In the seventh century Mohammed flourished. His doctrinal system, it is well known, was drawn indiscriminately from many sources, and mixed with additions and colors of his own. Finding the dogma of a general bodily resurrection already prevailing among the Pa.r.s.ees, the Jews, and the Christians, and perceiving, too, how well adapted for purposes of vivid representation and practical effect it was, or perhaps believing it himself, the Arabian prophet ingrafted this article into the creed of his followers. It has ever been with them, and is still, a foremost and controlling article of faith, an article for the most part held in its literal sense, although there is a powerful sect which spiritualizes the whole conception, turning all its details into allegories and images. But this view is not the original nor the orthodox view.
The subject of the resurrection was a prominent theme in the theology of the Middle Age. Only here and there a dissenting voice was raised against the doctrine in its strict physical form. The great body of the Scholastics stood stanchly by it. In defence and support of the Church thesis they brought all the quirks and quiddities of their subtle dialectics. As we take down their ponderous tomes from their neglected shelves, and turn over the dusty, faded old leaves, we find chapter after chapter in many a formidable folio occupied with grave discussions, carried on in acute logical terminology, of questions like these: "Will the resurrection be natural or miraculous?" "Will each one"s hairs and nails all be restored to him in the resurrection?" "When bodies are raised, will each soul spontaneously know its own and enter it? or will the power of G.o.d distribute them as they belong?"
"Will the deformities and scars of our present bodies be retained in the resurrection?" "Will all rise of the same age?" "Will all have one size and one s.e.x?" 11 And so on with hundreds of kindred questions. For instance, Thomas Aquinas contended "that no other substance would rise from the grave except that which belonged to the individual in the moment of death."12 What dire prospects this proposition must conjure up before many minds! If one chance to grow prodigiously obese before death, he must lug that enormous corporeity wearily about forever; but if he happen to die when wasted, he must then flit through eternity as thin as a lath.
8 De Civ. Dei, lib. xxii. cap. 19, 20.
9 See the strange speculations of Opitz in his work "De Statura et Atate Resurgentium.
10 Redepenning, Origenes, b. ii. s. 463.
11 Summa Theologia, Thoma Aquinatis, tertia pars, Supplementum, Quastiones 79-87.
12 Hagenbuch, Dogmengeschichte, sect. 204.
Those who have had the misfortune to be amputated of legs or arms must appear on the resurrection stage without those very convenient appendages. There will still be need of hospitals for the battered veterans of Chelsea and Greenwich, mutilated heroes, pensioned relics of deck and field. Then in the resurrection the renowned "Mynheer von Clam, Richest merchant in Rotterdam,"
will again have occasion for the services of the "patent cork leg manufacturer," though it is hardly to be presumed he will accept another unrestrainable one like that which led him so fearful a race through the poet"s verses.
The Manichaans denied a bodily resurrection. In this all the sects theologically allied to them, who have appeared in ecclesiastical history, for instance, the Cathari, have agreed. There have also been a few individual Christian teachers in every century who have a.s.sailed the doctrine. But, as already declared, it has uniformly been the firm doctrine of the Church and of all who acknowledged her authority. The old dogma still remains in the creeds of the recognised Churches, Papal, Greek, and Protestant. It has been terribly shattered by the attacks of reason and of progressive science. It lingers in the minds of most people only as a dead letter. But all the earnest conservative theologians yet cling to it in its unmitigated grossness, with unrelaxing severity. We hear it in practical discourses from the pulpit, and read it in doctrinal treatises, as offensively proclaimed now as ever.
Indeed, it is an essential part of the compact system of the ruling theology, and cannot be taken out without loosening the whole dogmatic fabric into fragments. Thus writes to day a distinguished American divine, Dr. Spring: "Whether buried in the earth, or floating in the sea, or consumed by the flames, or enriching the battle field, or evaporate in the atmosphere, all, from Adam to the latest born, shall wend their way to the great arena of the judgment. Every perished bone and every secret particle of dust shall obey the summons and come forth. If one could then look upon the earth, he would see it as one mighty excavated globe, and wonder how such countless generations could have found a dwelling beneath its surface." 13 This is the way the recognised authorities in theology still talk. To venture any other opinion is a heresy all over Christendom at this hour.
