for dust THOU art, and to dust shalt THOU return." Not thy body, not the mere animal portion of thee, shall return to the earth, from which it was taken, but THOU thyself, the whole man, shalt cease to exist an organized being, and shalt again be resolved into the elements out of which thou wast formed. Opposed as this may be to preconceived opinions, what other meaning can possibly be affixed to the words of the sentence, without resorting to a mode of interpretation so arbitrary and fanciful, as to be unanimously rejected by all sober-minded commentators, when treating on those portions of the Scriptures which involve no contradictions to their prejudices? So strong, indeed, is the language both of the prohibition and the sentence, that even if man did or do consist of two distinct natures of body and soul, it is impossible to read the words in any way which does not apply to the whole man-to the soul as well as to the body; not the slightest reference being made to the exemption of any portion of him from the death he had incurred.

But the fact of the perfect nature of man, and of his destined immortality when first created, are not left to be inferred; the appointed means by which his existence was to be indefinitely prolonged are described. Nay, so transcendant were the vivifying powers of the tree of life, that they had virtue to neutralize even the mortal

poison of the tree of knowledge, and caused the Almighty to place an insurmountable barrier before the former, lest that world which he had made for the permanent abode of a race of innocent beings, should become the habitation of endless generations of immortal sinners, too well knowing good from evil, and ever prone to follow the latter.

CHAPTER III.

Of the Word now.-The different senses in which it is used in the Pentateuch.-No trace of any allusion to an Immaterial Soul in the Divine Communications to the Patriarchs, nor in the four last Books of Moses.

THE preceding chapter having been devoted to an endeavour to prove that no part of Moses's account of the creation, temptation, fall, and doom of man, countenances the opinion of the existence of a soul independent of the body, the present will be employed in the examination of such other passages in his works as appear relevant to the subject.

It is to be observed that not only is the word now, which is supposed to denote the immaterial principle in man, used by Moses and the other authors of the Hebrew Scriptures, who wrote previously to the return from the Babylonian captivity, in various senses, but that the corresponding term in other languages is also similarly used by the writers in them: thus the úx" of the Greeks, the animus of the Romans,

the sawl (or soul, as we spell it) of the Saxons, and corresponding words in, probably, many other languages, were, and continue to be, used to designate a variety of things and qualities beside the immaterial principle. Now it certainly does seem very extraordinary, that if there be such a principle existing in man independent of sensation, not only the most ancient language, and that in which the history of his origin is written, but also the highly cultivated languages of the most civilized, and the narrow vocabularies of the rudest nations, should none of them afford a term, whereby to mark at once, without the possibility of mistake or confusion, the far most essential portion of his nature: yet such is the fact. Let us see the senses in which the term is used by Moses, in those portions of his works not yet noticed.

1st. Human Individuals.

Gen. xii. 5. Abraham took Sarai his wife, and Lot his brother's son, and the souls that they had gotten in Haran.

(This sense is used in ch. xxxvi., 15, 18, 22, 25, 26, 27; Exod. xii. 4; Lev. iv. 2, and in nine or ten other passages of the same book, and of Numbers and Deuteronomy.)

Ch. xvii. 14. That soul shall be cut off from his people.

(The same form of expression, the "soul shall

be cut off," occurs above twenty times in the Pentateuch.)

2d. Life-vital principle.

Gen. ix. 4. But flesh with the life thereof, which is the blood thereof, shall ye not eat.

5. And surely your blood of your lives will I require; at the hand of every beast will I require it; and at the hand of man: at the hand of every man's brother will I require the life of man.

Ch. xxxv. 18. And it came to pass as her soul was departing, for she died*.

Exod. xxx. 12. When thou takest the sum of the children of Israel after their number, then shall they give every man a ransom for his soul unto the Lord. (Also ver. 15 and 16.)

Lev. xvii. 11. For the life of the flesh is in the blood: and I have given it to you upon the altar to make an atonement for your souls: for it is the blood that maketh an atonement for the soul.

14. For it is the life of all flesh; the blood of it is the life thereof: therefore I said unto the children of Israel, Ye shall eat the blood of no manner of flesh: for the life of all flesh is the blood thereof.

Deut. xii. 23. Only be sure that thou eat not the blood: for the blood is the life; and thou mayest not eat the life with the flesh. (Vide Lev. xxiv. 17, 18.)

In this sense the word occurs in several other

* It may perhaps be said, that as the soul at the time of death is supposed to quit the body, most of the texts quoted in this section are as much in favour of the commonly received opinion as against it; but it should be recollected, (as has been endeavoured to be shewn in the remarks on Gen. ii. 7, compared with ch. i. 20, 21, 24, 30, and on Gen. ix. 4, 6,) that Moses uses the term to denote animal life alone; and surely nothing can more tend to produce error, than to affix a meaning to the words of an author which it is plain he never contemplated. Vide Lev. xvii. 11, 14.

Ꭰ