Father Abraham, you are mistaken, YOU are not dust and ashes, it is only your body. Thus do the Scriptures combine with nature in pronouncing man to be a creature of frailty and mortality, who, though bearing the image of God, and towering far above all other creatures in his intellectual might, and in the grandeur of his moral nature, and in his racial relation to futurity, is yet labouring under a curse which hastens him to an appointed end in the grave. It is of the highest importance that this truth should be recognised. It is impossible to discern the scheme of Bible truth while holding fundamental error on the nature of man. This will be manifest to the reader of the succeeding lectures.
Words truly fail to describe the mischief the doctrine has done.
It has rendered the Bible unintelligible, and promoted unbelief by making the Bible responsible for a doctrine with which its historic and moral features are inconsistent. It has taken away the vitality of religion by destroying its meaning, and investing the subject with a mystery that does not belong to it. It has robbed it of its vigour, and reduced it to an effeminate thing, disowned and unpractised by men of robust mind, and heeded only by the sentimental and romantic. Fling it to the moles and to the bats, and humbly accept the evidence of fact, and the testimony of God's infallible word.