third heaven; but whether he saw those visions in or out of his body, he professeth himself doubtful and uncertain, 2 Cor. xii. 2, 3, 4. I knew a man in Christ above fourteen years ago, (whether in the body, I cannot tell; or whether out of the body, I cannot tell: God knoweth;) such an one caught up to the third heaven. And I knew such a man, (whether in the body, or out of the body, I cannot tell: God knoweth ;) how that he was caught up into paradise, and heard unspeakable words, which it is not lawful for a man to utter. If the apostle had believed the vain philosophy of

passage, see Hermas, III. sim. 9. c. 16. Irenæus, IV. 27. Clem. Alex. Strom. III. 4. p. 526. et VI. 6. Excerpta Theod. ad fin. Clem. Alex. p. 973. Tertull. de Anima, c. 7, 55. Origen. c. Cels. II. 43. In Exod. §. 6. In Reg. Hom. 2. vol. 2. p. 497. In Psalm. p. 553. Hippol. de Antichristo, §. 26, 45.]

some men, that a man's soul cannot subsist without his body, he might very easily and most certainly have resolved his own doubt, and concluded that he received those visions and revelations in the body, seeing out of the body he could not so much as subsist.

But not to pursue any farther those particular texts of Scripture, that occasionally (and as it were by the by) dropped from the pens of the sacred writers, let us inquire into the whole state of the question concerning the soul's immortality and permanence after death, as it was controverted between the two great sects among the Jews, the Sadducees and Pharisees, in our Saviour's time, and as it was by the apostles.of Christ and by Christ himself professedly determined.

The dogmata and tenets of the Sadducees, opposite to the doctrine of the ancient church of the Jews, held by the Pharisees, are very briefly, yet fully enough, expressed by St. Luke, Acts xxiii. 8. For the Sadducees say there is no resurrection, neither angel, nor spirit: but the Pharisees confess both. The Sadducees believed that there is a God, though whether they believed God himself to be incorporeal is not without very great reasons questioned by some. But this is certain, that besides God, they believed nothing at all to subsist, but what is perceptible to sense. And hence they denied angels to be permanent substances, believing the angels of which they had read in Scripture to be only certain phantasms, occasionally formed by God, when he would at any time reveal his will to the sons of men, and afterwards vanishing and disappearing. And agreeably to the same hypothesis, they denied also any such beings as the spirits of men, distinct substances from

their bodies, and able to subsist without them. And hénce farther, by a necessary chain of consequences, they denied the resurrection of the bodies of men after death. For to what purpose should the body of man arise, if there were no soul in being, to which it should be reunited, and by which it should be again informed? And how could the same man at the resurrection receive the reward of his past actions, as the Pharisees rightly taught, if his soul did not subsist after death? For every man hath his individuation chiefly from his soul; and animus cujusque est quisque, "the soul of every man is the man." If therefore the soul of man itself be extinguished by death, at the raising of our dust, a new soul must be produced by God for every man, and so every man would be another man, and the same men could not receive the rewards and punishments of the world to come, due to their respective actions done in this life, which is the only supposed end of the resurrection. This a learned man more scholastically expresseth in these words: "If the soul be not a per"manent substance, but only a quality or crasis,

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which, when the body dies, perisheth and is extin

guished with it, it is impossible that the same nu"merical man should rise after death; because the "form or soul which perished, cannot be numerically "the same with the form or soul which is restored. "For this is numerically another, because between "that which perished, and this which is restored, "there intervened nihilum, a nonentity.' Now "whensoever between two extremes, a medium of a "diverse kind is interposed, those two cannot be nu

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merically the same, though they may be the same "specifically. For that is numerically one, which is