into things which ought not to be enquired into.  For the questions raised in the search concern us very closely; and, moreover, it is a matter about which God has made a revelation.  And to know more about it than many people even care to know is a safeguard against many an unwholesome fear, against many a mischievous deceit.

On the very threshold of this enquiry we are confronted with this question: “Is the soul the same thing as the spirit?  If not, what is the soul, and what is the spirit?”  That the Bible regards them

as distinct is sufficiently clear from the language used by S. Paul in his first Epistle to the Thessalonians: “I pray God your whole spirit, soul, and body be preserved blameless unto the coming of our Lord Jesus Christ.” [34a]  The same distinction is marked in the Epistle to the Hebrews: “The word of God is quick, and powerful, and sharper than any two-edged sword, piercing even to the dividing asunder of soul and spirit.” [34b]  It is thus that we understand the contrast which S. Paul enforces between things of the spirit and things of the soul.  “The natural man,”—i.e., the psychical man, the man who yields to the sway of the soul,—“receiveth not the things of the spirit of God.” [34c]  And again, speaking of the resurrection, he writes: “It is sown a natural body,”—i.e., literally a psychical body, a

body which is subject to the sway of the soul,—“it is raised a spiritual body,”—i.e., a body subject to the sway of the spirit.  “There is a natural body, and there is a spiritual body.” [35a]  When again S. James says: “This wisdom . . . is earthly, sensual, devilish,”—the word translated “sensual” is the same word “psychical,” i.e., subject to the sway of the soul. [35b]  S. Jude speaks of those who are “sensual,” i.e., psychical, “not having the spirit.” [35c]  Enough has been said to show that, according to the Bible, the soul is the seat of the senses, the desires, the will, the reasoning and intellectual faculties, the thoughts of the mind.  What then is the spirit in man?  We seem to have the answer given to us in the account of man’s creation, when we are told that “God formed man of the dust of the ground, and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life, and man became a living soul.” [35d]  This breath of

God could be nothing less than the spirit, which came from God Himself.  It is that higher endowment by which man is a spiritual being, and therefore has an affinity to God.  It is that which makes him God-like, even by nature, at least by his nature as it was before the fall.  But even the fall did not utterly dissolve that nature; man still remained a spiritual being, although the spiritual part of him was subject to the sway of the animal in him, and to the senses of the lower nature.  Until that creative act of God, man’s body and soul were scarcely higher in the order and rank of being than the body and soul of the brute.  It was the gift of the divine spirit which caused man’s soul truly to live, so that he became then “a living soul.”  Herein, henceforth, the soul of man differs from the soul of the lower creature.  In man the soul is in contact with the spirit.  The beast shares with man the possession of an animal soul.  It is the prerogative of man to be endowed

also with spirit.  By the spirit, man is capable of apprehending God, can commune with God, can long for Him.  Herein lies his capacity for religion.  His soul is incorporeal 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,