ever, so as to deny of the present what it affirms of the future.

(5.) Hearing the voice is stated in verse 25 as the means to the resurrection life, but in verse 28 as the means not only to this, but also to judgment upon evil. Consequently it bears a wider sense in the latter verse. Obedient hearing tends to life. But there is also disobedient hearing, tending to judgment. All shall ultimately hear the voice of the Son of God. But while truth accepted is a word of life, truth rejected is a word of judgment. (John xii. 48.) Rejected truth shall ultimately make its judgment voice ring through the spirit that heard and hearkened not. Entering into the future with this judgment voice resounding in conscience is “the resurrection of judgment. This, too, is through the voice of the Son of God, as the truth of Christ asserts its judgment power.

(6.) No general, simultaneous event can be supposed intended by "the hour" of verse 28, unless the same can be understood of "the hour" of verse 25, which no interpreter has ever ventured to do.

(7). With regard to the restrictive clause in verse 25, "they that hear shall live," we observe that it is precisely similar to the restriction that accompanies every offer of salvation, "he that believeth shall be saved." The resurrection of life, as distinct from the resurrection of judgment, is conditioned upon a certain hearing of "the voice of the Son of God." This is not a voice miraculously resounding through space, but a voice making itself heard within the obedient spirit. It is on the obedient relation of the soul to Christ, as the Author of spiritual life through

the receiving of the truth, that the result of life, as distinct from existence, depends. How this is we shall see from Paul's doctrine of the resurrection as the object of Christian endeavor. (Chapter iv.)

However the interpretation above given differs from any that we may have adopted, it is certainly the one most consonant with the testimony that is indisputably borne by our Lord's great saying, "I AM the Resurrection and the Life." This fact alone speaks with emphasis in its favor. The harmony of the two speaks for the truth of that view on which the light of both converges. The resurrection is a present and perpetual reality in the world of the unseen, through the power of Christ, through the obedient hearing of the voice of the Son of God.

CHAPTER III.

THE RESURRECTION EXEMPLIFIED IN THE

RISEN CHRIST.

"It is sown a natural body, it is raised a spiritual body." 1 Cor. xv. 44.

I. WHAT is raised?

How could the

Apostle have used the language above quoted, if the body that is buried is not raised, if at least, as in the case of the seed that is sown, some element of the buried body is not the germ of a body that is to rise from the very grave?

This question betrays two misconceptions.

1. The first of these is a confounding of two things utterly different, the dead person and the dead body. The dead person is raised; the dead body is not raised. This distinction between the person and his body is clearly recognized by the inquirer, whose question about the kind of body to be expected in the resurrection the Apostle is here answering. "With what body do

THEY come?"

It is a distinction that has been before the world, at least ever since Socrates, in speaking of his own funeral, said to his friends, "You may bury me if you can catch me.'

It is true, the analogy of the seed, which the Apostle employs for illustration, directly suggests the survival in the "spiritual body" of some element that was present in the "natural body." But it is begging the question to assume that this surviving element is of the body, as well as in it. If Paul was thinking at all (which is uncertain) of an element in the seed that passes over into the new body to which the germinating seed gives place, we can hardly question that he recognized the analogous element that passes from our present body to our future body, as the spirit, which is in Not to notice such

the body but not of it. a probability as this were to exhibit an obtuseness like that which Paul rebuked by addressing his questioner as a "simpleton."

But besides this, the notion of a survival and resuscitation of the buried body, or some element of it, involves still another radical misconception, namely:

2. That personal identity requires, at least

so far as some germinant element is concerned, identity of material between the body buried and the resurrection-body. But what is it that personal identity depends on? Surely not on the material that is organized, but on the power that organizes it. I am the same person that I was twenty years ago, simply because my body, though it has changed in every particle twenty times over, is organized and animated by the same spirit. People who have not seen me for twenty years do not always know me at first sight as the same, but after a while they recognize my personal identity in its familiar expression. Identity of person and identity of material are very different things. The personal element is the spirit. Recognition of identity depends on the expression which the spirit gives to the organism which it animates.

A thought very precious to many sorrowing hearts is touched by the fact just mentioned. It is by no means unlikely that, in the resurrection-state, recognition after long separation may be even more immediate than in this world, conformably to that more perfect power of self-expression which we may attribute to the spirit in the spirit