PCA Historical Center

SERMON.
by the Rev. Thomas Dwight Witherspoon,
Pastor of the Second Presbyterian Church, Memphis, Tenn.
[published in The Southern Pen and Pulpit, April 1868, pages 50-52.]

THE IMMORTALITY OF THE SOUL.

If a man die shall he live again?-Job, xiv : 14

            Next to the question of the existence of God, the inquiry of the text is certainly the most momentous and significant that can awake attention.  If it be true, that apart from the belief of a personal Spirit, seated upon the throne of the universe, infinite in holiness and unlimited in power, the very thought of religion is a mockery-its very name a delusion ; it is none the less true, that, apart from the belief of man's immortality, all religious convictions, and all religious inquiries, become matters of but secondary and trivial importance.  If, when these eyes, that now beam with intelligence, close at the touch of death, they close never again to open to the beauties, either of this world or of another ; if, when these hearts, that now beat high and warm, grow still and pulseless at the icy touch of the dread messenger, they are nevermore to throb in unison with aught that is holy, and generous and good ; if, when the dust returns to the earth as it was, the spirit is dissipated into thin air, or remanded to the womb of non-entity ; then, indeed do all the claims of religion become matters of the most shadowy moment and of the most insignificant importance.  If man's spiritual vision, like his material, is to be bounded by the things of time and sense, if no shadow from the mysterious future is to be projected upon the present, if no light from heaven is to illumine the darkness of earth ; then as well may the pages of God's Holy Word be closed, the notes of the Sabbath bell be hushed, the lips of the living minister sealed, and the aisles of the sanctuary left desolate and lone.  Religion will have lost its power.  Its incentives and its sanctions will alike be gone.  The inquiry what shall we eat and what shall we drink and wherewithal shall we be clothed, will assume a paramount importance.  Man's highest wisdom will be felt to be, "Let us eat, and drink for to-morrow we die."

            We propose therefore to occupy a little time in examining the evidences of the immortality of the soul, and in establishing the fact that it does not perish, with the body, but abides in its conscious existence and its personal identity forever.

            I.  And, first, it deserves to be considered that the soul being an immaterial substance, simple and uncompounded, and not like the body, an organism of material and separable parts, the fact that death destroys the body, creates no presumption that it destroys the soul.  The only power which death possesses, in so-far as our knowledge extends, is, (as Bishop Butler in his analogy has so conclusively shown), the power of decomposition, or the resolution of the compound substance into the simple elements of which it is composed.  Death separates the soul from the body and thus decomposes or dissolves man's complex nature.  Death decomposes the body, by resolving it into the simple elements, the fluids and minerals and gases of which it is composed.  But death does not annihilate the body.  It does not destroy a single particle of its original matter.  It only separates those particles, so that they enter into new combinations and constitute new organisms and forms of life.  The truth is, that practically, we know nothing whatever of annihilation.  Not an atom of matter, insofar as we know, has been annihilated since the world began.  There are many changes which look like annihilation.  As Job so beautifully says, "The mountain falling, cometh to naught and the rock is removed out of his place.  The waters wear the stones.  Thou washest away the things that grow out of the dust of the earth."  The fires of conflagration leap upon our dwellings, and in a few moments where the stately palace reared its graceful front, remains as it were but a handful of dust.  But has the matter of which the dwelling was composed been annihilated?  Not at all.  Part of it has fallen to the ground in the form of ashes, part of it has passed into the air in the form of vapors and gases ; part of it has become incorporated with the air itself by a new combination.  But in one form or other, every particle of the original matter remains, and if these particles could be brought together and reunited, the dwelling would again appear.  It is so in reference to all the changes that take place around us.  Matter in its forms and combinations is unstable and transient.  Matter in its essence is immutable and imperishable.  If it be destroyed at all, it must be by a direct fiat of the omnipotent one resolving its elements into that original nothingness from which they came at His creative word.

            But the soul is like these ultimate particles of matter, a simple substance, incomplex in its nature and incapable of being resolved into anything simpler than itself.  If it perish at all, it must perish by annihilation and as we have seen, annihilation is something which we do not know ever to have taken place in reference to anything that God has made.  To suppose, therefore, that the soul perishes at death, is to suppose that the divine power is at that moment put forth miraculously in an act of annihilation-an act of which we have no evidence, for which we can see no reason, and to which all the analogy of God's providence stands opposed.

