ROYAL NAVAL COLLEGE, GREENWICH, MARCH 3RD, 1893

ROYAL NAVAL COLLEGE, GREENWICH, MARCH 3RD, 1893

My Dear Brother, — I send you a line in answer to your letter, but in what I write you must understand that I am not speaking dogmatically but only stating how things present themselves to my own mind. It appears to me that in breathing into man’s nostrils the breath of life God gave to man a moral existence — different from all the rest of the creation — man became a living soul. The word ‘soul’ in the first use of it referred in itself, I imagine, to the natural part of man, his natural life as made out of earth (1 Corinthians 15:45 - 47), what he had in common with the beast (only that he was a living soul by the breath of God). Soul came afterwards to denote the individuality as seen in the expression “the soul that sinneth it shall die”, i.e., the person actually sinning. From that I fancy it came to be used to distinguish the moral from the material part of man, and is commonly so employed by the Lord. A man is identified before God by his moral being; and the moral part (of necessity maintaining the man’s identity) is held by God in eternal existence and if man dies (converted or unconverted) is again clothed in a body. I should not myself confound this with the term ‘inner man’ which is, I think, the ideal or faith existence of a christian in connection with unseen things.

With love in the Lord,
Believe me,
Your affectionate brother,
F. E. Raven.