are they?--are they to be raised, and reconstructed to constitute the future temples of souls? If so, "flesh and blood will inherit the kingdom of God;" though Paul, in one of his more highly illuminated moments taught the contrary; and further, we sow-bury the veritable body which shall be; though this same apostle said: "We sow not that body that shall be." "There is a natural body, and there is a spiritual body." These natural, earthly bodies correspond to the chaff of the wheat-the husks of the corn. Harvest-time separates them forever; because the end for which they were united has been subserved. So with the earthly and spiritual bodies. The death-angel divides them forever.

And just as well expect the blade of wheat to return and re-enter the kernel; the oak, the acorn, the butterfly, the chrysalis or, as reasonably expect songful birds to seek their dilapidated nests, taking on, and re-living in their old shells, as immortal spirits to return grave-ward in some future period, to seek and re-inhabit their earthly bodies. Nature knows no retrogression. Our mortal bodies are raised only in grasses and grains, forests and fruits; but our conscious souls move on in the line of progress towards the great infinite Soul of all things.

Roger Williams, too liberal for the Puritanic Christianity of his time, was banished by Christians afar off among the heathen Indians-the Narraghansetts, who, in the gentle tolerance of Jesus, received him into their weird, wigwam homes. The Rev. J. H. McCarty, writing recently relative to the importance of erecting a suitable monument over the place where his body was interred, says:

"On digging down into the 'charnel house' it was found that everything had passed into oblivion. The shapes of the coffins could only be traced by a black line of carbonaceous matter the thickness of the edges of the sides of the coffins, with their onds distinctly defined. The rusted remains of the hinges and nails, with a few fragments of wood and a single round knot, was all that could be gathered from his grave. In the grave of his wife there was not a trace of anything save a single lock of braided hair which had survived the lapse of more

than 180 years. Near the grave stood a venerable apple tree, when and by whom planted is not known. This tree had sent two of its main roots into the graves of Mr. and Mrs. Williams. The larger root had pushed its way through the earth till it reached the precise spot occupied by the skull of Roger Williams. There making a turn as if going round the skull, it followed the direction of the back bone to the hips. Here it divided into two branches, sending one along each leg to the heel, where they both turned upward to the toes. One of these roots formed a slight crook at the knee which makes the whole bear a very close resemblance to a human form. This singular root is preserved with great care, not only as an illustration of an important principle in vegetation, but for its historic association. There were the graves, emptied of every particle of human dust! Not a trace of anything was left!"

The grave emptied of every particle of human dust!where gone? Those apple-tree roots, thrusting out their hungry feelers, absorbed it, to feed a yearly fruitage. Man partaking of this fruit, and appropriating it by a law of assimilation, it formed a part of their own bodies. The inquiry is, who will legitimately claim these elements, providing human bodies are to be raised?

Motion inheres in all things. Particles in human bodies change from seven to twenty-seven years, depending upon condition and occupation. Admitting the record, Methusaleh living over nine hundred years, must have had some sixty or seventy different bodies which is to be anastasized! In certain islands of the ocean, savages, termed cannibals, killing their enemies, devour their flesh and drink their blood; so that the same earthly materials form the component parts of two or more individualized beings. Who is to own them in the resurrection? Where Bonaparte fought his most sanguine battles, waved the next season golden grain. These harvests were unusually luxuriant, because blood and muscle, had enriched the soil a soil yielding in turn grains and grazing herds for the sustenance of man. To whom will these life-materials belong when anastasized and re-constructed? Children, passing as withered buds to summer-land spheres of innocence, grow

in those angel gardens to spiritual manhood and womanhood. Must their beautiful well-rounded forms return at the sounding of a resurrection trumpet and, re-entering, be compelled to dwell in their infantile bodies? All these physical and moral impossibilities are legitimately connected with the resurrection of the body.

It is often asked, Was not Jesus's physical body raised? These passages give the answer:

"And their eyes were opened, and they knew him; and he VANISHED out of their sight."

