416 THE DEPARTING AND SEPARATE SOUL. .above the planets and stars, &c. are therefore easily answered, and all those difficulties removed, if we consider the soul as ä pure intellectual being, a substantial thinking power, without any dimensions of length or breadth, and consequently withont any proper relation to place. Then it will follow, that human spirits which were united to bodies, when they enter into a state of separation, need not have any thing to do with a real proper motion or flight, or change of places. An embodied soul, (that is, a soul acting in concert with an animal body) when it becomes a àeparate soul (that is, a soul acting in its own pore intellectual capacity without a body) does not need properly to alter its place; but only its manner of thinking and acting, in order to be in heaven and hell, i. e. happy in the presence of God, or miserable in the midst of devils, acting and thinking without bodies. In order to give us some faint idea of this matter, and to help our conceptions while they are so incmnbered with corporeal and local images, let us conceive the whole intelligent crea- tion, or all created spirits, as one set of beings, acting in dif- ferent manners (and if you please) in one open and infinite space; for we cannot utterly throw off all these kind of ideas in the pre- sent state. Some spirits are said to be united to a body, that is, are influenced in their actions by animal bodies, and it is their busi- ness to move and manage those engines ; but by the perpetual agency of animal nature upon them, the re-action upon it, and their converse with the material world by the means of that animal, they are restrained from more immediate converse with separate spirits, or even with God the infinite Spirit. Others are free or disengaged from bodies, and these have a more immediate perception of God the infinite spirit, and con- verse with each other perhaps under no confinement, or under such lesser limitations as their Creator's will and their own finite natures make necessary. They become conscious of one another's thoughtsand volitionsby some unknown way that God has ap- pointed ; for as an embodied spirit is Conscious of the motions of that animal to which it is united by the appointment of God, as it becomes conscious of the motions of other bodies round about it by the organs of that particular animal, and as it is also eon.; scions of the thoughts of other embodied spirits by the motions or voices of their several engines oranimal bodies, so doubtless there is a way which God the Creator-Spirit has ordained, whereby created spirits, which are social beings, shall main- tain society and friendly communion with other created spirits when they are in their native state, separate from material engines. Now death is but the cessation of animal life, in that
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