The Soul of Man: The Bible View Versus the View of Modern Psychologists and Philosophers

The Soul of Man: The Bible View Versus the View of Modern Psychologists and Philosophers THE SOUL OF MAN:
THE BIBLE VIEW VERSUS THE VIEW OF MODERN
PSYCHOLOGISTS AND PHILOSOPHERS
By G. C. Brewer

President Cox, Brethren and Friends: The subject which has been assigned me for this occasion is a hard one because it covers such a wide field both in theological speculation and scientific and philosophical deductions and conclusions. It is not difficult to set forth what the Bible teaches about the soul of man, but the Bible does not enter into a discussion of this question in the same way the philosophers do. I am tonight given the task of presenting the contrast between the views of psychologists and philosophers and the view that is set forth in the word of God. This is a very interesting study to me, and I hope it will not prove too dry for my hearers. First, then, let us enter into the view:

I. The Teaching of Psychologists and Philosophers in Reference to the Soul of Man.
This is by no means a new study and while I am to present the view of modern philosophers, it is profitable first of all to get a general survey of what philosophers of former days have thought on this question. The Greeks were the first people of which we have any knowledge who began to speculate about the origin of life. Thales (624-548 B.C.) is the first man who began the study of this great mystery. He was followed by Anaximander in trying to solve the problem of life. These Greeks lived on the shores of the blue Agean Sea,' which teemed with multitudinous life. And their knowledge of nature was marvelous considering the advantages- they had for study. Empedocles (495-425 B. C.) formulated what they had learned about nature for the first time. These Greeks held that all life originated in the water and that all land animals, including man, came from the animals.that had lived in the ocean. But with the coming of Aristotle (384-322 B. C.) we have (Henry Fairfield Osborn says) the beginning of a new world. Aristotle was the son of Nichomachus, who was the physician of Philip of Macedon, and he had the advantage of his father’s instruction in science. Later, his famous pupil, Alexander the Great, placed at his disposal a library that was the wonder of the age. Aristotle’s knowledge of nature was encyclopedic but he differed from those Greeks that preceded him in that he attributed life to a Creator. He was not an atheist nor a materialist as modern evolutionists are. He said that all nature manifested design and that there was wisdom displayed in the order and system that are before us and that life itself could not have been produced from dead matter. He wrote a book called “Peri Psyches,” which means “Concerning the Soul.” He regarded the mind as superior to matter and believed that man possesses a soul that is independent of the physical organism. His treatment of this question dominated the whole philosophy of men for many centuries. The scholastic philosophers of the thirteenth century treated the f subject in the same way that Aristotle did and used the Latin words “de anima” to designate this division of' their study. The Greek word “psychology” was then rapplied first by Melanchthon in the sixteenth century to this brahch of study. This was an effort to get one word that would include the whole field covered by the speculations in reference to the soul or mind. The Greek word “psyches” means life or soul and “psychology” originally meant the study of the soul. It used to be called also “mental philosophy.” Toward the close of the seventeenth century, a change began to take place in this branch of science that has continued until the present time and the end is not yet. Under Descartes, psychology was changed from the science of the soul to the science of the mind, and men began to study mind, thought and thinking as something produced by the physical organism and not as an entity or a part of man that might live independent of the organism. Then under the influence of Hume and Kant, the noumenal mind disappeared and left us phenomenal consciousness. Then in more recent times with the advent of Watson, consciousness itself was discarded and psychology became the science of behavior. We, therefore, now have behaviorism. So we see that psychology first lost its soul, then lost its mind, then lost consciousness, and now we have behaviorism. This gradual degeneration of psychology from animism to behaviorism is one of the greatest ironies in the' history of human thought. Disintegration set in when Descartes substituted his psycho physical dualism of mind and matter for Aristotle’s hylomorphic dualism of Soul and body. This continued to the point that men believed thinking to be a function of a' physical organ. The brain produces thought in some way for which .they could not account but which they accepted as true. Cabanis (pronounced Kah-bah-nee) asserted that “the brain secretes thought as the liver secretes bile.” This, however, was entirely too mate-rialistic for his age and he later receded from this view or altered the statement to some degree. But in our modern age, we are right back to this same idea even if .our psychologists would not accept this same state-ment. Our psychologists—or rather our behaviorists—of today do not believe that man has any soul that could live independent of his body. They do not believe that there is any self or rational ego that may be considered apart from the physical organism. Man is, according to their view, a product of heredity, and what he does and says or thinks may be all traced to the function of his glands. Man is not the same personality all the time, according to their philosophy. He is one man at one age and another man at another age. He is one being under one set of circumstances and another being under a different set of circumstances, and he is not responsible for what he does under any circumstances. He is a mere automaton. Thus we hear of various complexes. One man is explained as possessing an inferiority complex; another man has sadistic impulses; another has a fixation; and little Johnnie possesses a pyromania and is not responsible therefore for setting fire to things. This is a brief statement of the conclusions of present day psychologists, and yet it is amusing to know that materialistic philosophers used to tell us that these glands that now determine our character, were vestigial; that is, these were the remains of organs that once functioned in our body but are now just useless vestiges. They claimed that all the ductless glands were vestigial. But these are the very glands now that determine our health, our growth, and our character. These glands are called endocrinal glands and they, secrete a material called hormones that go into our blood stream and determine our conduct. This wej know to be true for scientists demonstrate this in their experiments. The pituitary gland is one of the most important of all and this gland is very small but it has a division or mark that separates it into three sections and the different sections of the gland secrete a different substance. It is found that one section secretes what they call prolactin. This is the mother hormone and an injection of this secretion into a hen will send her around clucking and endeavoring to mother chicks; or it produces milk even in the virgin rat. These marvelous discoveries in reference to the body and the function of the different organs in the body has led man to identify himself with the beasts.

