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SEPARATION OF SPIRIT AND MATTER
161 Can there be anything more serious than this? There is nothing of your arm or easy-chair speculation in the apostolic language here. The apostle is in deadly earnest.
The body, the object of so many of our fond affections, is a hindrance in the soul's path and must be removed, because sin is associated with and centred in it. But is there any difficulty attaching to the destruction of the body? Can it not be put an end to by something that is destructive of life, e.g., by poison ? Aye! there is the rub; the difficulty is precisely here, and it is a very great difficulty! For death bị suicide does not effect a complete separation between the body and the soul, as it leaves two subtle inner vestments* adhering to the spirit, which is immediately drawn into another womb by the forces of magnetic attraction operating on it, through the electric material of those inner vestments, and is reborn elsewhere in due course of time with a new outer bodily cover. We must therefore distinguish this, the suicidal form of death, from the idea of death in the Pauline Epistle referred to above. The distinction consists in the cessation of sin, which is destroyed by dying in the proper way and which continues in the ordinary mode of demise. St. Paul, therefore, correctly says :-"For he that is dead is freed from sin ” (Romans v. 7). We must not, of course, take it to mean death in the normal sense ; what is meant is only for he that is dead to the body, etc. The problem, then, is how to die so as to be alive ever more thereafter ;
by the antagonism between soul and body... The body is by nature evil and plots against the soul. It is dead, so that each of us carries a corpse, and the Philosopher ... cares for that which is alive in him, the soul, and neglects that which is dead, the body, aiming only at this that that which is best, the soul, may not be maltreated by the evil and dead thing with which it is bound up.' This view logically carried out is the parent of asceticism. It had already collected the Essenes in Palestine, and perhaps the Therapeutæ in Egypt, and it was destined at a later period to people the Egyptian desert with monks" (Drummond's Philo Judæus, Vol. I. pp. 23-24).
* In the Bible these inner bodies are not specifically mentioned, but the whole doctrine is briefly given in a different garb. In Thessalonians (iv. 23) mention is made of "spirit, soul and body" which acquire great significance in the light of the following statement in the Epistle to Hebrews (see Chap. iv. 12):—"For the word of God is quick and powerful, and sharper, than any two-edged sword, piercing even to the dividing asunder of soul and spirit, and of the joints and marrow.. ." It is clear from this that what St. Paul regards as soul is the inner vestment, intervening between the purity of spirit and the gross material body, and that the separation between soul and spirit is possible by knowledge divine that cuts asunder more sharply than the sharpest sword.
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