In the American community, to a very great extent, the belief in the immortality of the soul is supposed to be identical with the belief in the resurrection of the dead, taught by Christianity; and our Unitarians, with their rationalistic erudition, very generally hold that the peculiar and distinctive doctrine taught by our Lord was the immortality of the soul. But the immortality of the soul was believed by the whole ancient world, Gentile as well as Jewish; and, though questioned by some ancient and modern sophists, there never has been found a people who, as a body, were ignorant of it, or that denied it. All the ancient, as all modern superstitions recognize it. All believe the soul is imperishable, though many suppose it will be absorbed in the Great Fountain of Life, as a drop in the ocean—a misinterpretation of the Christian doctrine of union with God in the Light of Glory, as the ultimate end or final beatitude of the just. The doubt was as to the body, or the _umbra_, the material envelope and companion and external medium of the soul in this life. The gross outward body they believed returned to dust, and mingled with its kindred elements; but this _umbra_, shade, the manes of the dead, which all antiquity carefully distinguished from the soul, was also, for the most part, believed to be imperishable; but its reunion with the soul, I do not find the heathen world ever clearly asserting. In other words, the ancient heathen world, though it retained the primitive belief in the immortality of the soul, had lost belief in the resurrection of the body, and the reunion of soul and body, or at least only retained some traces of it in their doctrine of metempsychosis, or transmigration of souls. The peculiar Christian doctrine, or the doctrine so insisted on by the Apostles, was not the immortality of the soul, which was always presupposed, but the resurrection of the dead, the return to life, not of that which had not ceased to live, but of that which had died, to wit, the body. Hence the article in the Apostles’ Creed is not, I believe the immortality of the soul, but, I believe the resurrection of the body, _resurrectionem carnis_, the resurrection of the flesh; and to this belief, it must be remarked, that the spirit-manifestations afford no confirmation, and indeed they virtually contradict it. The distinguishing trait of Christian morality is charity, which is distinguished from philanthropy or benevolence, as a supernaturally infused virtue is distinguished from a mere human sentiment, but, in the minds of but too many of those who call themselves Christians, really confounded with it. The spirits were then, under the name of charity, to teach a philanthropic, sentimental, and purely human morality, for in doing so, they would seem to the mass of superficial Christians to be confirming the distinctive trait of Christian morality, and at the same time appealing to the morbid spirit of the age.