could not have been an appearance to the bodily eyes of the gazers, for pure spirit cannot be visible. In the three cases of restoration to life at the command of Jesus there is no suggestion of any departed spirit being recalled to inhabit the body; and in the instance of the resurrection of Christ himself, messengers, whose radiance was apparent to the eye, whose voices were audible to the ear, were sent to roll away the stone, and release the captive of death. Now, as they were recognised by human senses, these messengers could not have been purely spiritual, according to philosophical definitions of spirit: and as these messengers were sent to open the mouth of the cave, it is a fair presumption that matter is acted upon only by matter, except in the case of the One Being whom alone we must necessarily suppose to be spiritual. If the spirit of Jesus had returned to inhabit the inclosed body, what need would there have been of messengers to assist, if those messengers are supposed spiritual? And it is monstrous to imagine them material, and man spiritual. The easiest interpretation of the whole case is surely to suppose that all were material agents (however etherealized) of the One Spirit through whom all was done.

The other supposition which has divided opinion is, that man being wholly material, falls into a state of unconsciousness at death, which continues, and must continue, till at some awful future period, there shall be a revivification of every human body. That the first part of this supposition is correct there can be little doubt. The resemblance of death to a deep sleep has suggested the idea almost universally; and it is confirmed by the silence of all who have ever been restored to life as to their experience of death. It may, indeed, be conjectured that all impressions received in an ulterior state must necessarily be obliterated when the body is reinstated in its mortal conditions; but this is

a mere hypothesis, and scarcely a tenable one. The greater probability undoubtedly is, that all was a blank from the moment of ceasing to breathe to the moment of breathing again. But the supposition that this unconsciousness remains till a far distant period, when all who have lived will be reanimated at once, is attended with insuperable difficulties, and with no substantial evidence whatever.

Who that looks round him or calculates for a moment can suppose that human bodies can be raised entire ? We all speculate somewhat in Hamlet's mode when we watch the revolutions of churchyards. We see how the earthy barriers between the graves are broken through, how dust is mingled with dust till all becomes an undistinguishable mass; how in course of time, the foundations of dwellings for the living are laid among the ruined abodes of the dead; how, when these dwellings have also crumbled away, the plough turns up the clods, and food is raised from the elements of a former organization to nourish frames which must afford the same service in their turn. Other changes succeed. When generations have reaped their living harvests from the harvest-field of death, green pastures are spread, or still waters expand, or the sea comes sweeping over all, and a new species of vegetation begins in the hollows, and a new influx of life pervades the scene of so many vicissitudes. Thus is it in every region. The caravan of the desert leaves no trace of its perished thousands when the moist wind and the dry, the jackal and the carrion bird, have done their work. The sunken vessel, with all that it contained of human or inanimate, is dissolved into its elements before the neighbouring coral reef has been built up to the surface. And what is to be said of cannibalism, where one human frame is immediately incorporated with another? The resurrection of each entire human body is manifestly impossible.

But it is maintained, though the body may not be raised entire, some portion of it may be indestructible: some undistinguishable atom may be preserved in a state of organization from which life may be at length evolved, and in which a consciousness of identity may be renewed.

On the fate of undistinguishable atoms we certainly cannot speak positively; but it is reasonable to require some evidence of the existence of the kind supposed. We know of no such evidence, and perceive no need of such a supposition. The Mahometans and Jews held the same doctrine; but as their notions were grosser than ours, their choice of the indestructible part was more open to refutation. They each fixed on a certain bone which was to be incapable of decay, and prepared to sprout up into a complete human form in the fulness of time. These bones, however, were found to crumble into dust like other bones, and the conjecture was overthrown, as would probably be that of these other speculators if their "atoms" were not "undistinguishable," and therefore beyond the reach of argument and testimony.

Thus much, however, may be said, that if only a particle remains to be revived, its renewal of life or development, or whatever else it may be called, is something wholly different from that resurrection of the body which is contended for on Scripture grounds. It cannot be supposed to be the doctrine which Paul had in mind when he wrote on the subject to the Corinthians and the Thessalonians; it removes to the furthest limit the analogy between the resurrections of the gospel history and our own. It is not only a mere hypothesis, but it is as much discountenanced by Scripture as the doctrine of a separate

soul.

There is yet a third supposition, which, though not free from difficulties, avoids the most perplexing which beset

the other two, and as it was primarily suggested by Scripture, is by far the most easily reconcileable with the most important class of facts to which we can appeal. On this supposition, man is and ever shall be material, his frame being made susceptible of change according to his change of state as expressed by Paul, "there is a natural body, and there is a spiritual body:" or as we may explain it, there is a gross body, and there is an etherealized body. The unconsciousness of death may thus last only while the ethereal body is evolved from the gross inanimate one, and we have at once an explanation of most of the Scripture expressions which have been given over as inexplicable by one or other party or both, and thus the facts also of Scripture present comparatively little difficulty.

A while ago, this doctrine would have been objected to on the ground of physical impossibility; but the extraordinary advancement of chemical science within a short period has made men cautious of pronouncing on physical impossibilities. The evolutions which have been detected of invisible substances from bodies which thenceforth tend to dissolution, the transmutations of various substances into one another and into others wholly different, the apparent transformations when known elements are combined in new modes, present results which would formerly have been far less credible to the ignorant, than the doctrine in question need be to us who are confessedly as much in the dark about some elements of the human frame as the peasantry of a century ago respecting various subtile substances with which science has rendered us familiar. By the doctrine in question, the phenomena of disease and death are made easy of explanation on the grounds which the materialist has ever firmly occupied; while the objections to the state ensuing, on which the immaterialist has seldom been satisfactorily answered do not apply. The body is, as he supposes, destined to decay

without any design of revival; it need not, as he says, perplex us to see it pass through a succession of forms, the same particles, perhaps, constituting in turn the limbs, the heart, the brain, of many living creatures; it need not, prospectively, give us concern to imagine that what was once Alexander may bung a beer barrel, or that "Imperial Cæsar, dead and turned to clay, might stop a hole to keep the wind away." It remains to compare the supposition with Scripture facts, and afterwards with Scripture reasonings.

There is evidently nothing to contradict it in the cases of the daughter of Jairus and of the young man of Nain, and of those who were raised by the apostles from death which had just taken place: and though it may appear vain to speak of what seems most natural in miraculous cases, it will be acknowledged to be more easily conceivable that the process of bodily change should be delayed or reversed in such instances, than that the spirit should be recalled from a new state of which it retained not the slightest impression. We are not destitute of something like evidence that this change does not begin at once, or is at first slow, or easily reversible. Persons appareatly drowned have been revived when every indication of life had some time ceased; and inferior animals, if not men, have been restored by galvanism when they had been confidently pronounced dead; in the case of small animals, we know, to the astonishment if not the horror of the operator. It will be said they were not dead. Certainly, according to our common notion of death, because they lived again without miraculous intervention. But what is it then to be dead? Where can the line be drawn short of the obvious commencement of decay? Would these bodies, if not acted upon, have given any further sign of change previous to decay? Was any token of death absent, any intimation of lingering life discernible? Surely not. The restoration of the youth and maiden of the gospel history was effected