We will next bring forward and criticize the arguments for and against the doctrine before us. It is contended that the doctrine is demonstrated in the example of Christ"s own resurrection. "The resurrection of the flesh was formerly regarded as incredible,"
says Augustine; "but now we see the whole world believing that Christ"s earthly body was borne into heaven." 14 It is the faith of the Church that "Christ rose into heaven with his body of flesh and blood, and wears it there now, and will forever." "Had he been there in body before, it would have been no such wonder that he should have returned with it; but that the flesh of our flesh and bone of our bone should be seated at the right hand of G.o.d is worthy of the greatest admiration." 15 That is to say, Christ was from eternity G.o.d, the Infinite Spirit, in
13 The Glory of Christ, vol. ii. p. 237.
14 De Civ. Dei, lib. xxii. cap. 5.
15 Pearson on the Creed, 12th ed., pp. 272-275.
heaven; he came to earth and lived in a human body; on returning to heaven, instead of resuming his proper form, he bears with him, and will eternally retain, the body of flesh he had worn on earth!
Paul says, "Flesh and blood cannot inherit the kingdom of G.o.d."
The Church, hastily following the senses, led by a carnal, illogical philosophy, has deeply misinterpreted and violently abused the significance of Christ"s ascension. The drama of his resurrection, with all its connected parts, was not meant throughout as a strict representation of our destiny. It was a seal upon his commission and teachings, not an exemplification of what should happen to others. It was outwardly a miracle, not a type, an exceptional instance of super natural power, not a significant exhibition of the regular course of things. The same logic which says, "Christ rose and ascended with his fleshly body: therefore we shall," must also say, "Christ rose visibly on the third day: therefore we shall." Christ"s resurrection was a miracle; and therefore we cannot reason from it to ourselves. The common conception of a miracle is that it is the suspension, not the manifestation, of ordinary laws. We have just as much logical right to say that the physical appearance in Christ"s resurrection was merely an accommodation to the senses of the witnesses, and that on his ascension the body was annihilated, and only his soul entered heaven, as we have to surmise that the theory embodied in the common belief is true. The record is according to mere sensible appearances. The reality is beyond our knowledge. The record gives no explanation. It is wiser in this dilemma to follow the light of reason than to follow the blind spirit of tradition.
The point in our reasoning is this. If Christ, on rising from the world of the dead, a.s.sumed again his former body, he a.s.sumed it by a miracle, and for some special purpose of revealing himself to his disciples and of finishing his earthly work; and it does not follow either that he bore that body into heaven, or that any others will ever, even temporarily, rea.s.sume their cast off forms.
The Christian Scriptures do not in a single pa.s.sage teach the popular doctrine of the resurrection of the body. Every text in the New Testament finds its full and satisfactory explanation without implying that dogma at all. In the first place, it is undeniably implied throughout the New Testament that the soul does not perish with the body. It also appears, in the next place, from numerous explicit pa.s.sages, that the New Testament authors, in common with their countrymen, supposed the souls of the departed to be gathered and tarrying in what the Church calls the intermediate state, the obscure under world. In this subterranean realm they were imagined to be awaiting the advent of the Messiah to release them. Now, we submit that every requirement of the doctrine of the resurrection as it is stated or hinted in the New Testament is fully met by the simple ascension of this congregation of souls from the vaults of Sheol to the light of the upper earth, there to be judged, and then some to be sent up to heaven, some sent back to their prison. For, let it be carefully observed, there is not one text in the New Testament, as before stated, which speaks of the resurrection of the "body" or of the "flesh." The expression is simply the resurrection of "the dead,"
or of "them that slept." If by "the dead" was meant "the bodies,"
why are we not told so? Locke, in the Third Letter of his controversy with the Bishop of Worcester on this subject, very pointedly shows the absurdity of a literal interpretation of the words "All that are in their graves shall hear my voice and shall come forth." Nothing can come out of the grave except what is in it. And there are no souls in the grave: they are in the separate state. And there are no bodies in millions of graves: they long ago, even to the last grain of dust, entered into the circulations of the material system. "Coming forth from their graves unto the resurrection" either denotes the rising of souls from the under world, or else its meaning is something incredible. At all events, nothing is said about any resurrection of the body: that is a matter of arbitrary inference. The angels are not thought to have material bodies; and Christ declares, "In the resurrection ye shall neither marry nor be given in marriage, but shall be as the angels of heaven." It seems clear to us that the author of the Epistle to the Hebrews also looked for no restoration of the fleshly body; for he not only studiously omits even the faintest allusion to any such notion, but positively describes "the spirits of just men made perfect in the heavenly Jerusalem, with an innumerable company of angels, and with the general a.s.sembly and church of the first born." The Jews and early Christians who believed in a bodily resurrection did not suppose the departed could enter heaven until after that great consummation.
