The Spirit Survives in It's Completeness

       Brethren, observe, that man's spirit cannot be resolved like his body into form and material, the former perishing while the latter survives. Man's spirit either exists in its completeness, or it ceases to exist. The bodily form of William the Conqueror has long dissolved into dust. The material atoms which made up the body of William the Conqueror during his lifetime exist somewhere now beneath the pavement of the great church at Caen; but if the memory and the conscience and the will of the Conqueror have perished, then his spirit has ceased to be. There is no substratum below or beyond these which could perpetuate existence; there is nothing spiritual to survive them, for the soul of man‚ your soul and mine‚ knows itself to be an indivisible whole - something which cannot be broken into parts, and enter into unison with other souls - with other minds. Each of us is himself. Each can become no other. My memory, my affections, my way of thinking and feeling are all my own; they are not transferable. If they perish they perish all together. There are no atoms to survive them which can be worked into another spiritual existence; and thus the extinction of an animal or a vegetable is only the extinction of that particular combination of matter - not of the matter itself; but the extinction of a soul, if the thing were possible, would be the total extinction of all that made it to be what it ever was. In the physical world, destruction and death are only changes. In the spiritual world, the only possible analogous process would mean annihilation. And, therefore, it is a reasonable and a very strong presumption that spirit is not, in fact, placed at this enormous disadvantage when compared with matter, and that, if matter survives the dissolution of organic forms, much more must spirit survive the dissolution of the material forms with which it has been for a while associated.