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| item = 2
| type = article
| type = article
| status = wanted
| status = proofread
| continues = 137, 138
| continues = 137, 138
| author =
| author =
| subtitle =
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| source title = Spiritualist, The
| source title = london_spiritualist
| source details =
| source details = v. 4, No. 182, February 18, 1876, pp. 74-6
| publication date = 1876-02-18
| publication date = 1876-02-18
| original date =
| original date =
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We have received the following letter: —
<center>''To the Editor of'' “''The Spiritualist.”''</center>
{{Style S-Small capitals|Sir}}, —The letters of “M. A. Cantab,” and of M. A. Oxon,” on this topic are most interesting, and the definition of the latter is excellent. “Within this spirit body dwells the soul, that temporarily segregated portion of the divine mind, by virtue of the possession of which man is immortal, and is a potential sharer in the attributes of Deity. ''This soul'' ''is given at incarnation; and not till it becomes possessed of it is the spirit'' ''immortal."''
But, I would ask, is the soul given at incarnation? We know that the body of the embryo infant is much developed before it is “quickened.” Is it not so with the intelligence, which has to be developed to some extent before the immortal soul can be quickened in it? As the intellectual faculties (which constitute a sensible child as compared with an idiot) are gradually grown and developed, and exercised after birth, so I understand that the infinitely more subtle immortal soul is gradually developed and born into the spirit body, which spirit body has been made, and to a certain degree developed, in the young material body.
The signs of the existence of this soul are an instinctive love of good, and hatred of evil, ''i.e''., the possession of a moral sense, quite independent of that external law which even a dog can learn by the accompaniment of rewards and punishments. To feel the beauty of holiness, and to perceive an undying principle amid transitory life are proofs that we have been born the second time, and that we have passed from death to life; that we possess a sense which will not die with the body, and that we are “potential sharers in the attributes of Deity.”
But if, unfortunately, this germ is in some person either not implanted or not developed, or if conscience be killed, and with it the soul germ, then the spirit body contains not its destined immortal guest, and therefore becomes gradually extinguished after death, resolving itself back into the spirit elements, as the earth body does to its physical elements.
This natural psychic law seems to have been known to those who wrote of “the second death,” of “trees whose fruit withered, of wandering stars, to whom it reserved the blackness of darkness for ever.” It is absolute extinction of individuality; it is not corrective pain; it is simple extinction; a less painful fate than that of the multitude who have had a conscience, whose immortal soul has been generated, but suppressed, during mortal life, and whose progressive destiny will take them through purifying fires, and who will suffer from “the worm that dieth not.”
Is it not probable that some of the elementary spirits of an evil type are those spirit bodies which, only recently disembodied, are on the eve of an eternal dissolution, and which continue their temporary existence only by vampiring those still in the flesh. They had ''existence''; they never attained to ''being''. I think our lunatic asylums furnish certain half-witted, yet cunning creatures, who possess only the elementary spirit within “a fluctuating mass of atoms,” and evidently have not even the germ of the higher and immortal soul.
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spiritual_scientist_v.04_n.09_1876-05-04.pdf|page=4|Spiritual Scientist, v. 4, No. 9, May 4, 1876, p. 100
spiritual_scientist_v.04_n.09_1876-05-04.pdf|page=4|Spiritual Scientist, v. 4, No. 9, May 4, 1876, p. 100
london_spiritualist_n.182_1876-02-18.pdf|page=5|London Spiritualist, v. 4, No. 182, February 18, 1876, pp. 74-6
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