The most cogent proof that the New Testament does not teach the resurrection of the same body that is buried in the grave is furnished by the celebrated pa.s.sage in Paul"s Epistle to the Corinthians. The apostle"s premises, reasoning, and conclusion are as follows: "Christ is risen from the dead, become the first fruits of them that slept." That is to say, all who have died, except Christ, are still tarrying in the great receptacle of souls under the earth. As the first fruits go before the harvest, so the solitary risen Christ is the forerunner to the general resurrection to follow. "But some one will say, How are the dead raised up? and with what body do they come?" Mark the apostle"s reply, and it will appear inexplicable how any one can consider him as arguing for the resurrection of the identical body that was laid in the grave, particle for particle. "Thou fool! that which thou sowest, thou sowest not that body that shall be, but naked grain, and G.o.d giveth it a body as it hath pleased him." "There are celestial bodies, and terrestrial bodies;" "there is a natural body, and there is a spiritual body;" "the first man is of the earth, earthy; the second man is the Lord from heaven;" "flesh and blood cannot inherit the kingdom of G.o.d;" "we shall all be changed," and "bear the image of the heavenly, as we have borne the image of the earthy." The a.n.a.logy which has been so strangely perverted by most commentators is used by Paul thus. The germ which was to spring up to a new life, clothed with a new body, was not any part of the fleshly body buried in the grave, but was the soul itself, once contained in the old body, but released from its hull in the grave and preserved in the under world until Christ shall call it forth to be invested with a "glorious," "powerful,"
"spiritual," "incorruptible" body. When a grain of wheat is sown, that is not the body that shall be; but the mysterious principle of life, latent in the germ of the seed, springs up and puts on its body fashioned appropriately for it. So, according to Paul"s conception, when a man is buried, the material corpse is not the resurrection body that shall be; but the living soul which occupied it is the germ that shall put on a new body of immortality when the spring tide of Christ"s coming draws the buried treasures of Hades up to the light of heaven.
A species of proof which has been much used by the advocates of the dogma of a bodily resurrection is the argument from a.n.a.logy.
The intimate connection of human feeling and fancy with the changing phenomena of Nature"s seasons would naturally suggest to a pensive mind the idea, Why, since she has her annual resurrection, may not humanity some time have one? And what first arose as a poetic conceit or stray thought, and was expressed in glowing metaphors, might by an easy process pa.s.s abroad and harden into a prosaic proposition or dogmatic formula.
"O soul of the spring time, now let us behold The stone from the mouth of the sepulchre roll"d, And Nature rise up from her death"s damp mould; Let our faith, which in darkness and coldness has lain, Revive with the warmth and the brightness again, And in blooming of flower and budding of tree The symbols and types of our destiny see."
Standing by the graves of our loved and lost ones, our inmost souls yearn over the very dust in which their hallowed forms repose. We feel that they must come back, we must be restored to each other as we were before. Listening to the returned birds whose warble fills the woods once more, gazing around on the verdant and flowery forms of renewed life that clothe the landscape over again, we eagerly s.n.a.t.c.h at every apparent emblem or prophetic a.n.a.logy that answers to our fond imagination and desiring dream. Sentiment and fancy, especially when stimulated by love and grief, and roving in the realms of reverie, free from the cold guidance and sharp check of literal fact and severe logic, are poor a.n.a.lysts, and then we easily confuse things distinct and wander to conclusions philosophy will not warrant. Before building a dogmatic doctrine on a.n.a.logies, we must study those a.n.a.logies with careful discrimination, must see what they really are, and to what they really lead. There is often an immense difference between the first appearance to a hasty observer and the final reality to a profound student. Let us, then, scrutinize a little more closely those seeming a.n.a.logies which, to borrow a happy expression from Flugge, have made "Resurrection a younger sister of Immortality."
