Blueridge Believer
Puritan Board Professor
That the souls of believers are made perfect at death, is one of those delightful doctrines which Scripture clearly teaches, and of which a revelation from God alone could give us full assurance. That the soul is not destroyed when the body is dissolved—that it survives the decay and wreck of our physical frame—that our rational and moral faculties are neither benumbed into a state of insensibility, nor suspended in their exercise, by that solemn event which terminates our connection with the present world—but, on the contrary, our souls are freed from every encumbrance by which their exercise had here been cramped or interrupted, and translated into a state wherein they shall continue to expand, and act with greater vigor than before. These are some of the sublimest truths of Scripture, and they open to us a prospect which has no limit—the prospect of an eternal existence—a never-dying consciousness, which, as it feeds an elevating hope respecting the future, so it should teach us now to entertain a reverence for ourselves, as beings over whom death itself shall have no permanent power.
It is true, we must submit to that humiliating method of departing out of this world, which God has imposed as the wages of sin. We enter not on eternity as by a "triumphal march," but through suffering, and agony, and shame. The body is dissolved, and decays, and it must be interred in the dark and lonesome grave—but our nobler nature, the soul, survives. Looking on the agonies of dissolving nature, or on the dreary stillness which follows, we might have supposed, that here was a final period of conscious existence—that all was over with the busy, active, and restless spirit, which, for years, had fluttered amidst the cares or pleasures of the world. But no, that spirit is not dead, it is only departed, and will appear again on another scene.
James Buchanan
Comfort in affliction
It is true, we must submit to that humiliating method of departing out of this world, which God has imposed as the wages of sin. We enter not on eternity as by a "triumphal march," but through suffering, and agony, and shame. The body is dissolved, and decays, and it must be interred in the dark and lonesome grave—but our nobler nature, the soul, survives. Looking on the agonies of dissolving nature, or on the dreary stillness which follows, we might have supposed, that here was a final period of conscious existence—that all was over with the busy, active, and restless spirit, which, for years, had fluttered amidst the cares or pleasures of the world. But no, that spirit is not dead, it is only departed, and will appear again on another scene.
James Buchanan
Comfort in affliction
