Having thus artfully introduced the idea that the spirit was created for the occasion, Mr. L. takes up this reasoning which shows that if the spirit is conscious after leaving the body, it must have been before it entered it, and, applying to it a term doubtless suggested by his own feelings in view of the assumptions to which he was himself obliged to resort, calls it silly. Nevertheless here is the rock on which their exposition of this text inevitably and hopelessly founders. There is another consideration not without its bearing on this question. The words, “And the spirit shall return to God who gave it,” are spoken promiscuously of all mankind. They apply alike to the righteous and wicked. If the spirit survives the death of the body, the spirits of the righteous would, as a natural consequence, ascend to God, in whose presence they are promised fullness of joy. But do the spirits of the wicked go to God also? For what purpose? The immediate destination usually assigned to them is the lake of fire. Is it said that they first go to God to be judged? Then we ask, Where does the Bible once affirm that a person is judged when he dies? On the contrary, the Scriptures invariably place the Judgment in the future, and assert in the most explicit terms that God has appointed a day for that purpose. Acts 17:31. Thus the Bible doctrine of the Judgment is directly contradicted by this view. According to the Scriptures no man has yet received his final judgment; yet, according to the view under examination, the spirits of all who have ever died, good and bad, righteous and wicked, have gone to God. For what purpose have the spirits of the wicked gone to him? Are they there still? Does God so deal with rebels against his government--give them Heaven from one to six thousand years, more or less, and hell afterward? Away with a view which introduces such inconsistencies into God’s dealings with his creatures. How infinitely preferable that view which alone the record warrants; that is, that the spirit that returns to God who gave it is the breath of life, that agency by which God vivifies and sustains these physical frames; since this, so far as the record goes, is just what God did give to man in the beginning, since the definition of the term sustains such an application, since this spirit, without doing violence to either thought or language, can return to God in the same sense in which it came from him, and, above all, since this view harmonizes all the record, and avoids those inconsistencies and contradictions in which we find ourselves inevitably involved the very moment we undertake to make the spirit mean a separate entity, conscious in death and immortal in its nature. CHAPTER VIII. THE FORMATION OF THE SPIRIT.