Let us hear Paul once, on this subject. “Therefore we are always confident, knowing that whilst we are at home in the body, we are absent from the Lord.” In a few words, he says, “Wherefore we labor, that, whether present or absent, we may be accepted of Him.” 2 Cor. v. 9. How could we be “present with the Lord,” and “accepted of Him,” when absent from the body, if there be not an inner spiritual man, who will exist separate, or absent from the body? No man living can ever reconcile this passage with the preposterous theory, that when a man dies, he has no conscious existence. To this we add only one more scripture. When John, in the Island of Patmos, was in awful and sublime vision, and saw the whole panorama of the future ages passing in review, he says, “I saw under the altar, the souls of them who were beheaded for the word of God and for the testimony of Jesus Christ, and they cried and said, how long, O Lord God Almighty, holy, just and true, dost thou not avenge us of our blood on them who dwell on the earth.” Here were souls, alive, looking back to what had been done on earth, and looking forward to what would be done in future. They had not lost their identity nor memory, forgotten the past nor distrusted the future, but were alive. The intermediate state is, therefore, a conscious state, the righteous are comforted, and at rest with the Lord, in Abraham’s bosom, or Paradise; the wicked are in _Tartareous_, in prison, tormented, reserved unto the judgment of the great day, with the angels that sinned.