but only silenced a party that came to him with an objection, and thus gained a momentary advantage over an opponent;--a triumph indeed for the abler disputant personally, but no gain to the cause of truth.

To illustrate this let us suppose some Sadducee, after a momentary surprise at the ease and adroitness with which the Galilean had completely silenced his party, resuming thus:-"Rabbi, we do honor to the wonderful wisdom which dwells within thee; and never had we dreamed that any proof of so incredible a doctrine as that of the resurrection (which the common ignorant people hold indeed, and our opponents the Pharisees, who are cunning enough to adopt the most popular belief,) would ever have been established from the writings of our great lawgiver. And my brethren here have drunk the wine of astonishment, and are filled therewith; while our enemies who make long their phylacteries, shoot out the lip at us, saying, Aha! But let their triumph be short. Though in truth one of our tenets appears to be disproved, yet verily their doctrine is not therefore established. We have hitherto believed indeed that there is no immaterial soul, capable of existing independently of the body, and have therefore denied a separate state; while, finding no syllable about a future life, least of all about a resurrection of the body, in the writings of our father Moses, we have denied the doctrine of the Pharisees as a superstition.

"But admitting the authority of Moses, and the validity of the principle that God would scarcely call himself the God of the eternally non-existent, we now must assuredly concede that there is therefore some sort of life for the children of God after death. But this is all that thou hast established. While indeed thou hast adopted the very basis of our system, namely,-No organisation, no life.

"For either the sentence thou hast quoted from Moses contains really a proof of the resurrection, or it does not. If it does not, we are not confuted touching the resurrection, and nothing has been done; for it was a resurrection thou undertookest to make good. If it does, it does this only by first of all admitting and affirming our own philosophy to be correct, namely, that man does not exist after death as a pure spirit, and that for conscious life there must be organisation, which the Pharisees deny. Or, if thou refusest this axiom of ours, then, thou hast established from Moses

a life after death indeed, but verily no resurrection of the body. So that while we must henceforth admit on the authority of Moses, whose sense thou hast so ably elicited, a life after death, (which indeed we can allow much more easily than the notion of a resurrection of dead bodies,a re-assembling of multitudinous scattered particles which from the creation have existed in all sorts of combinations, > and have helped to form the bodies of numerous other individuals,)—we are confirmed by the failure of thy argument in our disbelief of a resurrection, which if any scribe could have established thou couldest, as indeed thou didst undertake to establish it."

But not to prolong this imagined reply on the part of some Sadducee present, and which appears to me to contain a sufficient answer to the chief and only forcible objection that I think can be advanced against the principle I have elicited from our Lord's discourse, I do submit that the air of the narrative altogether seems to carry the conviction that the three evangelists, who have each of them narrated it at unusual length, deemed it a most striking argument, and recorded it, not merely as a wonderful instance of what may be called cleverness in silencing an opponent, but a most wonderful illustration of the astonishing wisdom with which our Lord spake, and a divinely irrefragable proof, derived from the Pentateuch itself, of that grand doctrine which he undertook to establish; and which we therefore cannot consent to look upon as a striking illustration of the argumentum ad hominem, and nothing more, which is all the supposed objection makes it to be. By how much the argument is sound and good, and of independent value, by so much must it of course be held to establish the very point our Lord undertook to prove. And then its entire force, like that of the apostle's argument to the Corinthians, is, as already stated, to this effect,-No resurrection, no future life.

But perhaps it may be urged again, that the word ȧráoTaois is used generically for future existence, and not so much for that resurrection, to express which it is usually appropriated. And indeed Dwight argues that it does generally mean, and especially in this passage, simply the existence of the soul after death.

The first is-That

Two answers suggest themselves. the Sadducees, who came to Christ thinking completely to silence him, would, as a matter of course, being practised and subtle disputants, select the more difficult and less credible of two obnoxious tenets, held by an opponent, in order the more easily to perplex him. Now the existence of the soul after death, is one thing; the resurrection of a body-all whose particles have been dissipated and have entered into countless other combinations,-and the re-occupancy thereof by the conscious spirit, some thousands of years or ages hence, is a second and very different thing. To the eye of reason this latter tenet would appear very much less credible than the former. Now the Sadducees, I say, would as a matter of course choose the more difficult of the two, in order the more surely to succeed. And accordingly we find that it was the resurrection they fastened on. For their question shows this, 'In the resurrection, whose wife shall she be?' Which inquiry proves that it was not about a separate existence of the naked spirit, that they were come to dispute, but about the resurrection, generally believed in and properly so called, an embodied state, and still future, (as the phrase shows shall she be ?') to which such a question might not be wholly irrelavent.

