is spiritual, and the reign of Christ on earth is also spiritual. The martyrs, as disembodied spirits, reign spiritually with their Lord. Augustine (City, XX. vii.) mentions the opinion of some who believed that the saints will rise on the completion of six thousand years from the creation, and will live upon the earth to celebrate the millennial sabbath. "This opinion," he adds, "would not be objectionable, if it were believed that the joys of the saints in that sabbath shall be spiritual, and consequent on the presence of God, for I myself, too, once held this opinion. But as they assert that those who then rise again shall enjoy the leisure of immoderate carnal banquets, furnished with an amount of meat and drink such as not only to shock the feeling of the temperate, but even to surpass the measure of credulity itself, such assertions can be believed only by the carnal. They who do believe them are called by the spiritual, Chiliasts; which we may literally reproduce by the name of Millenarians." See Wordsworth: On John 5: 24–29.

CHAPTER III.

THE RESURRECTION.

Athenagoras: On the Resurrection. Justin Martyr: On the Resurrection. Tertullian: On the Resurrection. Augustine: City of God, XX. xx. xxi. Aquinas : Summa, III (Supplement) lxxv.lxxxvii. Calvin: Institutes, III. xxv. Pearson: On the Creed, Art. XI. Witsius: Apostles' Creed, Dissertation XIX. Ursinus: Christian Religion, Qu. 57. Cudworth System, III. 314-319 (Ed. Tegg). Howe: Blessedness of the Righteous, X. Horsley: On the Resurrection. South: On the Resurrection (Sermon LII.). Rawlinson Egypt, X. Speaker's Commentary: On Dan. 12 (Excursus). Goulburn: On the Resurrection. Landis: On the Resurrection.

THE doctrine of the resurrection of the body was from the first a cardinal and striking tenet of Christianity. The resurrection of Christ made it such. Perhaps no article of the new religion made greater impression, at first view, upon the pagan. When the philosophers of Athens "heard of the resurrection of the dead, some mocked, and others said, We will hear thee again of this matter," Acts 17: 32. The immortality of the soul and its disembodied existence were familiar to them. Socrates, in the Phaedrus (245), argues that "the soul is immortal, for that is immortal which is ever in motion; but that which is moved by another, in ceasing to move ceases to live." And in the Phaedo (114), after his description of the underworld, he adds, "I do not mean to affirm that the description which I have given of the soul and her mansions is exactly true-a man of sense ought hardly to say that. But I do say that, inasmuch as the soul is shown to be immortal, he may vent

ure to think, not improperly or unworthily, that something of the kind is true." "As for thy body," says Marcus Aurelius (Meditations, X.), "it is but a vessel or case that compasseth thee about. It is but an instrument, like a carpenter's axe. Without the soul, which has power to use it, the instrument is of itself of no more use to us than the shuttle is of itself to the weaver, or the pen to the writer, or the whip to the coachman."

The doctrine of the transmigration of the soul is wholly different from that of the resurrection. In this case, the soul goes into another body than its own. "The Egyp

tians believed in the transmigration of souls, so that the soul in a destined cycle wandered through the bodies of every species of animals, till it returned to a human body; not to the one it had formerly occupied, but to a new one." Heeren: Egyptians, II. According to Rawlinson (Egypt, X.), "the good soul, having just been freed from its infirmities by passing through the basin of purgatorial fire, re-entered its former body, rose from the dead, and lived once more a human life upon earth. This process was reiterated, until a certain mystic cycle of years became complete, when finally the good soul attained the crowning joy of union with God, and absorption into the Divine essence." The soul of the evil, according to Lenormant, goes through transmigrations, until it is finally annihilated. "This latter point is not, perhaps, universally allowed," says Rawlinson (I. 318).

The early fathers maintained the doctrine of the resurrection of the body with great earnestness and unanimity against the objections of the skeptics; of whom Celsus was acute and scoffing in his attack. Most of them believed in the resurrection of the very same material body. Justin Martyr, according to Hagenbach, teaches that cripples will rise as cripples, but at the instant of resurrection, if believers, will be made physically perfect. In his tract on the Resurrection (IV.), he argues that the miracles of Christ

wrought upon the body prove the fact of its resurrection. "The same power that could say, Arise, take up thy bed and walk, could say to the dead body, Come forth. If on earth Christ healed the sicknesses of the flesh, and made the body whole, much more will he do this in the resurrection, so that the flesh shall rise perfect and entire." The Alexandrine school, alone, adopted a spiritual theory of the resurrection. Origen went so far as to assert that a belief in the resurrection of the body is not absolutely essential to the profession of Christianity, provided the immortality of the soul were maintained.

The Patristic view of the resurrection passed into the Middle Ages with little modification, excepting that in connection with the materialism of the Roman Christianity it naturally became more materialistic. The poetry of Dante, and the painting of Angelo powerfully exhibit it. In the Protestant system, a real body, and one that preserves the personal identity, is affirmed; but the materialism of the Papal, and to some extent of the Patristic church, is avoided by a more careful attention to St. Paul's distinction between the natural body (σῶμα ψυχικὸν) and the spiritual body (σῶμα πνευματικὸν).

Respecting the probability of a resurrection of the body, it may be remarked that it is no more strange that the human body should exist a second time, than that it has existed the first time. That a full-formed human body should be produced from a microscopic cell, is as difficult to believe, upon the face of it, as that a spiritual resurrection-body should be produced out of the natural earthly body. The marvels of embryology are, a priori, as incredible as those of the resurrection. The difference between the body that is laid in the grave, and the body that is raised from the grave, is not so great as the difference between the minute embryonic ovum and the "human form divine," represented by the Antinous or the Apollo Belvidere. If the generation of the body were, up to this time, as rare an event as

the resurrection of the body, it might be denied with equal plausibility. The question of St. Paul, in Acts 26: 8, applies here: "Why should it be thought a thing incredible that God should raise the dead?" The omnipotence that originated the body can of course re-originate it. Even if the extreme view be adopted, that there must be the very same material particles in order to the identity of the body, this is not an impossibility for God. For as Pearson (Article XI.) remarks: "Though the parts of the body of man be dissolved, yet they perish not, they lose not their own entity when they part with their relation to humanity; they are laid up in the secret places, and lodged in the chambers of nature, and it is no more a contradiction that they should become the parts of the same body of man to which they did belong, than that after his death they should become the parts of any other body, as we see they do." Only in this case, a particle of matter that had once been a constituent in two or more human bodies, could not be a constituent of two or more resurrection-bodies, because this would involve the simultaneous presence of an atom in two or more places.

The resurrection of the body was taught in the Old Testament, and for this reason it was the common belief of the Jews in the time of Christ. John 11: 24; Mark 6:16; 12:23. Passages that teach it are: Isa. 26:19, "Thy dead men shall live; together with my dead body shall they arise." Ezekiel 37:1-14, where the parable of a spiritual resurrection implies a bodily resurrection. Ps. 16:9, "My flesh also shall rest in hope." Dan. 12:2,

Many that sleep in the dust of the earth shall awake." The majority of commentators find the resurrection in Job 19:23-27. The translation of Elijah, and the reappearance of Samuel at Endor, favor the doctrine of the resurrection of the body. The careful sepulture of the body by Abraham and the Old Testament saints proves the expectation of the resurrection. Gen. 49: 29.