Nature, the old, eternal snake, comes out afresh every year in a new shining skin. What then? Of course this emblem is no proof of any doctrine concerning the fate of man. But, waiving that, what would the legitimate correspondence to it be for man? Why, that humanity should exhibit the fresh specimens of her living handiwork in every new generation. And that is done. Nature does not reproduce before us each spring the very flowers that perished the previous winter: she makes new ones like them. It is not a resurrection of the old: it is a growth of the new. The pa.s.sage of the worm from its slug to its chrysalis state is surely no symbol of a bodily resurrection, but rather of a bodily emanc.i.p.ation, not resuming a deserted dead body, but a.s.suming a new live one. Does the b.u.t.terfly ever come back to put on the exuvia that have perished in the ground? The law of all life is progress, not return, ascent through future developments, not descent through the stages already traversed. "The herb is born anew out of a seed, Not raised out of a bony skeleton. What tree is man the seed of? Of a soul."
Sir Thomas Browne, after others, argues for the restoration of man"s body from the grave, from the fancied a.n.a.logy of the palingenesis or resurrection of vegetables which the magicians of the antique East and the mystic chemists of the Middle Age boasted of effecting. He having a.s.serted in his "Religion of a Physician"
that "experience can from the ashes of a plant revive the plant, and from its cinders recall it into its stalk and leaves again,"
Dr. Henry Power wrote beseeching "an experimental eviction of so high and n.o.ble a piece of chemistry, the reindividuality of an incinerated plant." We are not informed that Sir Thomas ever granted him the sight. Of this beautiful error, this exquisite superst.i.tion, which undoubtedly arose from the crystallizations of certain salts in arborescent forms which suddenly surprised the early alchemists in some of their experiments, we have the following account in Disraeli"s "Curiosities of Literature:" "The semina of resurrection are concealed in extinct bodies, as in the blood of man. The ashes of roses will again revive into roses, though smaller and paler than if they had been planted unsubstantial and unodoriferous, they are not roses which grew on rose trees, but their delicate apparitions; and, like apparitions, they are seen but for a moment. This magical phoenix lies thus concealed in its cold ashes till the presence of a certain chemical heat produces its resurrection." Any refutation of this now would be considered childish. Upon the whole, then, while recurrent spring, bringing in the great Easter of the year, typifies to us indeed abundantly the development of new life, the growth of new bodies out of the old and decayed, but nowhere hints at the gathering up and wearing again of the dusty sloughs and rotted foliage of the past, let men cease to talk of there being any natural a.n.a.logies to the ecclesiastical dogma of the resurrection of the flesh. The teaching of nature finds a truer utterance in the words of Aschylus: "There is no resurrection for him who is once dead." 16
The next argument is that based on considerations of reason and of ethics. The supporters of the doctrine of the resurrection of the body have often disingenuously evaded the burden of proof thrown upon them by retreating beneath loud a.s.sertions of G.o.d"s power.
From the earliest dawn of the hypothesis to the present time, every perplexity arising from it, every objection brought against it, every absurdity shown to be involved in it, has been met and confidently reb.u.t.ted with declarations of G.o.d"s abundant power to effect a physical resurrection, or to do any thing else he pleases, however impossible it may appear to us. Now, it is true the power of G.o.d is competent to innumerable things utterly beyond our skill, knowledge, or conception. Nevertheless, there is a province within which our reason can judge of probabilities, and can, if not absolutely grasp infallible truth, at least reach satisfactory convictions. G.o.d is able to restore the vast coal deposits of the earth, and the ashes of all the fuel ever burned, to their original condition when they covered the world with
16 Eumenides, 1. 648, Oxford edition.
dense forests of ferns; but we have no reason to believe he will do it. The truth or falsity of the popular theory of the resurrection is not a question of G.o.d"s power; it is simply a question of G.o.d"s will. A Jewish Rabbin relates the following conversation, as exultingly as if the quibbling evasion on which it turns positively settled the question itself, which in fact it does not approach. A Sadducee says, "The resurrection of the dead is a fable: the dry, scattered dust cannot live again." A by standing Pharisee makes this reply: "There were in a city two artists: one made vases of water, the other made them of clay: which was the more wondrous artist?" The Sadducee answered, "The former." The Pharisee rejoins, "Cannot G.o.d, then, who formed man of water, (gutta seminis humida,) much more re form him of clay?"
