lations must be revived and continued. There was a woman, said they, who had seven husbands successively, all of whom died, and the woman died after them. Now, then, ask the cavillers, "in the resurrection whose wife will she be of the seven?" Mark the answer: "Do ye not err yourselves, because ye know not the Scriptures, neither the power of God? For when they shall rise from the dead, they neither marry nor are given in marriage, but are as the angels which are in heaven. And as touching the dead that they rise, have ye not read in the book of Moses, how in the bush God spake unto him, saying, I am the God of Abraham, and the God of Isaac, and the God of Jacob? He is not the God of the dead, but of the living, for all [though dead to us] are alive to him.”* You misconceive the true doctrine, he tells the cavillers, in two particulars. You mistake the nature of the resurrection state. It is not a carnal one, but those who enter it become like the angels (ὡς ἄγγελοι). You mistake the time of it, for the dead have risen already. The patriarchs are not in their graves, but living with God, as the language of Moses implies. It is perfectly clear that the whole pungency of his *Mark xii. 18-27; Luke xx. 27-38. are reply consists in the putting of these two points, that the "children of the resurrection" absolved from all carnal conditions, and that the resurrection takes place at death, since with the patriarchs it is not an event in the uncertain future, but already transpired. He is confronted on another occasion with this same Pharisaic dogma, and in like manner he brushes it clean away. Over the grave of Lazarus, the sisters, who held the current Jewish doctrine, send their imaginations down the dim future to a day when the body of their brother shall be revived. "I know he shall rise again in the resurrection at the last day." Jesus replied, "I am the resurrection and the life; he that believeth in me, though he were dead, yet shall he live, and whosoever liveth and believeth in me. shall never die." I am the resurrection, and as well now as at any far-off future; I can abolish death to him that puts his trust in me.* * St. Paul has handled this subject philosophically, and undertaken to disclose something of the Divine method in the transition of man from sensuous to spiritual existence. We will not attempt here to give his whole thought, reserving that for a subject by itself. We will only give it so far forth as it bears upon our present theme. *John xi. 24-26. He spreads out this topic at large in the fifteenth chapter of his first letter to the Corinthians. And the reader will please to observe how he regards the Jewish dogma, that the same bodies are to be raised which have been laid in the sepulchres. He rejects it somewhat more contemptuously than Christ had done, for the man who could entertain such a notion he rather impatiently calls a fool. "Thou fool! that which thou sowest is not quickened except it die; and thou sowest not that body that is to be. Thou sowest grain merely; perhaps wheat, perhaps some other grain. But God giveth it- the grain -a body as it hath pleased him, and to every seed his own body." The grain dies; you see nothing more of that, but it contains the germ of a future body which rises out of it, and whose nature is according to the nature of the grain, since every seed puts forth its own germ, and not another's. He then goes on from this exquisitely fine analogy to construct the doctrine of man's resurrection. He says there are two kinds of bodies; one natural, one spiritual. The natural is the one that dies, like the kernel that perishes in the ground. The spiritual is the one that comes out of it, like the expanding blade which breaks from the decaying capsula that contained it. Herein he develops a doctrine much higher than the Jewish, and well calculated, not merely to touch our interest, but to seize the imagination and hold it captive. It is this, that man's resurrection is the putting forth at death of new existence, just as the decaying seed puts forth the blade. Its decay is necessary in order to release the life and the beauty that were imprisoned within its foldings. Death and resurrection describe processes, one the inverse of the other, but the former helping on the latter and preparing its triumphant way. Our future being is insouled and inurned in our present. The spiritual body is included elementally in our present mode of existence, with its perceptive powers all ready for their enlargement. The soul is not a metaphysical nothing, but a heavenly substance and organism, fold within fold. The material falls off, and the spiritual stands forth and fronts the objects and breathes the ethers of immortality. The future is wrapped up within us, and waiting to be unrolled. Death will not transfer us; it will only remove a hinderance and a veil. We receive with our present being the germ of all that we are to become hereafter. The physical comes first in the order of development, forming a secure basis for all that is to follow, holding it firm, and relaxing its compressure when its function is done. "First that which is natural, afterward that which is spiritual." The death of the first is the falling away of exuvial matter, when the life of our life becomes manifest and the spiritual body unfolds all its powers. The worm that crawls upon the ground and prepares its own grave in which to wait for its coming transformation, yet bears on its unsightly form those very prominences which mark the places of gold and silver spangles on the wings of the released and soaring insect. The lines of Rogers "To the Butterfly," with the alteration of a single word, are a fitting and brief summing up of the doctrine of Paul: "Child of the sun! pursue thy rapturous flight, Yet wert thou once a worm, -a thing that crept Such is the primary and essential doctrine of the resurrection. We by no means claim that we have yet given the whole idea which that word is often made to represent, especially as it occurs in the writings of St. Paul. It means, essentially, the immortal man breaking from the carnal investitures of earth, and thence standing up on a higher platform of existence, and having |