But the last chapter of Isaiah is likewise brought in, where it is said: “And it shall come to pass that from one new moon to another, and from one Sabbath to another, shall all flesh come to worship before me, saith the Lord. And they shall go forth and look upon the carcasses of the men that have transgressed against me; for their worm shall not die, neither shall their fire be quenched, and they shall be an abhorring unto all flesh.” Certainly, the casting out of these bodies to the view of all passengers, even to abhorring, and their being eaten by worms, can never mean that Moses taught the Jews the doctrine of the immortality of the soul; and the words “the fire shall not be quenched” can as little signify that the bodies so exposed to public view were to suffer eternal torments in hell. How can any one quote a passage in Isaiah to prove that the Jews in the time of Moses had adopted the doctrine of the immortality of the soul? According to the Hebrew computation, Isaiah prophesied about the year of the world 3380. Moses lived about the year 2500; therefore there was a distance of eight centuries between the one and the other. Now it is an insult to common sense, a downright mockery, thus to abuse the licence of quoting, by pretending to prove that a writer was of this or that opinion from a passage in another writer who lived eight hundred years after him, and who has not even made any mention of such opinion. It is beyond contradiction that the immortality of the soul, and rewards and punishments after death, are clearly and positively expressed and declared in the New Testament, and it is equally certain, that nothing concerning them is to be found in any one part of the five books of Moses. Notwithstanding that the Jews did afterwards embrace this doctrine, they were far from having a proper idea of the spirituality of the soul; they thought, in common with most other nations, that the soul was an uncompounded aerial light substance that retained the appearance of the body it had formerly animated; and hence came the term apparition, manes of the dead. Several fathers of the Church were of the same opinion. Tertullian, in his twenty-second chapter “_De Anima_,” expresses himself thus: “_Definimus animam Dei flatu natam, immortalem, corporalem, effigiatam, substantia simplicem_”; that is, “We define the soul a substance, formed by the breath of God; of an immortal, corporeal, figurative, and simple nature.” St. Irenæus, in the thirty-fourth chapter of his second book, says: “_Incorporales sunt animæ quantum ad comparationem mortalium corporum_.” “Souls are incorporeal in comparison of mortal bodies.” Adding, “Christ has taught us that the soul retains the image of the body”; “_Caracterem corporum in quo adoptantur_,” etc. Christ does not appear ever to have taught such a doctrine, and it is difficult to understand what St. Irenæus means in this passage.