CHAPTER XX.

SUMMARY.

OUR course of argument has led us through subjects of inexhaustible interest, and we hope we have carried the convictions of our readers along with us. Some of them, holding the traditional interpretations respecting the resurrection of Christ and of the philosophy contained in St. Paul's Epistles, may think that the letter of Scripture is against us. We promise to show, if they will leave their traditions a moment, that the letter is for us when it speaks for itself, and that too with a peculiar majesty of utterance. Something remains to be said, therefore, in expositions confirmatory of the reasonings which we have presented. But before we go on, we will review our steps and gather up the conclusions in which we now rest.

1. When we attempt to think clearly and rationally respecting the future life, we must choose between three hypotheses. We stand in

a trilemma, and we must adopt one of three sets. of conclusions, and exclude and reject the other two. We may join the metaphysicians, when we shall have the privilege of talking wisely and meaning nothing; of remaining in ignorance, yet showing off a quasi knowledge; of leaving the fools agape after us as if we were philosophers, and concealing the fact that we are more fools ourselves. Or, secondly, we may join the materialists and keep on the level of naturalism, in which case we cling to the corpses, and reiterate, These shall live again! Between death and the resurrection is a region of dusk, filled with disembodied entities; but after long centuries the trumpet blows, the church-yards yield up their mould from which frames of men are built, the disembodied entities or "monads " come back into them, and become real men and women once more, prepared to enter on their final heaven or hell. Each of these is a locale somewhere in space, to be reached by locomotives of some kind. Or, thirdly, leaving the flats of naturalism, and getting above its clay-pits, you ascend into the region of what we call the Bible Pneumatology, viz. :

2. The Christian doctrine of the resurrection and the spiritual world. There are celestial bodies and bodies terrestrial; the glory of the celestial is one thing, that of the terrestrial quite

another thing. They differ generically, not in fineness of texture; and so neither is perceived by the senses of the other. The natural body is not the man, nor any essential part of him. The spirit itself is an immortal organism, folded in by its clay coverings in order, for probationary purposes, to hold connection awhile with material things. It is the most real part of man, since nearer in degree and kindred to the eternal real ities. The resurrection is the emergence of the immortal being in a spiritual body out of material conditions, when first it has open relations with a spiritual world, and is set face to face with spiritual things.

3. "But to every seed his own body." The spiritual body is not manufactured, but created,created from within, and comes out of the natural body as the rose out of the bursting calyx, and therefore fragrant with all the moral qualities of the spirit, the form and figure of its very life. Hence the resurrection is the disclosure of man, the resolving of humanity, lost or redeemed, into the demon or the angel; and there is nothing covered that shall not be revealed, or hid that shall not be known.

4. Hence the great assize and the judgmentday. The life of life comes forth into the noon of truth, and all merely external and arbitrary connections are abolished; and society forms

anew according to the affinities of the inmost nature. Truth and falsehood, good and evil, are repellent, and they rise or fall and gather each to its place of central rest. Hence the cleavings that cannot err which take place at the grand and solemn crisis.

5. Yet not by way of revenge, but that each may seek the home centre, and find there all which in the nature of things he may enjoy. We gravitate towards the spot where our affections cling, till we find it; and thence we reach out again to do the work which we love. Hence the homes that rise up through all the zones that belt the heavenly hills, each a centre of radiances whose circlets throb outward over all.

6. Hence again the spiritual world is neither the limbo of the metaphysicians, nor some place which the materialists peer after among the stellar spaces. It is out of natural space and above it, and has its own spaces; it is not sublimation of the material world, but higher in the order of existence; it is nearer in degree to the creative mind, therefore a more substantial world than this. It differs from this, not because it is without substance, form, extension, distances, but because these exist, not under natural law, but under spiritual, and are therefore redolent with all the moral perfections and excellences of spirit itself, and open quite a new page of the

everlasting beauty and glory. Hence the elements of the heavenly happiness when the soul is new organized for its work, knows God by nearer and more open communion, is brought into the clear exercise of its central love and of the perfect moralities, and sees its highest imaginings of the good and the fair always passing over into their most beautiful realizations.

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We are on themes where the heart as well as the intellect must lend us its aid, and make the chain of logic warm, and not brittle with frost. The Church creeds will not avail us much, and if any one scruples at breaking away from their letter, let him remember that the Church has gone down so deep in naturalism as not only to splash the altars with mud," but the windows too, whence the light has small chance of getting through. The scholiasts will not avail us much; they are in the clay-beds themselves, and they plaster the text with clay till that which shone with the light of the empyrean is dingy and emits no more white sparkles as you touch it. But we will take the word without the clay-plasters, happily if, sitting before it bowed in prayer and with a high purpose, the truth may break out of the letter, the Son of Man out of the clouds of heaven already purpling before the presence of his coming.