Key of Knowledge

SR No.: 006702
Original Sutra Author: N/A
Author: Champat Rai Jain
Publisher: ZZZ Unknown
Publication Year: 1919
Total Pages: 1204
Language: English
Classification: Book_English
File Size: 25 MB

Page 290

THE KINGDOM OF GOD,
269
(2) The partriarchs are dead, (3) Some do not wake up from perpetual sleep,
and
(4) Some, who are accounted worthy of resurrection, become the sons of God and cannot die any more.
Now, in respect of the first of these propositions, it is easy to see that death does not imply absolute extinction, in any sense ; for the substances of nature subsist by their own nature, and cannot possibly be conceived as subject to annihilation. Both the soul and particles of matter are deathless for this reason. Hence, the idea of death only applies to bodies, or organisms, which are held together, for a time, by the presence of the soul, and which begin to dissolve and disintegrate on its departure. Therefore, in so far as death implies the extinction of that which was and is not now, it only means the departure of the soul from the body of matter in which it was ensouled. Hence, the partriarchs, who were and are not now, are, in so far as their personal forms are concerned, dead, though their souls, not being perishable, still continue to live in some form or other. In plain language, the patriarchs are dead and no longer alive as Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, and so forth ; but their souls still exist, in some form or other, in the universe.
As regards the latter part of the proposition, namely, that God is not the God of the dead, its literal reading is out of the question, for the speaker certainly could not have meant that his God was in the habit of disowning a devotee the moment he was dead. What it actually means is that Godhood, being the perfection in manifestation of the potential attributes of the soul,