II. Man a Beast?
Some men are today not only trying to trace the origin of man through the brute creation and concluding that man is only an improved ape, but some of them are placing man on the level with the beasts in the present time. In fact, they are trying to show that there hasn’t been such a great improvement after all. Such writers as James Harvey Robinson, author of “Mind in the Making” and other articles on this subject, have tried to show that man is simply a beast and that his mind as. well as his body has developed through a long series of transmutations. Robinson speaks of this as a discovery and therefore parades it before the unthinking students of our day as something that is entirely new. It is one of the strongest manifestations, of the bias of many men who claim to be scientists that they praise such writers as James Harvey Robinson and H. G. Wells. Neither of these men is a scientist at all; they are simply sycophants that take the wildest and most untenable conclusions and speculations of philosophers and preach them as scientific facts, and these preachments are lauded to the sky by the scientists. That is the way that these philosophical conclusions of the scientists become current. They reach the mind of the average man through these sycophants. But to say that the fact that man has much in common with the beasts is a discovery is laughable. Men have always known that they had many things in common with the lower animals. There are not only certain undeniable homologies in his structure but also certain likenesses in his experience. Solomon knew this and wrote of it thousands of years before J. H. Robinson was born—witness these verses from Ecclesiastes 3:19-22 : “For that which befalleth the sons of men befalleth beasts; even one thing befalleth them: as the one dieth, so dieth the other; yea, they have all one breath; and man hath no preeminence above the beasts: for all is vanity. All go unto one place: all are of the dust, and all turn to dust again. Who knoweth the spirit of man, whether it goeth upward, and the spirit of the beast, whether it goeth downward to the earth? Wherefore I saw that there is nothing better, than that a man should rejoice in his works; for that is his portion: for who shall bring him back to see what shall be after him?” But instead of explaining the mystery of life by trying to' study the body in all of its functions and reduce man to the level of the brute, the scientists have only complicated the matter and run into a blind alley. They are not even able to explain the development of the body to say nothing- of the origin of life and of the ex-istence of the soul. Let us consider some of the things that these scientists have found out about the body. Biology and psychology have always been closely as-sociated and, as we have seen, men have always tried to find a physical basis for the mind. We may, therefore, turn our attention briefly to a study of biology.

