CHAPTER X.

THE POST-RESURRECTION BODY.

WRITERS on the subject of the resurrection are in the habit of speaking of the change of the natural body into the spiritual; and one class suppose that Christ's body was so changed by instant miracle at his ascension. They imagine that this represents the transmutation which bodies raised out of the graves will have at the last day, and which the bodies of living men will then have before being received into heaven.

We know of no particle of evidence that any such change will be effected, and to us it is philosophically inconceivable. There is no such thing as changing material substance into spiritual. We know of matter only as a certain combination of external qualities; we know of spiritual body only as a certain other combination: one combination may cease, and the other may take its place in orderly succession, but that would be a destruction and a new creation. Or one may

exist within the other; spiritual body potentially within the natural, as the living ovum within the shell; the latter may be extruded, and the former come forth and be clear of it. That is not changing natural body into spiritual, but causing it to be put off, that the other may come forth and take its place.

Precisely this, as we conceive, was the change in the post-resurrection body of our Lord. He rose in the natural body, but its extrusion was rapid, and was completed at his ascension, after which he was seen no more by the natural eye.

So we understand the Evangelic narratives. We will not dogmatize on the question, but remember we are treading on holy ground, and may not presume to know all that lies within these stupendous phenomena. It is clear to our apprehension, however, that our Lord's subjective glorification was consummating at the moment of his crucifixion, and that when he exclaimed, "It is finished," the divine was becoming full-orbed within the natural; that the material body was taken up from the sepulchre to be put off successively, and by virtue of the divine plenitude from within, and that to this rapid transformation are to be ascribed the anomalous appearances during the forty days. Hence Mary at first did not know him; hence the "other form" in which he walked to Emmaus with the two unrecognizing disciples;

hence (possibly) his comparative "illocality," as the natural waned, and was less subject to the laws of motion; and hence, perhaps, the "cloud" that enveloped him at his ascension, it being the last dispersion and sublimation of all that was earthly; and then he was no more to be seen, except as by Stephen and St. Paul, when the spiritual sense was opened to the transcendent realities of another sphere. The fact that he passed through closed doors needs no more explanation than the opening of the tomb, the walking upon the waves, or the opening of Peter's prison-gates by angel hands.

We are no such masters of the Divine Psychology that we shall pretend to give all the reasons why it was necessary that Christ should have

resumed the natural body.

Perhaps it was ne

cessary that it should serve yet further as the basis and scaffolding of the glorified man. Perhaps it was not in accordance with essential Divine laws, that from such a soul as his the natural should be put off by a disorderly and violent death. Perhaps it illustrates to us what death must ever be to a sinless nature; what it will be to man if ever he becomes purged of all spiritual and moral evil. The actual death of Christ was not on the cross, but on the ascension mount; that putting off mortality which typifies the transition of renovated humanity from the natural

degree to the spiritual; such a death as Adam would have had if he had never sinned; not a violent rending away of the body, but its gradual extrusion, more slow or more rapid, according to the degree in which the heavens are englobed within us; the spiritual waxing, the natural waning, till our last earthly integument breaks away from us, softly as a summer's cloud, which conceals from those that gaze after us the sunlit side where the eternities shed their "unfluctuating peace." So, at least, the Saviour put on immortality. We do not mean that the expiration on the cross was apparent and not real, or that the body laid in Joseph's tomb was not a veritable corpse. We have no doubt it was. But it were not possible in the nature of things that it should so remain. Not with him could the natural so be put off, but rather in its divine and beautiful order. Long before his crucifixion his real death began; for that was the decrease of the natural before thè incoming fulness of the Divine Man. The crucifixion did not even interrupt the process, but it went on to its completion, till on ascension mount the last of the earthly broke away, and the Glorified Form stood in the unclouded effulgence of God. Thus, and not on Calvary, was that death of the Saviour which exemplifies the transition of redeemed and renovated man.

For another and more obvious reason, it was necessary that the natural body should be resumed. It was to bring down the evidence of the resurrection to the lowest plane of human perceptions. Christ could not break upon his disciples unveiled from his glorified state, for as yet their minds could not bear it. The natural served to them as a protecting disguise, through which the annunciation might be made; and even then their reason swayed and trembled beneath it. Men were immersed in sense, and therefore into the regions of sense the Divine Mercy let down the proofs of Christ triumphant over the grave, so that the Thomas of his own disciples and the Thomases of every age might not only see, but feel and handle and believe.

It is very fortunate, however, that the real doctrine of Christ's resurrection depends on no uncertain hypothesis respecting the natural body. Whether the last of what is mortal was excluded on the cross and left for ever in the sepulchre ; or whether it was excluded progressively during the forty days following, which we believe; or whether it was excluded instantaneously in the act of ascension; - it is broadly evident that it was excluded; and the way is open to us for a right apprehension of the fundamental fact of Christianity.