"Then the same day at evening, when the disciples were assembled, * * * midst, and saith, Peace be unto you." in another form unto two of them, as they country."

the doors were shut, where came Jesus and stood in the "After that, he appeared walked, and went into the

These passages affirming that he "stood in their midst, the doors being shut;" that after his crucifixion he drew near and went with them towards Emmaus, their "eyes being holden," that "they knew him not," that he appeared in "another form," that he "vanished out of their sight," &c., clearly show that it was the spiritual Jesus, clothed with the spiritual body that pertains to the resurrection state of immortality. The disciples saw him, because clairvoyant. The conditions destroyed, "he vanished from their sight." They "vanished," not he. In the "twinkling of an eye" a clairvoyant of normal mediumship can pass from the internal to the external. In this sense the disciple withdrew from Jesus.

Again it is asked, If the physical body of Jesus was not raised, what became of it?" We can easily conceive that the friends might have removed it before the "watch" was set, or that the same angel, who rolled the stone from the door of the tomb, might have transported away "the body of their Lord." The disposition of that body is of no more interest to us than that of Zeno, Plato, or Confucius. The important question is-Did the man of Nazareth live? did he

walk again in their company clothed with his glorified body? This we believe, as his reputed biography demonstrates.

Death is the disengagement of the spiritual from the fleshly-the severance of the sympathetic copartnership between the spiritual and earthly bodies. The thinker will note the distinction between the soul and spirit. The old philosophers clearly perceived this distinction. Plato considered the soul to be "the image of the spirit." Paul prayed God to "preserve body, soul and spirit." Professor Bush, of the New York University, said:

"As it is through the gross material body that the soul manifests itself in the present world, so are we warranted in believing that it is through the soul that the spirit manifests itself in the other world; in other words, it performs for the spirit the office of a body, and is consequently so termed."

Soul and spiritual body, often confounded with spirit, are synonymous. We employ the terms, soul and spiritual body reciprocally; and, as constituting the man, use this formula -Physical body, Spiritual body, Spirit; or, body, soul and spirit.

As the butterfly's folded wing, in its rudimentary state, can be traced under the shell of the chrysalis, so the whole future, resurrectional body is contained, or wrapped up, in the material form, during mortal life. Its release, termed death, is really birth. A modern seeress, writing upon the "Philosophy of Life," well says, "As the physical birth of the foetus is death to its placenta envelope, so a spiritual birth is death to its physical casket, the body; or, as the destruction of the casket in which the child is developed, implies the birth of the physical system, so the destruction or death of the physical body implies the birth of its spiritual system.” Death, as a divine appointment in harmony with natural law, and in its time beautiful, is equivalent to spiritual birth, giving enlarged freedom to the soul, and increased facilities to the spirit for manifestation and perfection. The buds swell into flowers wooed by the sunlight; the birdlings burst

from their shells for flight on joyous wing; the child, maternally developed, gains its individual freedom in outer life through pain, effort and crying; so the spasms, throes and pantings, sometimes beheld with sympathizing sorrow, are but the strugglings of the soul to release itself from the coffined walls of its earthly tabernacle. What seems agony to us may be pleasure to the emancipated.

The process of death does not involve the disorganization of the spiritual body. If it is thus absolutely disintegrated into scattered particles, by what law is it reorganized? May not more positive individualities, sustained by such elements, selfishly appropriate what belongs to another, thus virtually involving the destruction of individual identity? In no department of nature does structural disorganization precede birth. Here, disorganization is retrogression to the individuality thus subjected to the unnatural process of unmaking! The grain does not resolve itself into its original elements when ready to be ripened; the bird does not return to its indefinable diffuseness in its shell when plumed for an exit; the animal does not cease to be, for a moment, when nature casts it forth for a higher being.

The spiritual body, composed of the ultimates of all the primates, constitutes a symmetrical wholeness of structure, and is unitively unfolded from its earthly casket as the rose from the rose-bud. The God-principle, pivotal and central in man, continually acts, as a divine magnet, by the law of necessity, holding the spiritual body to itself in a continuous organized unity. The law of attraction, as in a magnet to steel, is an infinite law, and as such is equally active during physical life, during the process of death, and forever thereafter.

That unformed, cloud-shapen, magnetic mass, seen by clairvoyants, hovering over the corpse, is not the scattered fragmentary substances of the spiritual body thrown around loosely, but the electric emanations and radiations enveloping it as aural atmospheres around the earth. Clairvoyants, subject to the law of conditions, and, consequently, not