III. The Beginning of the Life of an Individual and the Development of His Body.
Each one of us began our existence as a single cell and from this minute particle of matter, these bodies, that are “wonderfully and fearfully made” developed. This process of de-velopment is, within itself, a marvel if not a miracle; and we shall see that the most learned scientists today living admit that there are some things even in this process that can not be explained on the mechanistic basis. We were told this morning that life begins as a single cell and that one cell cannot be distinguished from another; so that, looking at this cell, we can not tell whether the being that is to be developed therefrom is going to walk or fly, crawl or swim. This is true if we think of it only from a superficial observation. We might even go further and say you could not tell whether the finished product is to be animal or vegetable; but we must remind you again that this would be a very superficial observation. Upon an analysis of the cell, we can determine to what species it belongs. The cell itself now constitutes a universe, and some scientists give their entire lives to the study of only one division of a cell. The cell is composed of such things as nucleus, cytoplasm, chromosomes, cen- trosomes, etc. The number of chromosomes in the cell will differ according to the species to which it belongs; and, too, the scientists cann tell whether it’s a human cell or a cell that belongs to some other species by the number of chromosomes. Thus we see that the species differ all the way down as far as the microscope can take us. The human cell contains 48 chromosomes and a new individual begins as a single cell and yet here is a marvel: This one cell is really two cells. It is formed by the union of the ovum, the female cell, and the spermatozoon, or the male cell. Each of these cells contains 48 chromosomes and yet in the final ripening process before the two are united, each one is reduced by some unknown process to half the number of chromosomes so that when the two are united, there is after all, only one cell of 48 chromosomes. The cells of the different species cannot be united because they do not contain the right number of chromosomes—or the proper constituents. This is why we cannot cross the species. The male spermatozoon carries in its head the right solution to dissolve and penetrate the wall of the female ovum so that the two may be united. The sperm of any species other than the human could not even penetrate the human ovum. But the mystery has not yet been fully presented. Look now at this single cell that has been formed by a union of male and female element. It begins to divide and thus to multiply. It divides geometrically: 2, 4, 8, 16, 32, until the completed human body contains twenty-six trillion cells. But what is more marvelous, it not only divides and multiplies, but it differentiates; that is, fromi this one cell come many different kinds of cells; there are the blood cells, the nerve cells, the muscle cells, the brain cells, and on and on until the body is completed. But here again we find another old theory of the evolutionists completely annihilated. The old t idea was that acquired characters could be transmitted but this was completely ruined when Weis- mann (1834-1914) put forth what was known, or what is sometimes called, the germ plasm theory. This is the idea that all we inherit was in the germ of life that came from our parents and from their parents and on back no one knows how far. The study of the cell has proved Weismann’s doctrine to be correct. Thus in the very beginning of the new individual, somewhere about the time the cell begins to divide, certain cells are set apart which are known as germ cells. The body that is now forming, has two distinct sets of cells: the germ cells and the soma cells. These somatic cells are the ones that continue to divide and differentiate to produce the body. The germ cells lie dormant through all this period of development before birth and even through all the childhood years after birth. They have no function until the child reaches puberty; then these cells begin to function. They are the reproductive cells and they carry the qualities that we inherit. What you are doesn’t determine what your child will be but the same things that made you what you are will continue to operate and will make your offspring what they are.

