The Life of the Waiting Soul in the Intermediate State | Page 9

the
possession of an animal soul. It is the prerogative of man to be
endowed also with spirit. By the spirit, man is capable of apprehending
GOD, can commune with GOD, can long for Him. Herein lies his
capacity for religion. His soul is incorporeal no less than his spirit. It is,
as it were, midway between the body and the spirit. It touches the body
on the one side, on the other side it touches the spirit. The desires and
the thoughts of the soul may become enslaved by the body, or they may
become the servants of the spirit. The soul is the prize, for the mastery
of which the spirit strives, and the flesh or body strives. The spirit may
gain the soul, or the flesh may gain the soul. If the spirit loses the soul,
it is a loss fatal and irreparable. The soul is drawn now this way by the
baser longings of the flesh, now that way by the nobler appeals of the
spirit. It is the "debateable ground" {37} on which the real battle of life
is fought. "The flesh lusteth against the spirit, and the spirit against the
flesh." The gaining of the soul is the gaining of the whole man. The
losing of the soul is the losing of the whole man. Those have degraded
and brutalized their life whose human spirit has yielded up its
supremacy, whose soul has been swept along in captivity by the bodily
desires. For as in some the spirit shapes the whole soul, so in others the
soul, enslaved by the flesh, shapes the spirit.
Death at length steps in, and tears asunder the flesh from the
incorporeal part of us; and soul and spirit, still united, pass together to
the life which awaits them in the world unseen.

IV.
"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that the spirit, when at death it is, in company with the soul, withdrawn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