body gradually fail, until it ceases to be the obedient instrument of the soul. Then it dies, and is laid away in the grave, what is of the earth returning to earth. Is it to be revived and renewed? "How foolish you are," says the apostle. "You have but to open your eyes to find your answer in the natural world. The seed you sow grows again, but not the identical, naked seed you planted. That perished; but in its perishing, the life hidden in it revealed the mysterious faculty of reincorporating itself. It seized upon the dead earth about it, and speedily shaped for itself a habitation, to each seed its own body. Look further; a similar law maintains everywhere in nature. Birds, beasts, fishes, all have their individuality of bodily life. Even the stars, those "patines of bright gold," which

"Thick inlay the floor of heaven,"

are not lost in a world of indiscriminate existence, for "one star differeth from another star in glory." There are bodies terrestrial, and there are what corresponds to this, bodies celestial.'

"How little you understand it! Here the body is mortal, corruptible, carnal; there it is immortal, incorruptible, spiritual. Here death reigns in all; but death itself, the last enemy, is for us vanquished. The

1 See Note 1.

first man, Adam, became a living soul; the last Adam is not merely a human soul, he is a life-giving spirit, having power to renew and preserve our entire being. In his coming and triumph we shall see the finished work. Flesh and blood cannot inherit the kingdom of God. I show you a mystery. The forms in which you know the material of the body are transient. They will be changed. But we shall be ourselves, glorified, entire. Death has lost its sting. The victory shall be Christ's, and shall be complete. Therefore be at peace." 1

1

Paul amplifies this in many another utterance in later epistles. The emancipation Jesus had wrought begins in the new spiritual life Christians already know. This carries in itself the warrant of eternal existence. As we are redeemed by Jesus' death, we are to be saved in his life. At his coming, Christ is to change, not "our vile body" (for the apostle never vilifies the body), but "the body of our humiliation," i.e., the body pertaining to the life of humiliation into which our Lord himself entered when he was made in the likeness of men, into "the body of his glory," i.e. into a body like his own as it is in the perfected life of his post-resurrection kingdom. This new body, old yet new, made of heavenly substance, is the "building from God, a house not made with hands, eternal,

1 See Notes 2, 3 and 4.

in the heavens," for which the apostle longed, earnestly desiring to be clothed upon with the final house which is from heaven-a consummation to be attained when the Lord shall come.'

Everywhere the New Testament represents the life in Christ as both abundant and progressive. Salvation is already begun in all who receive Christ. And while it is the Lord's will that for a time they shall continue upon earth and under the law of physical death, the fashion of this world is passing rapidly away, and they who are not of this world already have in them the promise and the potency of a post-mortem existence, in which, with undiminished faculties, they shall advance to a final completion in a post-resurrection life, of which perfected corporeity in some form is an essential condition. "He that raised up Christ Jesus from the dead shall quicken also your mortal bodies through his Spirit that dwelleth in you" (Rom. 8: 11), is the specific promise, and in the light of other Scripture is not to be restricted to the immediate influence of the Christian spirit on the Christian's personal appearance. It points to a change in the whole man, of which heaven is to be the realization. Our Lord's farewell words as to the "mansions" he is preparing, gain significance in this connection. He will finish the work that was given him to do only

1 See Note 5.

when the redemption he made possible by his sacrificial death shall be accomplished in the renewal of every man who is given to him, in his entire body.

In spite of Paul's warning about "flesh and blood," we are continually stumbling over the difficulties inherent in the material body. But how little we know about matter! We think of it as the antithesis of life. We are accustomed to attribute to it qualities determined by this antithesis. It is inert, ponderable, impenetrable, infinitely divisible, and so on. But today the physicists announce all matter as in motion, and the philosophers go so far as to say that matter and energy may prove to be synonymous terms. This is enough to make us distrust the seriousness of the difficulty which our conception of the body imposes upon the teaching of the Scripture. When we observe matter as we know it, we see it gathering about an invisible form, or conception, to make the crystal, as of quartz or salt, always the same; and in higher degree the living cell, also, always itself and identical, which in turn falls into place in the living body, likewise after its kind-preparing in its most developed form the habitat of the soul, each also itself and original, which seems to mark the ultimate purpose of the entire process. We remember Spenser's lines in the "Faerie Queene":

"For of the soul the body form doth take,

The Soul is Form, and doth the Body make."

Some mysterious force has dominion over what we know as crude matter. It carries it forwards and upwards in ever new combinations, with many an inexplicable leap, over seemingly impassable gulfs where life appears, or sensation, or thought, until it reaches a seeming finality in man. Then we suddenly discover that this controlling force, this living power, is not simply in a man, it is the man himself. Whatever may be true outside him or below him, he is the center of his own being, he thinks, feels, wills; and as for his body when he leaves it, it is no longer what it was, a part of himself, but simply inanimate clay-a lump like any other clod.'

Matter, then, is not complete until we find it in the living man. What possibilities it has beyond, we do not know. What it has in man we should have as little known had we not had experience of it. In any case nature has already widened out to embrace what once was held the supernatural, for nature now embraces man, and man is spirit, and spirit reaches up tɔ the Being of God. We do not know the soul apart from its life in the body. The term disembodied spirit suggests something essentially unreal and vague. Even Dante's imagination lost such spirits in the "viewless wind." There appears ground for the conception, not that the soul is material, or the prod

1 See Notes 6 and 7.