Rev. George F. Moore, of Andover, preached in Appleton Chapel last night, choosing as his text the twenty-sixth verse of the sixteenth chapter of St. Matthew: "For what is a man profited if he shall gain the whole world and lose his own soul." In the religions of the ancient world, men had many different conceptions of what the soul is. The Egyptians believed that the soul remained with the body after death, and so invented a means of preserving the body. In the Odyssey we hear of the souls inhabiting a region of shadowy caves beneath the earth, and again of the souls of heroes, placed in the sky above with the Gods. Another conception is that the soul is a shadowy double of the man, which lingers with his remains after death, or, according to Plato, it is the true self, imprisoned in the body during life, and freed from it at death. All these conceptions are represented in the Bible.

Today however, the general conviction is that the soul is not a thing separable from the body, but is its essential self. It is the thing of supreme worth to man, and loss of it is a thing against which men must fight.

Religion teaches us that three things are necessary for the salvation of the soul: first, Works, which mean sacrifice, self denial, and doing good to others; second, Knowledge of God and the truth of the life eternal; and third, Faith, a surrender to God's will and a devotion to his service. Man has an affinity to two things, to God and to the brute. It is this discord between two natures which we must strive to resolve into a perfect unity with God himself. We must give up the things of this earth and all self-seeking purposes, if we are to attain this unity. As Jesus has said, "He that loseth his life shall find it," and in this paradox is the solution of the problem. But the bare knowledge of this is not the way of salvation. By acts and faith alone can we attain the salvation of that which is most precious, the soul.