            II.  It deserves, again, to be considered that if the soul perishes at death, man subserves no purpose worthy of himself.  He accomplishes no end commensurate with the scale on which his being is projected.  Man is the masterpiece of the visible creation.  His exalted nature, his munificent endowments of head and heart, his enlarged capacities and transcendent yearnings of spirit, would bespeak for him a grander destiny, a more enlarged sphere and a more prolonged period of existence, than have been given to the inferior orders of creation beneath Him.  But if the soul dies with the body, then it must be confessed that while everything else lives long enough to develop its capacities and perfect its being, and achieve a destiny worthy of itself, man alone is like an untimely birth.  His life is unsatisfactory and abortive.  He is cut down at the very beginning of his course of development.  The fires of genius are extinguished in the very moment of their kindling.  Full of sublime aspirations and immortal hopes, he passes away leaving behind him unemployed capacities, and unexplored resources of being, in comparison with which all that he had achieved, is but vanity and dust.

            Nay, more than this, if this life be all of man's existence, the very simplest elements of nature around him become invested with a grandeur superior to his own.  The acorn that man presses with his foot beneath the sod, springs up a living thing to breast the storms of a hundred winters and abide in its sinewy strength, after he and his children's children are sleeping in the dust at its foot.  The fountain that leaped up in our childhood, in whose rippling waters we laved our boyish feet, will laugh on in its sportive merriment, when our names, and memories and all that was ever known of us, shall have been forgotten.  The moon that looks down upon us in her silvery beauty at night, is the same moon to which Job was once tempted to kiss his hand in token of reverence, and the stars that now peep forth from their quiet retreat, are the same stars that kindled their watch fires over the first sleeping pair in the Garden of Eden.  All nature abides in its strength and grandeur as age succeeds upon age, while man, poor creature of an hour, sports his brief period upon the stage and then passes away.  Truly if this be all of man's existence, he may well say with the author of Ecclesiastes, "Then I looked upon all the work that my hands had wrought, and upon all the labor that I had labored to do ; and behold, all was vanity and vexation of spirit, and there was no profit under the sun."

            III.  The belief of man's immortality is common to all nations and all times.  Not only where the light of Divine revelation has dawned, but in the depths of heathenism, and under the dim light of nature, the apprehension of a future state has been entertained and cherished.  Homer, the oldest of the writers of Greece, presents to our view the spirits of his departed heroes, still living, dwelling in Elysian bowers, possessing the same consciousness and exercising the same faculties as when here upon the earth.  Cicero says, "That the spirit continues after death we hold by the common consent of all nations."  Seneca, "I take pleasure not only in inquiring into, but, also in believing in the immortality of the soul, I resign myself to the glorious hopes which it brings, expecting to remove into that immensity of time and into the possession of endless ages."

            But it is not necessary to multiply passages.  The Hades of the Greeks ; the Orcus of the Romans, the transmigration of the Brahmin, and the hunting ground of the Indian, all proclaim the same great fact, that there is in man in instinct of immortality-that there is a voice within him which whispers that the soul does not perish when the body returns to dust.  And answering to this voice within the soul, there have been echoes of the same great truth from the natural world around.  There is a voice in every grain of corn which falls into the earth and after a temporary burial springs to life again.  There is a voice in every sunrise, speaking of that glorious morning yet to dawn upon the dark, silent, sorrowful night of the grave.

            There is a voice in every springtime whose unfolding petals burst through the fetters of the winter's desolating snows.  There is a voice in every moth that tears away the silken winding sheet and comes forth from its temporary grave, a bright and beautiful thing to sport in the sunshine upon its golden wings.  And thus with an instinct within proclaiming man immortal, and with these analogies from the outward world confirming the belief, man has ever been, except when warped by prejudice of education, a believer in the immortality of the soul.

            IV.  Man's moral nature contains clear and unambiguous testimony to the immortality of the soul.  Conscience reveals distinctly the fact that there is a great Lawgiver and Judge under whose government we are placed, and to whom we are responsible for every action of life.  It reveals with equal clearness the truth that after death, we must appear before Him in judgment and be rewarded or punished according as we have obeyed or disobeyed His law.  This, if we mistake not is the proof of man's immortality which exacts most influence upon the minds of men. 

            It lays hold of the deepest and strongest principles of our nature.  It is the voice of the great Lawgiver, speaking to the soul of duty, of destiny and of danger.  Its words are words of authority and power.  This thought of an approaching tribunal overcomes the soul.  Doubt and cavil shrink away, abashed from the presence of these convictions which awaken all the moral powers into activity.  Associating itself with conceptions of the Divine Holiness and of the majesty of the divine law, with convictions of guilt and forebodings of divine wrath, it becomes a belief with which the soul dares not trifle.  It may be obscured for a time by the sophistries of infidelity.  It may be inoperative for a time in the rush of business, or the giddy maze of pleasure.  But, if it sleeps at all, it sleeps only like those volcanic fires that smoulder beneath the earth, for a time, to break forth with increased violence when their pent up flames find egress from their prison.  Let the hour of disappointment, or adversity, or sickness come, and this belief of a future state will reassert its tremendous authority ; will terrify all opposition into silence ; will dissipate with a breath the vain sophistries of infidelity ; and wring from the soul in agony of spirit the confession of its ruin and wretchedness.  Let conscience but speak with untrammeled voice, and there will no longer be any doubt of man's immortality.