Now to show that the scientists themselves recognize something in this marvelous process something that cannot be taken hold of and explained by physical research, we wish to give you the statements of a few scientists. Winterton C. Curtis in “Science and Human Affairs” (Harcourt, Brace & Co., 1922), in discussing the cell and this development about which we have been talking, speaks of: “The living substance was revealed as a continuous, never-dying stuff, which could, be traced back through many cell divisions to egg and spermatozoon, and thence to preceding generations. These facts led to the inference that the protoplasm had persisted through an infinitude of cell divisions since its first cell organization in the remote past. Thus it consists of the mortal body-cells, which constitute the adult bodies existing at any given moment, and of the potentially immortal ova and spermatozoa. The origin and nature of these germ-cells, their union in fertilization, and the processes of cell division and differentiation by which the adult organism arises from the single cell formed by their union, are all parts of the cell-theory as developed during the last fifty years. Cellular phenomena will probably remain an outstanding feature of the developmental process for all time.” This man is an atheist and in his book he takes pains to try to destroy all faith in supernaturalism and yet here we have him using the astounding terms concerning the material that goes to make up the body and the life, “never dying stuff” and “the potentially immortal ova and spermatozoa.” The Yale University press has put out a book written by the professors of the University called “The Evolution of Man.” The whole purpose of this book is to prove that man is of brute origin or to establish the mechanistic or materialistic philosophy of life, and yet Dr. Harry Burr Ferris who wrote the chapter on Embryology makes this very fine statement on page 42: “As a result of fertilization the egg cell has the power of almost indefinite multiplication and the still more marvelous power of differentiation so that its descendants are not all alike, but some form nerve cells, others gland cells, still others muscle cells, et cetera. This differentiation in structure is accompanied also by a corresponding functional differentiation.

It may be possible to explain many of the processes of life on the mechanistic, or physico-chemical basis, but it is difficult, at present, to explain reproduction on this theory” (Emphasis mine). Here again we find this scientist compelled to admit that this process of reproduction cannot be explained on the mechanistic basis. The following statements from E. B. Wilson are also apropriate on this point. In discussing such words as soul, vital principle and directing force which some writers use in describing the process of body de-velopment, Wilson says: “They are words that have been written into certain spaces that are otherwise blank in our record of Knowledge, and as far as I can see no more than this” (“Biology,” page 23, 1908). And yet he could not get aw’ay from the idea conveyed by these words. He had to fill in that blank space with them. In telling of the development of the body from a single cell he speaks of “a formative power pervading the growing mass as a whole” (“The Cell,” 2nd Ed., page 59). And in his lecture on “The Physical Basis of Life,” he speaks of “the integrating and unifying principle in the vital processes” (Science, March 9, 1923, page 284). If this does not show that he sees some superorganic power directing in this marvelous development of the body, the following question does show it. He asks, “Shall we join hands with the neo-vitalists in referring the unifying and regulatory principle to the operation of an unknown power, a directive force, an archaeus, an entelechy or a soul?” (Science, March 9, 1923, page 285). This proves that the scientists themselves find in their study of the physical man and of his development an unseen, unknown principle or power that they can not explain. Yet they will not acknowledge the Creator. This is illustrated by the following quotation. This quotation is from Dr. Gustave Geley, director of the “Institute Metapsychique International.” In his book “From the Unconscious to the Conscious,” pages 30-31, he says: “By its whole biology the insect presents the symbol of what evolution really is, and as we shall see later, it proves that the essential cause of evolution should be sought neither in the influence of the environment, nor in the reactions of organic matter to that environment; but in a dynamism independent of that organic matter directing it and superior to it.

“It shows us evolution taking place primarily by an internal impulse entirely distinct from surrounding influences, by a primordial effort, unerring but still mysterious and absolutely inexplicable by classical naturalism.

“Not only so: this incomparable testimony, while it is the negation of contemporaneous naturalistic theories, contradicts also the antiquated concept of Providential creation.

“From the Psychological point of view, the leading characteristic of the insect is that it possesses pure instinct almost without a trace of intelligence. Further, • we And that this pure instinct, which has remained such for ages, is marked by a refined and cruel ferocity without counterpart in the rest of the animal world, but nevertheless perfectly innocent.

