What is Jainism

Author(s): Champat Rai Jain
Publisher: Champat Rai Jain

Page 65

RELIGION AND COMPARATIVE RELIGION
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with wickedness of which the Titans are the emblem. By innate impurity men are condemned to the cycle of births and deaths, from which they can escape and be made fit for communion with Gods only by purification and initiation in the Mysteries."
This again is quite plain, and needs no comment from me. In the Bible the resurrected Soul says of himself :
“I am he who liveth, and was dead, and behold I am alive for ever-more and have the keys of hell and of death."-Rev. i. 18.
Hippolytus, one of the early Church Fathers of the ante-Nicene period, distinctly describes the soul as a simple substance, and as such immortal. Clement of Alexandria, Gregory Thaumaturgus, and others also held the same opinion. Origen says :
“The mental acumen of those who are in the body seems to be blunted by the nature of corporeal matter. If they are out of the body then they will altogether escape the annoyance resulting from a disturbance of that kind. At last by the gradual disappearance of the material nature, death is both swallowed up and even at the end exterminated ... It follows that we must believe our condition at some future time to be incorporeal ... and thus it appears that then also the need of the bodies will cease ... The whole nature of bodily things will be dissolved into nothing."
St. Paul teaches :--
“I beseech you therefore, brethren, by the mercies of God, that ye present your bodies a living sacrifice, holy, acceptable unto God, which is your reasonable service.” -- Rom. xii. 1.
In Colossians (chap. ii. verse 11) there is a reference to the putting off the body of flesh by the circumcision of Christ, which means the purification of the heart. Clement of Alexandria tells us :
“The Saviour himself enjoins, 'watch,' as much as to say *Study to live and endeavour to separate the soul from the body.'"
In one of his many Epistles St. Paul describes the antagonism between the spirit and the flesh, the one being contrary to the other, and finally winds up with the most impassioned ejaculation “O wretched man that I am ! who shall deliver me from the body of this death ?"