EIGHTH PRIMARY CONVICTION "I look for the resurrection of the body." I THE most pregnant of commentators on the New Testament packs up a depth of thought upon this in two words-" Verbum amanissimum." "A most pleasant word for burial." just so! When we "Verbum amœnissimum” look our last upon the mortal tenement of those we love, Hamlet's word hangs upon our lips and fills our imagination. "For by this time he stinketh,” cried Martha to Jesus. A sickness of loathing steals over our nearest.* Then it was that "Jesus lifted up His eyes to heaven," as if He would bathe His spirit in the azure purity of the sky. The section from which our word is taken † stands out even in the New Testament relatively to the hope of immortality with a magnificent fulness. It is to St. Paul what the Phædo is to Plato, or the Tusculan Disputations to Cicero. Even here, as St. Paul dictates, he can be pityingly irritated for a The crass stupidity, the priggish omni moment. "Fastidium etiam apud proximos."-Bengel. † 1 Cor. xv. 35-40. science of some clever objectors, are so provoking. "Paul violates Christ's precept in the Sermon on the Mount," it has been said. A very little Greek Testament is sometimes a wholesome corrective to very much imagination. The word is not that which Christ forbade. "Silly one," + cries the apostle; the question was a silly one and the questioner is called silly; "you who are so weak-that which you sow." Yet all the time he is full of a great love for sorrowing humanity, of a splendid passion to console and to elevate. He proceeds to point out an analogy between man in his revealed future and the vegetable world. It is in principle a foreshadowing of the argument which Butler was to develop in his "Analogy" so many ages afterwards—an identity of principle in nature and grace. It is not that imaginative likeness to external forms of human life which haunted Stanley in the forests of Equatorial Africa. It is the likeness of general laws, intellectual and moral rather than physical. (a) The first law is life through death §-the decaying bulb; the husk at the root of the stalk; the life *Matt. v. 22. † ὁ σπείρεις, 1 Cor. xv. 37. † ἄφρον, 1 Cor. xv. 36. § Tertullian has developed this idea with a magnificent, if too exuberant, rhetoric: "Omnia pereundo servantur, omnia de interitu redeunt. . . . Omnia incipiunt cum desierunt; ideo finiuntur ut fiant; nihil deperit nisi in salutem. . . . Operibus eam præscripsit Deus antequam literis; viribus prædicavit antequam vocibus. . . . Nec dubites Deum carnis etiam resurrectionem quem omnium nôris restitutorem."—Apolog. XLVII., "De Res. Carnis." xix. new in form, flexible, colored, exuberant, beautiful. "Thou-that which thou sowest-is not made life unless it die." (b) Varied life-variety of flesh (“ all flesh is not the same flesh"),* variety of organization,† variety of glory and beauty in heaven above and in earth below. + heart was so human, Instead of the putre Then the apostle, whose seems to touch earth again. faction of the charnel, he appears to breathe the freshness of the spring. His style kindles and dilates. Logic passes into oratory, oratory into poetry, poetry into the awful yet consoling influence of prophecy. It is the "Oraison Funèbre" of a greater than Bossuet over all the company of the dead who die in Christ. The harmony of thought clothes itself with rhyme. Listen to the σTeίpeтaι, eyeíperat, four times over: sown in corruption, raised in incorruption; sown in disgrace, raised in glory; sown in weakness, raised with magnificent capacities of power; sown with an organization adapted for the natural life, raised with an organization fitted for the spiritual life. Throughout there is a breath of spring flowers, a rustle of green cornfields; it is indeed "verbum amoenissimum pro sepulturâ "! "I believe in the Resurrection of the body." This is the conviction of the Christian heart. Its proof, its sole proof, is the Resurrection of Jesus Christ and His word. Here again, as so often before, I must remind you not only what the article * 1 Cor. xv. 39. + 1 Cor. xv. 40. 1 Cor. xv. 39-42. of the Creed necessarily implies-not only what it is, but what it does not imply, and what it is not. And here once more, with all my reverence for a great book and a great name, I am forced to protest against a particular hypothesis of the resurrection of the body, which Bishop Pearson's justly high authority has caused to be identified with the dogma itself in many quarters to the injury of the faith. Pearson asserts that every one when he confesses a resurrection of the body is conceived to declare thus much: "I am fully persuaded that the bodies dissolved into dust or scattered into ashes shall be re-collected in themselves and reunited to their souls, that the same flesh which lived before shall be revived, that the same numerical bodies which did fall shall rise." Again: "the same flesh which was separated from the soul at the day of death shall be united to the soul at the last day." But the sameness of the resurrection body does not imply the identity of every particle which was there at the time of death. With the removal of this most unfortunate speculation nearly all the little ribald objections with which we are so familiar fall to the ground-e. g., if every atom which ever formed part of our corporeal investiture should be annexed to it, we should stand in gigantic vastness and weigh many tons. It has been calculated that the body a human being of seventy years of age could claim for itself would form a "colossus at least as vast as the statue of Liberty"; or, in the case of the interesting cannibal, who is so useful on these occasions, there might be different claimants for the same body; or again, as has recently been said by a writer of signal ability, of whose utterance I wish to speak with respectful surprise, "even if we live to a ripe old age, and avoid being eaten or mutilated; even if we die without any perceptible disease, the body which our friends will bury is not the body at its best, but at its worst. If men really believed in the resurrection of the body, they would pray above all things to die in their prime. Living to old age would mean an eternity of decrepitude and decay." And the same writer speaks of these as "difficulties which beset the orthodox view." But this view was never a dogma of the faith; its inconsistence with right reason was pointed out by the illustrious brother of St. Basil many centuries ago; it was never more than the hypothesis of certain orthodox theologians, doubted by the wise for the contradictions it even then was suspected of involving, and now seen to be in sharp conflict with our present knowledge of natural laws. All that faith requires us to hold about the resurrection of the body is the substantial identity of the risen body with that which we use during our life. It is to be the same, in whatever sense sameness can be predicated of the body during any separate portions of its corporeal existence. But complete identity of particles is so far from being necessary to the complete identity of the risen body, that if such complete aggregation of particles is required to constitute identity, then there is no such thing as identity of body in the whole creation. |