ARTICLE V.

SCIENCE AND CHRIST.

BY WILLIAM W. KINSLEY, WASHINGTON, D. C., AUTHOR OF "VIEWS ON VEXED QUESTIONS."

AVAILING ourselves thus of the light of modern science in our attempted explanation of the eternal destiny of souls, we can but conclude, first, that whoever stubbornly rebels against these inexorable systems of law under which every one is necessarily placed at the very birth of being, and persists in that rebellion, which he has the power to do; whoever, in other words, refuses to hold in vitalizing subjection the under forces of his most complicate nature, and to yield lovingly to the vitalizing influences of the upper and divine, will under these very laws be finally pushed out of his present state of self-conscious being and lose forever his gift of sovereignty. If the body, the intellect, and the spirit are, as we have attempted to show, not only organisms in themselves but parts of the great world-organism, dissonance, disorder in any particular, will, unless arrested, spread confusion throughout the whole, and end eventually in total wreck.

Science thus reveals the awful fact of an impending doom of utter annihilation of self-consciousness and sovereignty to every incorrigible rebel in God's realm, for the very exigencies of the case demand this, the very fact that we are organized units, and as such are composed of complemental parts, having an intimate interplay and interdependence, and that we are parts of still wider organisms, and they of wider still, until the bounds of the human race

are reached, and it may be the very bounds of being, as the planets and solar systems and sun clusters of the universe circle at last orbit within orbit, in one vast sweep, in grand majestic harmony around God's central throne.

We witness every day the body as an organism passing under the doom of annihilation through the disintegrating power of the under forces which have broken away from the control of the upper. Faculty after faculty of the intellect we have seen disappear through violation of the laws of mind, until, finally, all evidence of any continued thoughtlife ceases. Science has furnished a strong presumption at least, through the analogies of nature, that the soul also is organic, and must depend for continued self-conscious existence, on the harmonious interplay of its parts, on the maintenance of its mastery over the under forces and its implicit and ready obedience to the upper. There are, as we have seen, no other conditions of liberty, and without liberty there can be no perpetuity of any organic life. It is now a rapidly growing belief among Bible students, that the final annihilation of the conscious self-hood of the incorrigibly wicked is revealed in God's word as well as in his works. Converts to this creed are now numbered by tens of thousands in the Christian churches. I was surprised to find, when my attention was called to it, how all the passages bearing on this subject were susceptible of such an interpretation, and that the vast majority of them fairly excluded any other. The symbols used are symbols of destruction, and not of eternal torment. It is said that the wicked are cast in where the worm dieth not, and the fire is not quenched. But the worm and the fire are instruments of annihilation, and the obvious meaning is that their work will go on uninterruptedly until it is complete, until the organisms on which they are delegated to feed have been utterly consumed. While there is food for the worm

or fuel for the fire they will gnaw and burn; but, as the processes of destruction are progressive, that on which they prey is constantly diminishing, and unless there is being wrought a perpetual miracle of creation, as in the liver of the fabled Prometheus on which the vulture fed, an end must surely come. This figure, and indeed all other figures in the Sacred Record illustrating the final condition of those who persist in their disobedience, are robbed of their rhetorical force, are carried wholly out of their natural meaning unless this be their prophecy of doom.

I would not be understood as considering it possible for a human spirit to be banished, even by divine power, absolutely out of all being-be reduced to nothingness, but only out of a state of organized, sovereign, self-conscious being; for scientists, as indeed all careful thinkers, while conceding that any particular form of existence may be made to permanently pass away, regard it as axiomatic that an entity can never come up out of nonentity, or ever be returned to it.

Many entertain the belief, born of hope it may be, that God is too kind and sympathetic to suffer any soul to be lost. Unquestionably he would rescue every one, had he the power. The disintegration of the body he can arrest by sheer force of will, but the decay of the moral nature is the sad consequence of the exercise of a will as sovereign as his own. Without its consent he cannot stop the process, except by destroying the life; for, as I have said, moral life is made up of sovereign acts of will. Liberty is its vital air. God can compel our obedience; but, so soon as compulsion begins, responsibility ends. The soul, after that, becomes a characterless machine. Unless divine love can win back the rebel, his moral life must gradually die out, in accordance with spiritual laws which it is not in the compass of even God's power to alter or annul. Though God cannot stay this destructive process against our will, however

his sympathetic heart may be wrung with grief, as was Christ's when he wept over favored yet fated Jerusalem, still, while there survives the faintest spark of hope of the soul's reclaim, his spirit will no doubt strive with all its kindliest influences. I cannot see why the mere fact of physical death should be a signal to cease. Not until the heart has grown stony in sin, not until moral death has come, will God's hope perish, and his pleading spirit, with all its loving patience, be finally grieved away. Until then he will stand and knock at the door of the human heart.

Many profound scholars now affirm that it is nowhere revealed in Sacred Scripture that the body's death ends the soul's probation. Surely sound philosophy does not teach it. But that probation will certainly have an end sometime, -before death it may be for some souls, after death for others, the immutable laws of spiritual growth and decay have most certainly decreed.

Thus, from the phenomena and principles which the researches of science have brought to light, we are irresistibly led to the conclusion, that in some far future all discords will cease throughout God's universe; that all souls which stoutly stand out against his overtures of love, refuse to come into harmony with the great world-organism of which they were purposed to form a part, withstand the spiritual vitalizing forces whose mission it is to organize all things into a divine order, will, through this perverse persistence, be finally pushed out of self-conscious, moral being; that the time is coming when that notable prophecy shall be fulfilled which declares that before Christ, who became obedient unto death, who is the perfect embodiment of the divine order, and of the divine love, the central heart, the mysterious vitalizing power of this vast world-organism,—that before this Emmanuel, the Mighty Counsellor, the Prince of peace, in that great day when the divine plans shall have

reached their final consummation, all knees shall bow and all tongues confess.

Does the doctrine that Christ was divine, and that he constituted the second person in the Trinity, contain any confusion of thought as to the true nature of personality, or in any way antagonize the conclusions of science on this the most perplexing of questions, or will modern discoveries in mental phenomena be found here also to be Christianity's most helpful allies? There are three widely different opinions prevailing among evangelical theologians as to Christ's nature: first, that he never possessed any human soul, but that a human body simply was animated for a season by the Divine Spirit; second, that, while he indeed had a soul, this was so completely and permanently blended with the Divine Spirit that they together constituted a single new and unique personality which will remain intact through all the eternal ages; third, that Christ was of a dual nature, lived a dual life, had two infinitely different spirits alternately animating and controlling his body, sending electric waves of thought and emotion over the brain, that most delicate and mysterious of all its organs, that at times only the human was manifest with its many weaknesses and limitations, its longings and its griefs, and then again only the divine appeared, teaching with authority, forgiving sins, scanning the secret intents of the heart, lifting the curtains of the future, healing the sick, restoring the blind, even raising the dead.

I seriously question whether the first two opinions can bear the searching scrutiny of this critical age, and as neither of them embodies my own belief, I will not now take time to state their grounds of defence. The third, however, seems to me to be in perfect accord, not only with the facts of history, but with the conclusions of science. Multitudinous instances are well authenticated of one personality being for a time completely submerged by another, through that marvellous power denominated mesmeric influence.