while that there is no essential connection between materialism and sin—that the world which we now inhabit had all the amplitude and solidity of its present materialism before sin entered into it."
"Were our place of everlasting blessedness," he argues, "so purely spiritual as it is commonly imagined, then the soul of man, after having quitted his body at death, would quit it conclusively. Why should the disengaged spirit again be fastened to the drag of that grosser and heavier substance, which many think has only the effect of weighing down its activity? What is the use of a resurrection, if the union that then takes place, is to deaden or to reduce all those energies which are ascribed to the living principle in a state of separation?"
Surely the writer of this would have risen to clearer and nobler views of the soul, the resurrection and the life to come, had he studied the philosophy of Swedenborg, which solves all his difficulties at once by teaching that the spiritual body and the world it lives in, are neither material nor immaterial, but substantial!
His strongest argument for the solidity or reality of the spiritual life, in opposition to the absurd immaterialism which is everywhere taught, is drawn
