n a state of "coma" or
unconsciousness, awaiting the great Day of Judgment, when their bodies
will be resurrected and life everlasting given them. Those who are
interested in the matter, and who may doubt the above statement, are
invited to examine the records for themselves. The doctrine of the
Resurrection of the Body, which is of undoubted "pagan and heathen"
origin, was a favorite theological dogma of the Church in the first
thousand years of its existence, and for many centuries after, and it
still occupies a most important place in the church doctrines today,
although it is not so often publicly preached or taught.

David Kay says: "The great distinguishing doctrine of Christianity is
not the Immortality of the Soul, but the Resurrection of the Body. That
the soul of man is immortal was a common belief among the Ancients, from
whom it found its way at an early period into the Christian Church, but
the most influential of the early Fathers were strenuously opposed to
it, holding that the human soul was not essentially immortal, but only,
like the body, capable of immortality." Vinet says: "The union of the
soul and body appears to me essential and indissoluble. Man without a
body is, in my opinion, man no longer; and God has thought and willed
him embodied, and not otherwise. According to passages in the
Scriptures, we can not doubt that the body, or a body, is essential to
human personality and to the very idea of man."

John Milton said: "That the spirit of man should be separate from the
body, so as to have a perfect and intelligent existence independent of
it, is nowhere said in Scripture, and the doctrine is evidently at
variance both with nature and reason." Masson, commenting on Milton's
conception, says: "Milton's conception is that at the last gasp of
breath the whole man dies, soul and body together, and that not until
the Resurrection, when the body is revived, does the soul live again,
does the man or woman live again, in any sense or way, whether for
happiness or misery.... Are the souls of the millions on millions of
human beings who have died since Adam, are those souls ready either with
God and the angels in Heaven, or down in the diabolic world waiting to
be rejoined to their bodies on the Resurrection Day? They are not, says
Milton; but soul and bodies together, he says, are dead alike, sleeping
alike, defunct alike, till that day comes." And many Christian
theologians have held firmly to this do