A discourse concerning the Redeemer's dominion over the invisible world, and the entrance thereinto

6. Souls that go out of this World of ours, on the turn of this ⟨p. 39⟩Key, go not out of being. He that hath this Key of Death, hath also the Key of Hades, a Key and a Key. When he uses the former, to let them out from this, he uses the latter, to give them their Inlet into the other World, and into the one or the other part of it; into the upper, or the lower Hades, as the state of their case is, and doth require.

Our business is not now with Pagans, to whom the Oracles of God are unknown: If it were, the best and wisest of them who so commonly speak of Souls going into Hades, never thought of their going no whither; nor therefore that they were nothing. They had reasons, then, which they thought cogent, that induced them, tho' unassisted with Divine Revelation, to conclude they survived their forsaken bodies. And what else could any unbrib'd ⟨p. 40⟩understanding conclude, or conceive? When we find they have powers belonging to them, which we can much more easily apprehend capable of being acted, without help from the body, than by it? We are sure they can form thoughts, purposes desires, hopes; for it is matter of fact, they do it; and coherent thoughts, and thoughts arising from thoughts one, from another. Yea & thoughts abstracted from any thing corporeal, the notions of right and wrong, of Virtue and Vice, of moral good, and evil with some agreeable resolves, Thoughts quite above the sphere of matter, so as to form a notion of the Mind, it self, of a spiritual Being, as unexceptionable a one as we can form of a body. Yea of an Original self subsistent Mind and Spi•i•, the Former and Maker of all other. Tis much more ⟨p. 41⟩apprehensible, since we certainly know that all this is done, that it is done without any help of the body, than how flesh, or blood, or bones, or nerves, or brains, or any corporeal thng, should contribute to such Methods of thinking, or to any thought at all. And if it can be conceived that a Spirit can act without dependence on a body, what should hinder but we may as well conceive it to subsist and live without such dependence? And when we find this power of thought belongs to somewhat in us that lives, since the deserted Carcass thinks not, how reasonable is it to suppose, that as the body lives not of it self, or life is not essential to it, for life may be retired and gone, and it remain, as we see it doth, the same body still, that the soul to which the power of thought belongs, lves of it self,