Such a method of reasoning is an irrelevant impertinence. G.o.d can call Nebuchadnezzar from his long rest, and seat him on his old throne again to morrow. What an absurdity to infer that therefore he will do it! G.o.d can give us wings upon our bodies, and enable us to fly on an exploring trip among the planets. Will he do it?
The question, we repeat, is not whether G.o.d has the power to raise our dead bodies, but whether he has the will. To that question since, as we have already seen, he has sent us no miraculous revelation replying to it we can only find an answer by tracing the indications of his intentions contained in reason, morals, and nature.
One of the foremost arguments urged by the Fathers for the resurrection was its supposed necessity for a just and complete judgment. The body was involved and instrumental in all the sins of the man: it must therefore bear part in his punishment. The Rabbins tell this allegory: "In the day of judgment the body will say, The soul alone is to blame: since it left me, I have lain like a stone in the grave. The soul will retort, The body alone is sinful: since released from it, I fly through the air like a bird.
The Judge will interpose with this myth: A king once had a beautiful garden full of early fruits. A lame man and a blind man were in it. Said the lame man to the blind man, Let me mount upon your shoulders and pluck the fruit, and we will divide it. The king accused them of theft; but they severally replied, the lame man, How could I reach it? the blind man, How could I see it? The king ordered the lame man to be placed upon the back of the blind man, and in this position had them both scourged. So G.o.d in the day of judgment will replace the soul in the body, and hurl them both into h.e.l.l together." There is a queer tradition among the Mohammedans implying, singularly enough, the same general thought.
The Prophet"s uncle, Hamzah, having been slain by Hind, daughter of Atabah, the cursed woman cut out his liver and gnawed it with fiendish joy; but, lest any of it should become incorporated with her system and go to h.e.l.l, the Most High made it as hard as a stone; and when she threw it on the ground, an angel restored it to its original nature and place in the body of the martyred hero, that lion of G.o.d.
The Roman Catholic Church endorses the representation that the body must be raised to be punished. In the Catechism of the Council of Trent, which is an authoritative exposition of Romanist theology, we read that the "identical body" shall be restored, though "without deformities or superfluities;" restored that "as it was a partner in the man"s deeds, so it may be a partner in his punishments." The same Catechism also gives in this connection the reason why a general judgment is necessary after each individual has been judged at his death, namely, this: that they may be punished for the evil which has resulted in the world since they died from the evil they did in the world while they lived! Is it not astonishing how these theologians find out so much? A living Presbyterian divine of note says, "The bodies of the d.a.m.ned in the resurrection shall be fit dwellings for their vile minds. With all those fearful and horrid expressions which every base and malignant pa.s.sion wakes up in the human countenance stamped upon it for eternity and burned in by the flaming fury of their own terrific wickedness, they will be condemned to look upon their own deformity and to feel their fitting doom." It is therefore urged that the body must be raised to suffer the just penalty of the sins man committed while occupying it. Is it not an absurdity to affirm that nerves and blood, flesh and bones, are responsible, guilty, must be punished? Tucker, in his "Light of Nature Pursued," says, "The vulgar notion of a resurrection in the same form and substance we carry about at present, because the body being partaker in the deed ought to share in the reward, as well requires a resurrection of the sword a man murders with, or the bank note he gives to charitable uses." We suppose an intelligent personality, a free will, indispensable to responsibleness and alone amenable to retributions. Besides, if the body must be raised to undergo chastis.e.m.e.nt for the offences done in it and by means of it, this insurmountable difficulty by the same logic confronts us. The material of our bodies is in a constant change, the particles becoming totally transferred every few years. Now, when a man is punished after the general judgment for a certain crime, he must be in the very body he occupied when that crime was perpetrated. Since he was a sinner all his days, his resurrection body must comprise all the matter that ever formed a part of his corporeity, and each sinner may hereafter be as huge as the writhing t.i.tan, t.i.tyus, whose body, it was fabled, covered nine acres. G.o.d is able to preserve the integral soul in being, and to punish it according to justice, without clothing it in flesh. This fact by itself utterly vacates and makes gratuitous the hypothesis of a physical resurrection from punitive considerations, an hypothesis which is also refuted by the truth contained in Locke"s remark to Stillingfleet, "that the soul hath no greater congruity with the particles of matter which were once united to it, but are so no longer, than it hath with any other particles of matter."
