Hobbes - Leviathan.pdf

to hear the prayers of His servants that should pray therein, or (if
they were absent) towards it; and lastly, he offered a sacrifice of
peace offering, and the house was dedicated.*(2) Here was no
procession; the King stood still in his first place; no exorcized
water; no Asperges me, nor other impertinent application of words
spoken upon another occasion; but a decent and rational speech, and
such as in making to God a present of his new-built house was most
conformable to the occasion.
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* Exodus, 40
*(2) II Kings, 8
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We read not that St. John did exorcize the water of Jordan; nor
Philip the water of the river wherein he baptized the eunuch; nor that
any pastor in the time of the Apostles did take his spittle and put it
to the nose of the person to be baptized, and say, in odorem
suavitatis, that is, "for a sweet savour unto the Lord"; wherein
neither the ceremony of spittle, for the uncleanness; nor the
application of that Scripture, for the levity, can by any authority of
man be justified.
To prove that the soul, separated from the body, liveth eternally,
not only the souls of the elect, by especial grace, and restoration of
the eternal life which Adam lost by sin, and our Saviour restored by
the sacrifice of himself to the faithful; but also the souls of
reprobates, as a property naturally consequent to the essence of
mankind, without other grace of God but that which is universally
given to all mankind; there are diverse places which at the first
sight seem sufficiently to serve the turn: but such as when I
compare them with that which I have before (Chapter thirty-eight)
alleged out of the fourteenth of Job seem to me much more subject to a
diverse interpretation than the words of Job.
And first there are the words of Solomon, "Then shall the dust
return to dust, as it was, and the spirit shall return to God that
gave it."* Which may bear well enough (if there be no other text
directly against it) this interpretation, that God only knows, but man
not, what becomes of a man's spirit when he expireth; and the same
Solomon, in the same book, delivereth the same sentence in the sense I
have given it. His words are, "All go to the same place; all are of
the dust, and all turn to dust again; who knoweth that the spirit of
man goeth upward, and that the spirit of the beast goeth downward to
the earth"*(2) That is, none knows but God; nor is it an unusual
phrase to say of things we understand not, "God knows what," and
"God knows where." That of Genesis, 5. 24, "Enoch walked with God, and
he was not; for God took him"; which is expounded, Hebrews, 11. 5, "He
was translated, that he should not die; and was not found, because God
had translated him. For before his translation, he had this testimony,
that he pleased God," making as much for the immortality of the body
as of the soul, proveth that this his translation was peculiar to them
that please God; not common to them with the wicked; and depending
on grace, not on nature. But on the contrary, what interpretation
shall we give, besides the literal sense of the words of Solomon,
"That which befalleth the sons of men befalleth beasts, even one thing
befalleth them; as the one dieth, so doth the other; yea, they have
all one breath; so that a man hath no pre-eminence above a beast,
for all is vanity."*(3) By the literal sense, here is no natural
immortality of the soul; nor yet any repugnancy with the life eternal,
which the elect shall enjoy by grace. And, "Better is he that hath not