310 ESSAY TOWARD -THE [SECT, TV. the man Jesus was not left in death or the grave, the soul being sometimes put for the person ; or it may be as well construed, that the spirit of Christ, or his intellectual soul, was not left in the state of the dead, or of separa- tion from the body, which the word sheol" in hebrew, and " 62ms" in the greek signify. Here- ít may be observed also, that the words which signify spirit, " ruach, pneuma, spiritus," in hebrew, greek and latin, and other languages, is used sometimes for air or breath, which is supposed to be the principle of life to the animal body ; and sometimes it signifies the intellectual soul, the conscious and active principle in plan ; and therefore whatsoever may be said of the spi- rit's dying or being lost, is no p-oof that the conscious principle in man dies, which is a very different thing from breath or air. Perhaps it will be saidhere, does not Moses suppose breath to be the soul or spirit in man, when he says ; Gen. ii. 7. " God breathed into his nostrils the breath of life, and man became a living soul." Ì answer, it is evident that Moses makes a plain dif- ference between God's formation of man and brutes, for be makes no distinctiòn between their. soul and body in their creation ; but he distinguishes the soul from the body of man, in his creation, speaking according to the common language and philosophy of that age, as though the soul were in-the breath : Nor was it proper to speak in strict philosophical language to those ignorant people; nor were the modes of express-ion in the bible, so pecu- liarly formed to teach us philosophy as religion. But of this distinction between the ,soul of abrute and the soul of a man, there seems to be a plain intimation given by Solomon in the book of Ecclesiastes, chapter iii. verse 1. " Who knoweth the spirit of man that goeth upward, and the spirit of a beast that goeth downward to the earth That the spirit of man, that is, his con- scious and intellectual principle, goeth upward, or sur- vives at the death of the body, but the spirit of the beast, that is, the spring of its animal life goeth down to the earth, is mingled with the common elements of this ma- terial world, and entirely lost, But the wise man in this place perhaps, expresses some ofhis former atheistical doubts, saying, who knows who
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