“This ferocity then, if there were a responsible Cre-ator, would be the pure, the immaculate work of that Creator, whose creation would then appear to be his faithful reflexion.” This author shows that there is some directing principle which he calls dynamism and which he says can’t be explained and knocks out. the idea of evolu-tion ; yet he will not acknowledge the Creator and puts up the weak statement that this developing mass or this embryo manifests a ferocity which would be a re-flection on a Creator! I present this as evidence of the weakness of men when they undertake to overthrow truth which they themselves have discovered.

IV. Man’s Intellect Proves Him To Be Superior to the Beasts.
We have seen that even in the formation of the body there is evidence of a directing power that is above the natural laws. This proves to the Christian thinkers that there is a Creator who not only brought man into existence in the beginning but who governs now in the perpetuation of the species and even has an unseen power operating in the reproduction process. It might be said, however, that this mystery is as much observable in the formation of the body of beasts and the insects as in the human embryo. This we admit because upon this we rely to prove the existence of the Creator, and not to show the difference between man and brute. This difference is seen in the function of man’s mind which not only lifts him above the brutes but gives him control over them. Which mind is not produced by matter but which uses and controls matter and the forces that work through it. Alfred Russell Wallace, who was an ardent evolutionist, recognized man as far superior to the beasts. He said: “He stands apart, as not only the head and culminating point of the grand series of organic nature, but as in some degree a new and distinct order of being.” Thomas Henry Huxley, another evolutionist, recognized this difference and said the distance between man and the highest brute is im-measurable, “practically infinite.” But the materialistic philosophers of our present day. don't want to recognize this great difference between man and brute. They dwell upon the homologies and give no attention to the differences. Of course, man is akin to all the rest of the animal kingdom and shares with them some things that are common in this life. His metabolic life he shares with the plants; his sentient life he shares with the beasts; but rational thinking and willing are uniquely human. No beast possesses this power. Also, sense perceptions and sensual emotions are also powers that belong to the beasts and many men emphasize this side of the human being to prove that he is a brother to the beasts and give no thought to that which proves man to be far above even the highest brute. What beast ever wrote a book, or painted a picture, or composed music? What beast gives any thought to the world around him and. endeavors to understand the phenomena of nature? What beast admires the glory of the heavens and studies the wonder of the starry sky? A dog may bay the moon but he would never be able to understand that the moon is a satellite of the earth and that she only reflects a light that is borrowed from the sun. The wild beasts of the great northern region, as they go trotting over the frozen surface of the earth, may stop for a moment in the glow of the northern lights and look at it with fixed gaze but then they drop their heads and trot on with no more thought of what this wonder is. Man observed these lights, wondered about them, gave them the name of Aprora Borealis, and he can explain now the wonder of these lights of the north. Man tries to understand the secrets of the earth on which he lives. He invented a microscope that enables him to study things that are too small to be seen with his natural eye. He invented the tele-scope and studies the heavens, learns to calculate the movements of the planets, to weigh the sun and to measure the distance to the farthest star. Through his mathematics he can tell of the approach of a celestial wanderer, give the speed that it is traveling, and name the hour when it will come into view on the earth. Not only does man thus study the problems of life and enter into the secrets of the solar system, he even studies his own heart, analyzes his emotions and endeavors to understand this “divinity that stirs within him.” The achievements of man put him as far above the brute creation as the heavens are higher than the earth.

