dition of men after
death. Some thought that existence terminated at death; others that men
then lost their personality and were absorbed into the deity; and others
that the spirit was released by death and then entered on a separate
existence, possessed of personality and capable of enjoyment; but of the
Christian doctrine of resurrection-life for soul and body in abiding
reunion they were altogether ignorant. Those consolations which
Christianity brings to the mourner were unknown. There is an interesting
letter extant which was written to Cicero, the Roman orator, by a friend
who sought to comfort him after the death of his daughter Julia, in
which the consolation tendered strikingly marks the distinction between
Pagan and Christian views regarding death. Cicero was reminded by his
friend that even solid and substantial cities, such as those whose
ruined remains were to be seen in Asia Minor, were doomed to decay and
destruction; and if so, it could not be thought that man's frail body
can escape a similar experience. This is poor comfort in comparison with
the hope of glory which sustains the Christian under trial. He knows not
only that his soul shall live for ever, but that the life of eternity is
one in which the body too, then incapable of pain, weariness, or death,
shall have part. "We know that if our earthly house of this tabernacle
were dissolved, we have a building of God, an house not made with hands,
eternal in the heavens."[238]

Everlasting existence after resurrection will be the portion of the
righteous and the wicked. Attempts have been made to explain away
various emphatic Scripture statements regarding the doom of the ungodly,
with the view of lessening its terrors; but, if we are to accept the
plain meaning of these statements, there seems to be no reasonable
interpretation of them which gives sanction to the belief that this doom
can be escaped.

What is called the doctrine of Conditional Immortality finds not a few
advocates and adherents, who hold that existence in the future state is
exclusively for the faithful, and that the sentence to be executed upon
the wicked at death or at judgment is annihilation. A different belief,
termed "The Larger Hope," is maintained by others, who affirm that the
punishment to which those dying impenitent are to be subjected will in
time work reformation and cleansing, after which, restored to God's
favour, they will enter upon a life of happiness.

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