The State of the Impenitent Dead
Essay by Alvah Hovey D.D. Professor of Christian Theology in the Newton Theological Institution. Printed in 1858.
“...Yet it may be well to add, that if it is proper to say of a man who has lost his fellowship with sin and with a sinful world, that he is dead to sin, or dead to the rudiments of the world, it is equally proper and even more natural to describe one as dead unto God when he has lost all fellowship with him, and the faculties of his soul reason, conscience, affection have ceased to perform their noblest function, to unite him consciously with the Father of Spirits and make his existence truly normal and blessed. When we shall have attained such conceptions of life and death as are taught by a sound philosophy and by the word of God, these terms will no longer be confounded with “personal existence,” or “non-existence.”