"In the sure and certain hope of a glorious resurrection." What is to
arise? The disembodied soul? But you say it is already with God. What is
to arise? It is the body. It is more. It is he who is dead--who sleeps;
he whom we have buried there. Whatever our creeds may say, we do not, we
cannot ever understand the soul without the body. Not _a_ body, but
_the_ body. We believe not in the life of a soul previous to the body.
They are born together, and they die together. If they live hereafter it
must be together. For they are one.
Never be deceived by theories or professions. No one in the West has
ever understood the soul without the body, no one can do so. The
conception is wanting. We play with the theory in words as we do with
the fourth dimension. But who ever realised either?
But with the Oriental it is different. He believes in the migration of
souls. They pass from body to body. He can realise this--somehow, I know
not--but he can. Those who have read my "Soul of a People" will remember
that they not only believe it but _know_ it. They are sure of it
because it has happened to each one, and he can remember his former
lives. This comes not from Buddhism, because Buddhist theory denies the
existence of soul at all, nor from Brahminism. It is the Oriental's
instinct. He does not, I think, ever realise a soul apart from any body,
but he can and does realise a soul exhibited first in one body then in
another, as a lamp shining through different globes.
Therefore, when a Christian tells him of the resurrection of the body he
cannot understand. "Which body," he asks, "for I have had so many?"
Neither can he understand a Christian heaven of bodies risen from the
earth. His heaven is immaterial. It is the Great Peace, where life has
passed away. That he can understand. For neither can he conceive a life
of the soul without some body. When perfection is reached and the last
weary body done with, then life, too, is gone--life and all passion, all
love, all happiness, all fear, all the emotions that are life. They are
gone, and there is left only the Great Peace.
Our heaven grows out of our instincts as his does out of his instincts.
Our dead without their bodies would not be those we love, and hence our
heaven, where we shall recognise each other and love them as we did. I
did not understand heaven when I read books, but out of men have I
learned what I wished to know. Reason alone can tell you nothing, but
sympathy will tell you all things.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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