            V.  The last argument for the immortality of the soul to which I shall ask your attention, is found in the intense longing of the soul after something nobler and better than anything that this world has to give.  Who of us has not realized at times in our own lives, the springing up in our minds of thoughts so elevated and sublime, the welling up in our hearts of desires so pure and fervent, that we were conscious at the very time that they were thoughts and desires never to be fully gratified upon this earth.  Who of us has not sometimes felt in the intense yearnings of our souls, as if all the knowledge that is gained in this world were but the stepping stone to that more enlarged and expanded sphere upon which our souls desire and hope to enter?

            Who of us has not sometimes looked out upon the quiet closing of a beautiful autumnal day, as the clouds, tinged with the golden hues of the sunset, banked themselves like mountain tops against the clear blue sky, and imagined as we followed on from peak to peak that far, far away where the golden glory was streaming over the most distant summit, we beheld faintly imaged to our faith, the very battlements and domes of the City which hath foundations, whose Builder and whose Maker is God.  Or who has not sometimes stood at night beneath the blue canopy of heaven, all studded with its brilliant jewels, and wandered in fancy through the orbits of those dazzling worlds, thinking of planets and suns and systems, hoping, aye longing, for the time when our spirit shall trace not in fancy but in fact the course of their majestic and ceaseless revolutions, when in a higher state of existence, our ears shall drink in the notes of melody, as

                                                            "In reasons' ear they all rejoice

                                                                                And utter forth their glorious voice

                                                                                Forever singing as they shine

                                                                                The hand that made us is Divine."

Or who of us has not sometime stood by the open grave into which a form dearly and tenderly loved is being lowered, and even in the very moment where the earth is returning to the earth as it was, found our thoughts insensibly projecting themselves into that unknown future upon which the dear departed one has entered ; refusing, absolutely refusing, to be reconciled for a single moment to the thought that all we have loved has perished in the grave?  Who has not felt at a time like this the force of convictions, more potent than all the subtleties of the skeptic, proclaiming as with a trumpet that man is immortal?  And now what are these intuitive convictions, these primitive faiths, these instinctive yearnings of the soul, if they be not the testimony of God found in the very deepest strata of our nature bearing witness to its immortality?  Can it be that for all these intense yearnings, these ardent hopes, these lofty aspirations there is to be no answering reality?  Are they all but as the bright and beautiful mirage of the desert-airy visions that float before the fancy and have nothing real, nothing permanent, nothing perfect with which to satisfy the soul?  Oh it can not be that the soul is thus mocked of God!  He who is the fountain of all goodness would not be cruel enough to tantalize the soul with hopes never to be realized, with aspirations never to be filled.  These are not ghostly shadows which are pressed to our hearts in fond embrace and which in the very moment of our rapturous enfolding dissipate in air and leave us in the dreariness and bitterness of mocked and disappointed love.  No, no, these yearnings for something purer and better than earth ; these thoughts, vaster than earth's compass or earth's brightest and best scenes ever looking for something brighter and better ; these are all the testimony of the soul to its immortality, the proofs that it was created not for time but for eternity, not to taste of the waters of this life and die, but to drink forever of that river of the water of life which flows from beneath the eternal throne of God.

            It is true, then, beyond all controversy that the soul is immortal, and now with this conclusion is connected a train of the most solemn and momentous truths.  Before each one of us stretches this immortality with all the pomp of the judgment day and with all the weight of eternal years.  We are in this life only upon the threshold of our being.  This is but the springtime of which eternity is the great harvest period.  Let us remember that every ticking of the clock, and every pulse that throb in our hearts, brings us nearer to the fearful realities of this eternal state.  Are we prepared for the summons that shall call us away?  Are we clothed in His Gospel?  Let us so live that we may be able to address our souls with those sublime words of the poet,
                                                           

"The stars shall fade away-the sun himself,

                                                                Grow dim with age and nature sink in years,

                                                                But thou shalt flourish in immortal youth,

                                                                Unhurt amidst the war of elements,

                                                                The wreck of matter and the crush of worlds."