When the soul leaves the body, it would seem to have done with that stage of its existence, and to enter upon another and higher one, leaving the dust to mix with dust forever. The body wants not the soul again; for it is a senseless clod and wants nothing. The soul wants not its old body again: it prefers to have the freedom of the universe, a spirit. Philip the Solitary wrote, in the twelfth century, a book called "Dioptra," presenting the controversy between the soul and the body very quaintly and at length. The same thing was done by Henry Nicholson in a "Conference between the Soul and Body concerning the Present and Future State." William Crashaw, an old English poet, translated from the Latin a poem ent.i.tled "The Complaint: a Dialogue between the Body and the Soul of a d.a.m.ned Man."17 But any one who will peruse with intelligent heed the works that have been written on this whole subject must be amazed to see how exclusively the doctrine which we are opposing has rested on pure grounds of tradition and fancy, alike dest.i.tute of authority and reason. Some authors have indeed attempted to support the doctrine with arguments: for
17 Also see Dialogue inter Corpus et Animam, p. 95 of Latin Poems attributed to Walter Mapes.
instance, there are two German works, one by Bertram, one by Pflug, ent.i.tled "The Resurrection of the Dead on Grounds of Reason," in which recourse is had to every possible expedient to make out a case, not even neglecting the fact.i.tious a.s.sistance of Leibnitz"s scheme of "Pre established Harmony." But it may be deliberately affirmed that not one of their arguments is worthy of respect. Apparently, they do not seek to reach truth, but to bolster up a foregone conclusion held merely from motives of tradition.
The Jews had a favorite tradition, developed by their Rabbins in many pa.s.sages, that there was one small, almond shaped bone, (supposed now to have been the bone called by anatomists the os coccygis,) which was indestructible, and would form the nucleus around which the rest of the body would gather at the time of the resurrection. This bone, named Luz, was miraculously preserved from demolition or decay. Pound it furiously on anvils with heavy hammers of steel, burn it for ages in the fiercest furnaces, soak it for centuries in the strongest solvents, all in vain: its magic structure still remained. So the Talmud tells. "Even as there is a round dry grain In a plant"s skeleton, which, being buried, Can raise the herb"s green body up again; So is there such in man, a seed shaped bone, Aldabaron, call"d by the Hebrews Luz, Which, being laid into the ground, will bear, After three thousand years, the gra.s.s of flesh, The b.l.o.o.d.y, soul possessed weed called man."
The Jews did not, as these singular lines represent, suppose this bone was a germ which after long burial would fructify by a natural process and bear a perfect body: they regarded it only as a nucleus around which the Messiah would by a miracle compel the decomposed flesh to return as in its pristine life. All that the Jews say of Luz the Mohammedans repeat of the bone Al Ajib.
This conceit of superst.i.tion has been developed by a Christian author of considerable reputation into a theory of a natural resurrection. The work of Mr. Samuel Drew on the "Ident.i.ty and General Resurrection of the Human Body" has been quite a standard work on the subject of which it treats. Mr. Drew believes there is a germ in the body which slowly ripens and prepares the resurrection body in the grave. As a seed must be buried for a season in order to spring up in perfect life, so must the human body be buried till the day of judgment. During this period it is not idle, but is busily getting ready for its consummation. He says, "There are four distinct stages through which those parts const.i.tuting the ident.i.ty of the body must necessarily pa.s.s in order to their attainment of complete perfection beyond the grave.
The first of these stages is that of its elementary principles; the second is that of an embryo in the womb; the third is that of its union with an immaterial spirit, and with the fluctuating portions of flesh and blood in our present state; and the fourth stage is that of its residence in the grave. All these stages are undoubtedly necessary to the full perfection of the body: they are alembics through which its parts must necessarily move to attain that vigor which shall continue forever."18 To state this figment is enough. It would be folly to attempt any refutation of a fancy so obviously a pure contrivance to fortify a preconceived opinion, a fancy, too, so preposterous, so utterly without countenance, either from experience, observation, science, reason, or Scripture. The egg of man"s divinity is not laid in the nest of the grave.