My second reply as intimated on a previous page, is— That if avάotaois refer to the existence after death simply, then, since this word, either as a noun or a verb, is commonly used to express the resurrection from the grave, the rising again at the last day, at the end of the world, &c., and since we also believe in a conscious existence immediately after death, it will have to be maintained, in order to be consistent, that the phrases 'last day,' ' end of the world,'—are used relatively to the individual, or in accordance with popular phraseology current at the time; seeing that this avάotaois takes place at once on dying, this very avάotaσis which is elsewhere represented as taking place at the last day, &c. Nor will I affirm that this view is therefore necessarily incorrect. That which contradicts our previous notion is not for that reason false. But I bring forward the consequences to show that this endeavor to escape from the view I have taken, only renders me a service, by shortening my process. For to repeat what was said on the xvth to the Corinthians,-if the future existence of man be itself the resurrection, then, since every christian con

cedes the resurrection to be effected by Christ, it follows that but for the Saviour there would have been no conscious existence for the sinner after death. By man came also the resurrection [váσraois] of the dead."

§ It has been already submitted that scripture recognises only two bodies for man-the present animal-body, σ@ua ψυχικόν, and the spiritual-body, σῶμα πνευςικόν, and at the same time knows nothing of any conscious existence in a perfectly disembodied state. Which of course makes the resurrection [leaving it as yet an open question, what is meant by it precisely, and when it takes place] to be allimportant. It at the same time undoubtedly teaches the immediate enjoyment by the saint of the presence of his Saviour, and the blessedness of heaven. In confirmation of which remarks, the reader is requested to study attentively in its connection—

2. CORINTHIANS, chap. iv.

17 For our light affliction, which is but for a moment, worketh for us a far more exceeding and eternal weight of glory.

18 While we look not at

the things which are seen, but at the things which are not seen; for the things which are seen are temporal, but the things which are not seen are eternal.

Chapter v.

1 For we know that if our earthly house of this tabernacle were dissolved, we have a building of God, a house not made with hands, eternal in the heavens.

2 For in this we groan, earnestly desiring to be clothed upon with our house which is from heaven.

3 If SO be that being clothed we shall not be found naked.

4 For we that are in this tabernacle do groan, being burdened: not for that we would be unclothed, but clothed upon, that mortality

might be swallowed up of life.

5 Now he that hath wrought us for the self-same thing is God, who also hath given unto us the earnest of the Spirit.

6 Therefore we are always confident, knowing that whilst we are at home in the body, we are absent from the Lord.

7 (For we walk by faith, not by sight :)

8 We are confident, I say, and willing rather to be absent from the body, and present with the Lord.

At the close of chap. iv. the apostle testifies how lightly his manifold afflictions sat upon him. And afflictions

were they of no ordinary kind,—'troubled on every side― · perplexed-persecuted-always bearing about in the body. the dying of the Lord Jesus-always delivered unto death for Jesus' sake;' or, as he speaks in a subsequent chapter, when he is compelled to compare himself with others—' in labors more abundant, in stripes above measure, in prisons more frequent, in deaths oft. Of the Jews five times received I forty stripes, save one: thrice was I beaten with rods, once was I stoned, thrice I suffered shipwreck, a night and a day I have been in the deep; in journeyings often, in perils of water, in perils of robbers, in perils by mine own countrymen, in perils by the heathen, in perils in the city, in perils in the wilderness, in perils in the sea, in perils among false brethren: in weariness and painfulness, in watchings often, in hunger and thirst, in fastings often, in cold and nakedness.' Yet with sublimest heroism he points to calamities and sufferings which would drink up the spirits of most of us, and says 'These light afflictions! these light afflictions!' Do we ask the secret of this victorious composure? He tells us that he was habitually regarding the unseen realities of the next state, 'Knowing that he which raised up the Lord Jesus, shall raise up us also by Jesus, and shall present us with you.'

Here we perceive distinctly that it was his confidence in a resurrection that lightened his spirit of its load, and cheered him on his lonely and stormy way. We ought to compel ourselves to notice this, agreeing exactly as it does with his wont on other occasions. For it was his habit to console himself with the thought of being raised from the dead, which was the 'recompense of the reward' unto which 'he had respect;' as the first chapter of this epistle also shows, for having said 'We would not, brethren, have you ignorant of our trouble which came to us in Asia, that we were pressed out of measure above strength, insomuch, that we despaired even of life,' he goes on to say, 'But we had the sentence of death in ourselves, that we should not trust in ourselves, but in God who raiseth the dead. 2. Cor. i. 8–9.

But let us return to our proper passage. The apostle having said that notwithstanding all his troubles he persevered in his arduous course, animated with the confident hope that God who raised up Jesus would also raise him up, v. 14, regarded without displacency the perishing of his outward man, v. 16, seeing that his afflictions would work out