V. The Bible View Concerning the Soul of Man.
We come now to present what the Bible teaches in reference to man’s soul. This is so simple and easy that it will be like child’s play compared to the philosophical speculations with which we have been dealing. The Bible simply states certain things as true and does not enter into a study of how these things can be true. This is a fortunate arrangement for all of us, for the greatest intellects that exist have never been able to comprehend some of the things that these mighty philosophers have found out in their study. If the Bible, therefore, had attempted to explain to us all the things that are involved in man’s existence and in the relation of mind and matter, of soul and body, the great majority of the human race would have been unable to comprehend what the divine mind had thus discussed. The Bible teaches us that God created man in his own image and likeness. It tells us that after man had been formed from the dust of the ground, God breathed into his nostrils the breath of lives (the Hebrew is plural, and we have seen that man possesses different lives some of which he shares with the beasts), and man became a living soul. Male and female created he them and then he gave to this pair the power of procreation. We have been studying something about the marvels and the mysteries of this procreation process. We found that everything brings forth after its kind just as the Book of God states it in the beginning and that the species cannot be crossed, and all we learned about the matter is something of why they cannot be crossed, which was only a confirmation of the statement of the Book of God. The Bible sets forth the fact that man Is a dual being that he is composed of an inner man and an outer man. This inner man we call soul and the outer man, body. The Bible, however, uses the term “spirit” to designate the inner man. It uses the word soul a number of different ways, but rarely does it designate the inner or immortal part of man. When it does, it is used He- braistically. In order that the Bible student may have a working knowledge of the uses of these terms, we here give you the following discussion of the number of times they are used and the way they are used. This is my own work but it is taken from something I wrote many years ago. I’m reading from my discussion with Dr. Spence:

