"And when he had said this he fell asleep."
--ACTS VII. 60.
At death, as we have seen, the spirit and the soul are separated from the
body, and, still united together, are launched into the unseen world. For
though the soul is not the spirit, these two form the incorporeal parts
of our compound nature, are the two immaterial elements of that trinity
of life,--body, soul, spirit, which are united to make one human being.
They both survive death. For death is the separation of the soul from
the body, not of the soul from the spirit. But it must be remembered
that the spirit, when at death it is, in company with the soul, withdrawn
from the body, passes into the Intermediate State, shaped and stamped
with the impress which the life on earth has fastened upon it. The
spirit enters the new life, either enslaved, disfigured, degraded,
dishonoured by the sensual soul, or else strong, free, true, purified in
its victory over the flesh. It carries with it, in short, the character
which in life it has acquired.
It may be well to fall into the usage of ordinary speech, and speak of
that which survives death as the _soul_, so long as we keep in mind what
is really meant, viz., that it is the soul _united with the spirit_ which
survives death.
When, then, we say that the disembodied soul enters the Intermediate
Life, we are bound to consider in what condition it enters it. For
people sometimes argue thus: "Yes! I grant that there will be an interval
or waiting time between death and the Day of Judgment. But then, during
that time, is not the soul asleep? Surely the dying are said to fall
asleep. Then, if asleep, they are unconscious, and to the unconscious
soul the Intermediate State will seem to last but for an instant, and
will no sooner be entered upon than it will be practically at an end. For
complete insensibility to the passing and movement of time is one of the
effects of complete unconsciousness. And, in truth, is it not the case
that the Bible over and over again speaks of death as a state of sleep or
taking rest? {41a} Thus the Intermediate State is in fact a blank. The
eyes close in death, and they remain closed till they open to gaze upon
the glories of the Resurrection, and the terrors of the judgment seat of
Christ. Does not our own Prayer Book sanction this view in her Service
for the Burial of the Dead? {41b} And do we not in common language
ourselves express the same belief when we give to the resting place of
the bodies of the dead the name of 'cemetery,' or sleeping place?"
The answer to all this is that the language which represents death as a
profound slumber is language applicable enough to describe what befalls
the body, but is quite inapplicable when it is used of the soul. Sleep
is distinctly a physical and corporeal function. The soul cannot be
liable to or affected by corporeal influences when it is separated from
the body. The soul cannot sleep. It is the body, in the hushed
stillness of the chamber of death, which seems, now that the last
struggle is over, and the spasm of dying leaves it motionless, to be
sleeping. But even in life, while the body sleeps, the soul is awake. It
is often, during the sleep of the body, even more active than during the
waking hours. In dreams the soul is busy with its fancies. Thoughts
flit this way and that through the mind of the sleeper. Indeed, the body
is more often a hindrance rather than a help to the activities of
thought. To lose all consciousness of the existence of the body, to be
as if the body for the time were not,--this is to set the mind thinking
in freedom unrestrained. For the body and the conscious sensation of the
presence of the body seem to serve to drag down and encumber the energy
of thought. A sound through the ear, a sight presented to the eye, a
touch, an ache,--these break off sustained thinking. No wonder, when the
body sleeps profoundly, the soul is often then most active. And will not
this be so when the profoundest sleep of all falls upon the body?
It is clear that the disembodied soul, if we may again go back to the
Bible, is not by our Lord regarded as in a state of lethargy and dull
unconsciousness. "To-day," said He, "shalt thou be with Me in Paradise."
If this promise was meant to be a blessing and a solace it was meant to
be consciously _felt_ as a blessing and a solace. How else could the
thief have been in any true sense with Christ? S. Paul said, "For me to
live is Christ, to die is gain." {43} Gain! Wherein could it be a gain
to him to die, if to die was to exchange that eager, active vitality, so
full of welcome pain and happy suffering, so full of a service, whose
fruits were rich in blessing,--to exchange all this for dull heaviness
and blank oblivion?
In the narrative of the rich man and Lazarus, which, as we saw, describes
the Intermediate State, the rich man is said to have "lifted up his eyes
being in torments." So, then, his pain was felt. He was conscious; he
reflected; he remembered; he spoke. Once more, in a remarkable passage
in the First Epistle of S. Peter, to which, on a future occasion, I shall
again refer, our Lord is spoken of as "having been put to death in the
flesh, but quickened," _i.e._, made alive, "in spirit" {44}; words which,
whatever the context may mean, can only have the force of bringing the
effect of death in its relation to Christ's human body into sharp
contrast with its effect in relation to His human spirit. In respect of
His human body He was put to death; but in respect of His human spirit He
was quickened or lived, lived still, in Paradise, though His body was
dead. I need not, I think, refer to other passages. It is abundantly
clear, both from the necessity of the thing, and from the obvious
testimony of the Bible, that the soul still lives, still is awake, still
is conscious.
What, then, follows from the soul's consciousness in and through the
passage of death? Obviously this,--that the life of the soul goes on,
and is therefore the life of the same soul, sustained without break or
interruption, after death, by an unsuspended continuity of the
consciousness of personal identity. For of what is the soul still
conscious? Of itself. The life therefore of the soul after death is one
with the life of the soul before death. The same soul lives on. The
only change to it is the absence of the body, which has been withdrawn
from it, and is laid in the ground, and dissolves into dust. And this
continuous consciousness of identity means that the soul's character is
preserved unchanged and unaffected by the shock of the separation. For a
character it had been contracting during its sojourn in the body, a
character of its own. The spiritualized soul before death is a
spiritualized soul after death. The animalized soul before death remains
after death an animalized soul. The righteous is righteous still. The
holy, the pure, the faithful, the devout, the true, are true, and devout,
and faithful, and pure, and holy still. The wicked and tainted soul is
still wicked and tainted when it enters the unseen, and begins its life
in the Intermediate State. It is on the other side what it was on this
side. Death,--the crisis and shock of death,--makes no change, no other
change than this, that it strips off the outer clothing which enveloped
the soul. It leaves the soul the same, no better, no worse. This is
what is implied in the personal identity of the soul. It means the
continuity of consciousness, and therefore continuity of character.
Do we cling to some vague and fanciful expectation that the mere act of
dying, so to call it, will itself work a great change upon the soul, will
blot out our sins, will clear away our imperfections, will in an instant
heal the wounds and scars, which evil habits, long inured in us, have
wrought upon the soul? It will do nothing of the sort. We shall be no
better, no holier on the other side than we were on this, no more fitted
for heaven than when we died. If this be so,--and, so far as we can see,
it must be so,--how much does it behove us to fear greatly the peril we
incur by a careless and GOD-forgetting life! "Israel doth not know,"
said the prophet, "My people doth not consider." {47} That was the pity
of it. It was the thoughtlessness, and the ignorance which came of it,
that ruined the nation.
Oh! that in life we would look things in the face more steadily! Would
that we were ready to take heed how surely we are, day by day, shaping
and moulding our character for good or for evil, a character which no
shock of dissolution will affect, which will be ours when the crisis
comes to end our probation here, and to usher us, as we are and have
become, into that unseen life beyond!