The Destiny of the Soul: A Critical History of the Doctrine of a Future LifeAlger, William Rounseville
Religion
The Destiny of the Soul: A Critical History of the Doctrine of a Future Life
Alger, William Rounseville
Future life -- Christianity -- Bibliography; Future life -- Christianity -- History of doctrines
of God to teach astronomy, geology, chronology, and the operation
of organic forces, but to help educate men in morality and piety.
It is a religious, not a scientific, work. Some unknown Hebrew
poet, in the early dawn of remembered time, knowing little
metaphysics and less science, musing upon the fortunes of man, his
wickedness, sorrow, death, and impressed with an instinctive
conviction that things could not always have been so, casting
about for some solution of the dim, pathetic problem, at last
struck out the beautiful and sublime poem recorded in Genesis,
which has now for many a century, by Jews, Christians,
Mohammedans, been credited as authentic history. With his own
hands God moulds from earth an image in his own likeness, breathes
life into it, and new made man moves, lord of the scene, and lifts
his face, illuminated with soul, in submissive love to his
Creator. Endowed with free will, after a while he violated his
Maker's command: the divine displeasure was awakened, punishment
ensued, and so rushed in the terrible host of ills under which we
suffer. The problem must early arise: the solution is, to a
certain stage of thought, at once the most obvious and the most
satisfactory conceivable. It is the truth. Only it is cast in
imaginative, not scientific, form, arrayed in emblematic, not
literal, garb. The Greeks had a lofty poem by some early unknown
author, setting forth how Prometheus formed man of clay and
animated him with fire from heaven, and how from Pandora's box the
horrid crew of human vexations were let into the world. The two
narratives, though most unequal in depth and dignity, belong in
the same literary and philosophical category. Neither was intended
as a plain record of veritable history, each word a naked fact,
but as a symbol of its author's thoughts, each phrase the
metaphorical dress of a speculative idea.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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