tained when man passes through what we call death and the Rubicon of spirituality? Spirit can form no real link in this supposed chain of material being, but reveals the eternal chain as uninterrupted and wholly spiritual; yet this can be realized only as the discordant sense of Being disappears.
If man was first a material being, he must have passed through all the forms of matter, in order to become man. Degrees of development. If the material body is man, he is mere matter, or dust. On the contrary, man is the image and likeness of Spirit; and the belief that there is Soul in sense, or Life in matter, belongs to mortal mind, to which the Apostle refers, when he says we must “put off the old man.”
What is man? Brain, heart, blood, the material structure? If the real man is in the material body, Identity not lost. you take away a portion of the man when you amputate a limb; the surgeon destroys manhood, and worms annihilate it. But the loss of a limb, or injury to a tissue, is sometimes the quickener of manliness; and the unfortunate cripple may present more nobility than the statuesque athlete, — teaching us, by his very deprivations, that “a man 's a man, for a' that.”
When we admit that matter (heart, blood, brain, acting through the five physical senses) constitutes man, Human progress. we fail to see how anatomy can distinguish between humanity and the brute, or determine when man is really man, and has progressed farther than his progenitors.
The theory that Spirit is distinct from matter, but must pass through it, or into it, to be Individualization. individualized, reduces Truth to the dependency of
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