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

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 But it must be remembered that the spirit, when at death it is, in company with the soul, withdrawn from the body, passes into the Intermediate State, shaped and stamped with the impress which the life on earth has fastened upon it.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 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