In 1846, English Congregationalist Edward White attracted attention with his defence of the doctrine of conditional immortality, after which the doctrine of annihilationism gathered significant popularity, even more than universalism had previously done. One significant advocate of the position was the Wesleyan theologian J. Agar Beet (1840–1924) who in his classic work, The Immortality of the Soul: A Protest, took on the tradition head on. Here’s a few thoughts from that book:

 

‘The following pages are … a protest against a doctrine which, during long centuries, has been almost universally accepted as divine truth taught in the Bible, but which seems to me altogether alien to it in both phrase and thought, and derived only from Greek Philosophy. Until recent times, this alien doctrine has been comparatively harmless. But, as I have here shown, it is now producing more serious results … It will of course be said, of this as of some other doctrines, that, if not explicitly taught in the Bible, it is implied and assumed there … They who claim for their teaching the authority of God must prove that it comes from Him. Such proof in this case, I have never seen’. – Joseph Agar Beet, The Immortality of the Soul: A Protest (London: Hodder & Stoughton, 1901), v–vi. 

‘Of the six modern works quoted in this chapter [Beet outlines positions from Oosterzee, Pope, Laidlaw, Salmond, Welldon and Clarke], not one attempts to prove from the Bible, although some of them endeavour to prove in other ways, or assume without proof, the endless permanence of all human souls. This affords a presumption hardly distinguishable from certainty that this doctrine is not directly or indirectly taught in the Holy Scriptures. And in a matter pertaining altogether to the unseen world, other proof is worthless. It may therefore be dismissed as no part of the Gospel of Christ’. – Joseph Agar Beet, The Immortality of the Soul: A Protest (London: Hodder & Stoughton, 1901), 80.