"Now if Christ be preached that He rose from the dead, how say some among you that there is no resurrection of the dead? But if there be no resurrection of the dead, then is Christ not risen and if Christ be not risen, then is our preaching vain, and your faith is also vain. Yea, and we are found false witnesses * of God; because we have testified of God that He raised up Christ: Whom He raised not up, if so be that the dead rise not. For if the dead rise not, then is not Christ raised and if Christ be not raised, your faith is vain; ye are yet in your sins. Then they also which are fallen asleep in Christ are perished.”—ST. PAUL (1 Cor. xv. 12-18).

“... he preached unto them Jesus, and the resurrection."Acts xvii. 18.

XVII.

"Jesus, and the Resurrection"

HE Christian faith differs from the anticipations

THE

of the future life that are found in Paganism in the high dignity it reveals as in store for the human body. The great teachers of ancient Greece and Rome believed the soul to be immortal, and taught that in the life after death the emancipation of the soul from the body was its supreme reward, enabling the soul to attain to the fullest knowledge. Plato taught that the body was nothing but a hindrance to the progress of the soul; he could not foresee that it was capable of redemption, and in another life could become the fitting instrument of the soul. In the Phado he puts these words (among many others to the same effect) into the mouth of "real philosophers": "It has been proved to us by experience that if we would have pure knowledge of anything we must be quit of the body-the soul in herself must behold things in themselves: and then we shall attain to the wisdom which we desire, and of which we say that we are lovers; not while we live, but after death; for if while in company with the body the soul cannot

have pure knowledge, one of two things followseither knowledge is not to be attained at all, or, if at all, after death. For then, and not till then, the soul will be parted from the body and exist in herself alone. In this present life I reckon that we make the nearest approach to knowledge when we have the least possible intercourse or communion with the body, and are not surfeited with the bodily nature, but keep ourselves pure until the hour when God Himself is pleased to release us. And thus, having got rid of the foolishness of the body, we shall be pure and hold converse with the pure, and know of ourselves the clear light everywhere, which is no other than the light of truth. . . . And what is purification but the separation of the soul from the body?" It is only the sensual who make much of the body. The souls of such men after death are doomed to "prowl about tombs and sepulchres" until, as a penalty, "they are imprisoned finally in another body." 2

...

In many parts of the Bible the body is spoken of as a hindrance to the soul. We are told that "the corruptible body presseth down the soul, and the earthy tabernacle weigheth down the mind that museth upon many things"; and St. Paul's words: "O wretched man that I am; who shall deliver me from the body of this death?" are as strong as any that Plato wrote. St. Paul, however, had a sure and certain hope not

3

1 Phado, 66, 67.

8 Wisdom ix. 15.

2 Id. 81.

4 Romans vii. 24.

merely for the spirit of man after death, but for man as a whole. He prays not so much for an emancipation of the soul from the body as for the redemption of the body, and the preservation of the whole man— body, soul, and spirit-"blameless unto the coming of our Lord Jesus Christ."1 It was upon the "hope and resurrection of the dead "2 that St. Paul based his anticipation of a hereafter. So strongly does he insist upon this that he does not scruple to say the whole Christian faith in this world, and the whole Christian hope for the life of the world to come, depend upon the resurrection of the dead, and that the hope of the resurrection is based upon the fact of the Resurrection of Jesus Christ. "If Christ be preached that He rose from the dead, how say some among you that there is no resurrection of the dead? But if there be no resurrection of the dead, then is Christ not risen: and if Christ be not risen, then is our preaching vain, and your faith is also vain. Yea, and we are found false witnesses of God; because we have testified of God that He raised up Christ: Whom He raised not up, if so be that the dead rise not. For if the dead rise not, then is not Christ raised and if Christ be not raised, your faith is vain; ye are yet in your sins. Then they also which are fallen asleep in Christ are perished." If there was to be no resurrection of the dead, it would seem that St. Paul could not hope for that fuller life which Plato had written about. The

1

I Thess. v. 23. 2 Acts xxiii, 6.

3 I Cor. xv. 12-18.

survival of the soul in endless separation from the body, so far from being a more complete and perfect state, appeared to St. Paul as the triumph of death, so that he could only say that if there is no resurrection, then they which "are fallen asleep in Christ are perished." This divergence from the doctrine of Plato no doubt had its origin in a radically different doctrine concerning the soul. In Plato's philosophy the soul exists before the body; it is, in fact, without beginning and without end, and is sent into a human body owing to some imperfection. It falls from heaven to earth and enters into a body for which it was not originally designed; hence its union with the body is accidental and penal. The Christian doctrine teaches quite the reverse. The soul is created for the human body; apart from the body it is, even when perfect in itself, accidentally imperfect, inasmuch as it lacks that bodily organism which it was designed to inform. Death is therefore not conquered by the escape of the soul from the body, but by the body being through death prepared for a reunion with the soul, and gifted with a perfect life. Sown in corruption, the body is raised in incorruption; sown a natural body, it is raised a spiritual body; sown in weakness, it is raised in power. this way the whole man-and not merely the soulovercomes death and enters into life. It may be for this reason that so little is said in Holy Scripture of the soul in the intermediate state. That state was altered by the Passion, Resurrection, and Ascension

In