What is the soul, and how can we know or prove that it exists?

This is another thing that is difficult to understand. I do not know what a soul is; I could not tell you. I know it is invisible, I know it is part of my whole being, I know I can harm it or mar it with my sin, I know it can be dead in the sense of having no relationship with God when I am in mortal sin. I know the qualities that go into the soul, but I do not know what the soul is in itself. We say it is a spiritual essence, but who knows what a spiritual essence is? Can a spiritual essence see, smell, hear, and feel, and if so, how? I could not tell you, and I could not even tell you that I have a soul unless the church taught me, because that is where the information comes from. Put a man who never heard the gospel under scientific scrutiny and ask him to prove he has a soul, and he cannot. We only know it by the information given to our intellect. I know that when my physical body dies, my soul leaves the body because it no longer has a living entity to be one with; even demon spirits look for a living human body to inhabit, not a dead one. But how to describe that with pencil and paper, I could not tell you, and neither can anybody else. The same is true of angels; they are spirits, and they can assume human form for a purpose.