CHAPTER XV. GATHERED TO HIS PEOPLE. The pleasing doctrine that man can never die, though unfortunate in its parentage, is very tenacious of its life. In treating this subject in previous chapters, we have found that the record of man’s creation brings to view no immortal element as entering into his being; that the Bible, in its use of the terms immortal and immortality, never employs them to express an attribute inherent in man’s nature; that no description of soul and spirit, and no signification of the original words, will sustain the present popular definition of these terms; that the soul and spirit, though spoken of in the Bible, in the aggregate, seventeen hundred times, are never once said to be immortal or never-dying; and that no text in which these words are supposed to be employed in such a manner as to show that they signify an ever-conscious, immortal principle, can possibly be interpreted to sustain such a doctrine. Yet the dogma of natural immortality, very reluctantly yields the ground. To a twentieth proof text it will cling even the more tenaciously, if the preceding nineteen are all swept away. Besides the texts already noticed, there are a few other passages behind which it seeks refuge; and with alacrity we follow it into all its hiding-places, confident that in no passage in all the Bible can it find a shelter, but that into every one which it claims as its own, it has entered, not by right of possession, but as an intruder and a usurper. Behind the obituaries of the patriarchs it seeks to shield itself. It is claimed, for instance, that the death of Abraham is recorded in such a manner as to show that his conscious existence did not cease with his earthly life. We might justly insist on their going farther back and taking the recorded close of the lives of the antediluvian patriarchs as the basis of their argument. One of these, Enoch, was translated to Heaven without seeing death; and all the others, according to popular belief, went to Heaven just as effectually, through death. But how different is their record. Of Enoch it is said that he “was not; for God took him;” while of the others it is said, And they “died.” Surely these two records do not mean the same thing, and Enoch, whom God took, and who is consequently alive in Heaven, must be, judging from the record, in a different condition from those who died. But to return to the case of Abraham. The record of his death reads: “Then Abraham gave up the ghost, and died in a good old age, an old man and full of years, and was gathered to his people.” On this verse, Landis, p. 130, thus remarks:--