rich in blessing,--to exchange all this for dull heaviness
and blank oblivion?

In the narrative of the rich man and Lazarus, which, as we saw, describes
the Intermediate State, the rich man is said to have "lifted up his eyes
being in torments." So, then, his pain was felt. He was conscious; he
reflected; he remembered; he spoke. Once more, in a remarkable passage
in the First Epistle of S. Peter, to which, on a future occasion, I shall
again refer, our Lord is spoken of as "having been put to death in the
flesh, but quickened," _i.e._, made alive, "in spirit" {44}; words which,
whatever the context may mean, can only have the force of bringing the
effect of death in its relation to Christ's human body into sharp
contrast with its effect in relation to His human spirit. In respect of
His human body He was put to death; but in respect of His human spirit He
was quickened or lived, lived still, in Paradise, though His body was
dead. I need not, I think, refer to other passages. It is abundantly
clear, both from the necessity of the thing, and from the obvious
testimony of the Bible, that the soul still lives, still is awake, still
is conscious.

What, then, follows from the soul's consciousness in and through the
passage of death? Obviously this,--that the life of the soul goes on,
and is therefore the life of the same soul, sustained without break or
interruption, after death, by an unsuspended continuity of the
consciousness of personal identity. For of what is the soul still
conscious? Of itself. The life therefore of the soul after death is one
with the life of the soul before death. The same soul lives on. The
only change to it is the absence of the body, which has been withdrawn
from it, and is laid in the ground, and dissolves into dust. And this
continuous consciousness of identity means that the soul's character is
preserved unchanged and unaffected by the shock of the separation. For a
character it had been contracting during its sojourn in the body, a
character of its own. The spiritualized soul before death is a
spiritualized soul after death. The animalized soul before death remains
after death an animalized soul. The righteous is righteous still. The
holy, the pure, the faithful, the devout, the true, are true, and devout,
and faithful, and pure, and holy still. The wicked and tainted soul is
still wicked and tainted when it enters the unseen, and begins its life
in the Intermediate Sta