“In the Hebrew the word is Nepesh, and in Greek Psyche, and in English soul. This word occurs many times in the Bible and has a variety of meanings. Souls are ascribed to both animals and men. Souls are said to die and perish, etc. The word soul is very often used to designate a person, as, ‘Fear came upon every soul’; ‘Eight souls were saved by water’; ‘There were added three thousand souls’; ‘Three score and fifteen souls’; and when God breathed into man’s nostrils the breath of life and ‘man became a living soul,’ i. e., a living creature or living person. The spiritual or immortal part of man is not here designated. The word psyche or soul is never applied to God or angels and rarely to the human spirit. It occurs in the Greek New Testament one hundred and five times and has various meanings. In a few ini stances it is used as equivalent to the word spirit but is never translated spirit. Spirit is the word that designates the immortal element, the conscious Ego, the Self, the part of man that reasons, thinks, and dictates the actions of the body. In the Hebrew the word is ruacii, and in the Greek pneuma, and in English Spirit. The word of God divides between the soul and spirit and distinguishes them one from another (Hebrews 4:12; 1 Thessalonians 5:28). Of the creation of this spirit Moses gives no account except that man was made in the image of God. The Spirit is something higher than the soul. Tn the spirit is the unity of our being, our true Ego. The soul is but an element in its service. At death the soul passes away, the spirit ripens to a new existence’ (Lotze). The word spirit in some translations is a few times substituted for soul, but these terms are never interchanged in the original versions. The soul is said to die, but it is never said that the spirit dies. The dead are spoken of as spirits (Luke 28:37; Acts 23:8; Ileb. 12:23; 1 Peter 3:19), but the living as souls. The most important difference in their uses is that the soul is applied to the individual, but the spirit is never so used. Mortality, or death, or destruction is never affirmed of a spirit —any spirit, good or bad. The word pneiima occurs three hundred and ninety-three times in the New Testament and Psyche one hundred and five times, yet pneuma is never translated soul and Psyche is never translated spirit. Let us not then, confound these terms and when we read that the soul dies imagine that we have found proof of the mor- talit of the spirit. ‘Spirit’ is never said to die, to be destroyed or to cease to exist. Of the whole number of occurrences of pneuma in the New Testament, it is applied to the Spirit of God two hundred and eighty-eight times; to evil spirits thirty times; to the human spirit forty times; and, figuratively to indicate disposition seventeen times. It is also shown from the analysis of the occurrences of this word spirit that when any one in dying gives up or commends himself to the Lord, or to the Father, in such words as ‘he gave up the ghost,’ or ‘Lord Jesus, receive my spirit,” or “Father, into thy hands I commit my spirit,’ the word Psyche or soul is never used. This shows clearly that the terms are different and that the soul is merely the animal life while the spirit is the vital principle, the rational being that outlasts death.” That the soul may depart from the body and live on independent of the body is taught in many passages of Scripture. Since we have quoted Ecclesiastes vve may now say that the writer of that book before he laid his pen down indicated that man is more than mortal—that all of him did not come from the dust and that, when the body decays, the spirit wings its way back to its Maker. It says: “And the dust returneth to the earth as it was, and the spirit returneth unto God who gave it” (chap. 12:7). In Genesis 35:18, we have the story of the birth of Benjamin and the death of Rachel; the death there is simply represented as a separation‘of the spirit and the body. It says: “As her spirit was departing (for she died) she called his name Benoni, but his father called him Benjamin. Then again in 1 Kings 17:20-22, we have the story of the widow’s son that had died and his res-toration to life by the prophet. The prophet prayed God to let this child’s soul come back into his body and we are told that the soul re-entered the body and the boy lived again. Here we see that the departure of the soul means death and that when the soul is re-united with the body, life is restored. In Luke 20:37-38, our Lord answered the Sadducees in reference to the resurrection of the dead. He showed them that God had called himself the God of Abraham, of Isaac, and of Jacob. He did this when he spoke to Moses out of the burning bush and yet Abraham, Isaac and Jacob had been gone from the earth and, therefore, from our viewpoint dead, for three hundred years. God was still their God; and since God is not the God of the dead but of the living, this shows that Abraham, Isaac and Jacob are not dead but living; and our Lord says “all live unto God.” Then, when men die and their bodies return to dust, there is some part of them that is not dead but continues to live. This is the soul or the spirit and the fact that this soul or spirit lives apart from the body proves that there will be a resurrection from the dead. This implies that the per-sonality is not complete without the body and that therefore there will have to be a resurrection in order that the complete being may live again. In Hebrews 12:9, Paul says, “We have all had fathers of our flesh and they chastized us at will and we gave them honor. How much rather be in subjection to the Father of Spirits and live?” Here the apostle divides man into flesh and spirit and declares that the flesh came from one father and the spirit came from another. Our flesh or our bodies came to us from our physical parents through a flesh birth but our spirit came from God. Here we see that there could be no explanation of this passage unless we understand man to possess something that didn’t come to him through physical laws or from flesh birth. It came from God. Zechariah 12:1 tells us that God forms the spirit in man. When this spirit enters man is a problem which theologians speculate upon. Some have said that man receives his soul from his flesh parents just as he receives his body from them, and this was the seminal theory. A long time ago this was repudiated by most theologians and yet we saw in the discussion of embryology or the forming of the body, that there is an element there that the scientists speak of as immortal. So the idea of man’s immortal part coming from his parents is not so unscientific and absurd after all. But we do not care to speculate on this problem; it’s enough for us to know that God forms the spirit in man, which is equivalent to saying that God creates his soul when the body is created. Probably it enters into this body at the very union of the two cells, that results in a new life. We are, each one of us then, a special creation; we are the off-spring of God and we shall go back to him when our life in this material existence ceases to be. Since we are the offspring of God, we can no more be destroyed than God himself can be destroyed. The fact that God used our fathers and our mothers to produce us does not prove that we are not his workmanship. We have seen that his power and wisdom are manifested even in the formation of the body and that men cannot explain the process without acknowledging a. mysterious presence. Then we mujst not refuse to believe in the power that combined with that developing body an immortal soul. It is an enkindling thought that we shall live forever; that when we began to have a being, right , then there was a creature formed that will never end. He may live a brief three score and ten years on this earth and that body that came through a biological process may wear out and decay, but that spirit that came from God will continue to live in his presence. We will serve God through the endless years of eternity. What ministrations he may have for us on other stars, we do not know, but if we serve him well in this existence, we shall be prepared for any promotion that he may have for us and we will be ready to perform our part in the next act of the divine drama. Therefore let us hear the conclusion of the whole matter: “Fear God, and keep his commandments: for this is the whole of man” (Ecclesiastes 12:13).