Another motive for believing the resurrection of the body has been created by the exigencies of a materialistic philosophy. There was in the early Church an Arabian sect of heretics who were reclaimed from their errors by the powerful reasonings and eloquence of Origen.19 Their heresy consisted in maintaining that the soul dies with the body being indeed only its vital breath and will be restored with it at the last day. In the course of the Christian centuries there have arisen occasionally a few defenders of this opinion. Priestley, as is well known, was an earnest supporter of it. Let us scan the ground on which he held this belief. In the first place, he firmly believed that the fact of an eternal life to come had been supernaturally revealed to men by G.o.d through Christ. Secondly, as a philosopher he was intensely a materialist, holding with unwavering conviction to the conclusion that life, mind, or soul, was a concomitant or result of our physical organism, and wholly incapable of being without it. Death to him was the total destruction of man for the time. There was therefore plainly no alternative for him but either to abandon one of his fundamental convictions as a Christian and a philosopher, or else to accept the doctrine of a future resurrection of the body into an immortal life. He chose the latter, and zealously taught always that death is an annihilation lasting till the day of judgment, when all are to be summoned from their graves. To this whole course of thought there are several replies to be made. In the first place, we submit that the philosophy of materialism is false: standing in the province of science and reason, it may be affirmed that the soul is not dependent for its existence on the body, but will survive it. We will not argue this point, but merely state it. Secondly, it is certain that the doctrine which makes soul perish with body finds no countenance in the New Testament. It is inconsistent with the belief in angelic spirits, in demoniac possessions, in Christ"s descent as a spirit to preach to the spirits of departed men imprisoned in the under world, and with other conceptions underlying the Gospels and the Epistles.
But, thirdly, admitting it to be true, then, we affirm, the legitimate deduction from all the arrayed facts of science and all the presumptive evidence of appearances is not that a future resurrection will restore the dead man to life, but that all is over with him, he has hopelessly perished forever. When the breath ceases, if nothing survives, if the total man is blotted out, then we challenge the production of a shadow of proof that he will ever live again. The seeming injustice and blank awfulness of the fate may make one turn for relief to the hypothesis of a future arbitrary miraculous resurrection; but that is an artificial expedient, without a shadow of justification. Once admit that the body is all, its dissolution a total death, and you are gone forever. One intuition of the spirit, seizing the conscious supports of eternal ideas, casts contempt on "The doubtful prospects of our painted dust,"
18 Drew on Resurrection, ch. vi. sect. vii. pp. 326-332.
19 Eusebius, Eccl. Hist. lib. vi. cap. x.x.xvii.
and outvalues all the gross hopes of materialism. Between nonent.i.ty and being yawns the untraversable gulf of infinity. No: the body of flesh falls, turns to dust and air; the soul, emanc.i.p.ated, rejoices, and soars heavenwards, and is its own incorruptible frame, mocking at death, a celestial house, whose maker and builder is G.o.d.
Finally, there remain to be weighed the bearings of the argument from chemical and physiological science on the resurrection. Here is the chief stumbling block in the way of the popular doctrine.
The scientific absurdities connected with that doctrine have been marshalled against it by Celsus, the Platonist philosopher, by Avicenna, the Arabian physician, and by hundreds more, and have never been answered, and cannot be answered. As long as man lives, his bodily substance is incessantly changing; the processes of secretion and absorption are rapidly going forward. Every few years he is, as to material, a totally new man. Dying at the age of seventy, he has had at least ten different bodies. He is one identical soul, but has lived in ten separate houses. With which shall he be raised? with the first? or the fifth? or the last? or with all? But, further, the body after death decays, enters into combination with water, air, earth, gas, vegetables, animals, other human bodies. In this way the same matter comes to have belonged to a thousand persons. In the resurrection, whose shall it be? We reply, nearly in the language of Christ to the Sadducees, "Ye do err, not knowing the Scriptures, nor the will of G.o.d: in the resurrection they have not bodies of earthly flesh, but are spirits, as the angels of G.o.d."