pose of supplying the soul with a material personal link with the domain of God's works. It makes no difference whether the person dies in old age or in middle life or in childhood, it is the same incorruptible body through which the activities of the spirit are exerted.

4. There is now a spiritual, an incorruptible, body. There is that in our physical being which is permanent, which is not subject to forces producing waste. Final and formal causes underlie every class of objects, and are essential to every concrete thing. When God ordained man he made him for a purpose, and that purpose was to be reached through a definite system. Every human being is constructed according to a plan. that looks forward to and takes in the complex unit of body and spirit in a final, complete, and glorious personality. That which is sensuous in a human body comes far short of compris ing all that is essential to such body. There is an ideal end, and a specific mode of realizing the end which are fundamental and most real. No one fully understands what the body is who does not see the translucence of the final and formalthe purpose and the plan-in each individual body. That which we know through our senses comes far short of being the whole. It is the changeable, the perishable, yet resting back on that which is unchangeable and imperishable. He who looks into the deepest realities of nature finds that on which no eye can gaze and which no hand can touch. There is a changeless ground of all that is phenomenal, and so far as the body is concerned this will be realized in the resurrection.

But what is death? Can there be a resurrection if the principles insisted upon in the foregoing discussion are to be accepted as valid? In its final effect death is something more than the withdrawal of the soul from the body. It is something more than the destruction of the vital principle. As following the overthrow of the vital forces physical dissolution takes place in all cases not prevented by special antiseptic agents. The entire work of the vital forces as appearing in the sensuous physical being is demolished. If this be true, is there any thing physical remaining? Is there a body to be raised? The body that was, existing as a concrete reality, has become non-existent. Resurrection is a rising again, or a coming forth again. It must be, not the first, but the second coming forth.

The first coming forth was a creation, yet with each of us under a law of natural genesis through a potentiality lodged in the race; the second coming forth may, in like manner, be a creation under a supernatural law. To assume that because the word resurrection means rising again there must be a de facto body awaiting the resurrection to come forth into life, would be subjecting a doctrine of the Bible to the uncertainties of etymology. To affirm, for instance, that the true theory of temperance is the moderate use of alcoholic stimulants because the word temperance means moderation, would be to construct a theory on the flimsiest possible basis. Whatever the etymology may be, every sober thinker to-day tells us that the only theory of temperance that is rational enforces moderation in the use of that which is not of itself pernicious, but total abstinence from that which is hurtful. But the etymology of the word temperance is no more unsafe as a guide than the etymology of the word resurrection. A large part of the words in every language are used in a sense quite foreign to their original etymological meaning.

If Paul is to be understood as teaching that the resurrection body is germinally present in the natural body after death, then death does not usurp complete supremacy over our physical nature, it merely brings us to a state of possible transformation. He is not giving the mode of the resurrection when he speaks of the sown grain, he is only answering the objection that because the body dies there can be no resurrection. All nature in its successive movements presents to us that which is as strange and mysterious as the truth he is defending. A priori who would have looked for the origination and growth of the plant through the decay of the seed of a former plant? Yet this is God's order of movement in the natural world. The seed is decomposed to furnish nutriment to the germ, the ultimate purpose of which is the production of other grain. No one can explain the mystery of production from the germ, beginning in the dissolution of the seed about the germ, any more than he can explain the mystery of the appearance of a resurrection body reaching back to and dependent on the natural body that had been laid away in the grave. Yet the former we accept as a fact without any misgivings under even the limited energies of nature; then why cavil about the truth of

God's dealings with the body in the grander realm of the supernatural? There is one parallelism Paul draws. The grain that is sown is not the grain that is produced. The former perishes, but furnishes a condition for the coming forth of the latter. As species they are one, just as all human beings under a genetic law are one; but as concrete individuals they are not one. In like manner is the sowing of the body and its resurrection. The natural is perishable, the resurrection body is not perishable. Were there no natural body there would be no spiritual body. Were there no death there would be no resurrection. And the resurrection is as directly connected with, and dependent upon the natural body subject to decay as the grain produced is connected with the sown grain. They are both great mysteries to be studied in the realm of death, but they illustrate divine plans, one not less actually or less wonderfully than the other.

We must not fail to note the condition of the appearance of each human being on the earth. God is our creator, but he has established in nature a law of the production of life. Only under such law do the successive generations of men come into actual existence. The individual human person appears through the principle and process of traduction, in which the medium is psycho-physical, this complex psycho-physical unit being essential as an antecedent to our personality. The ancestral determines both our physical and mental peculiarities. There is the heredity of both. Physical, mental, and moral tendencies all are transmitted. It is orthodox to hold that the sin of Adam has impaired the moral life of the whole race. It has been said that the education of the child should begin a hundred years before it is born. Criminal tendencies are uniformly observed in the life of those who are preceded by generations of criminals. Using the term in its broad sense there is something in blood. Now, the antecedent energy on which our life has depended was both mental and physical. It was not the mental and physical acting independently of each other, but in undivided unity. These two factors were not partners, each performing a separate work, or co-operating as distinct units to produce a single end, but as an inseparable energy bringing forth the complex units of our being. Does not the genesis of our coming throw light on our predetermined ulti13-FIFTH SERIES, VOL. VIII.

mate destiny? Should not and does not the former contain in some sense a prophecy of the latter? Paul was profoundly impressed by the great truths of human life and the final glorious attainments of the human soul. He does not seek to tell us when and how the spirit shall reach its perfected state. Never confounding spirit with matter, wholly unlike as they are in their nature and purpose, yet wrought into the unit of a personality that can cognize the material and the spiritual, and in its achievements penetrate into and bring out to the light the mysteries of both, in triumphant notes he breaks forth in the glad shout, "Death is swallowed up in victory!"

Without attempting, on the positive side, to answer the question, "What is the resurrection?"-for who can traverse the supernatural?-we have sought to show that rationally considered the doctrine is not anti-scientific; that the philosophy of nature does not discredit it, and that in the light of the Gospel the sublimest hopes of the soul rest upon this glorious truth. When Peter, James, and John accompanied the Saviour to the summit of that high mountain, and Moses and Elijah appeared unto them from out of the sky, the transfiguration of the Son of man, in which "his face did shine as the sun, and his gar. ments became white as the light," may well be considered to be a manifestation of the spiritual or glorified body of Christ. And Jesus charged these apostles not to speak of this scene until the Son of man should be risen from the dead, thus connecting the event with the resurrection. Were our knowledge of God's plan commensurate with that of the apostle Paul; did we as clearly see that the whole gospel scheme was built on the resurrection of Christ as the first-fruits of them that sleep; were we able to get an adequate view of the possible and revealed glory of our transfigured life when the corruptible shall put on incorruption and the mortal shall put on immortality, would not the Gospel preached by us glow with a radiance which it does not now possess?

L R. Fiske

ART. II.—THE COMPULSORY LOCATION OF INEFFICIENT TRAVELING PREACHERS.

Ir a member of an Annual Conference is not a criminal to be expelled, nor a suitable person to be supernumerary or superannuate, but does not make-even with the utmost stretch of charity-a useful traveling preacher, or fill acceptably any one of the class of appointments at the disposal of a bishop, what shall be done with him?

Every Conference contains some "secular" in a sense that their minds are on their temporal affairs or outside matters more than upon their work. "Inefficient," in that wherever they go the churches languish and decay. "Unacceptable," in that no church knowing any thing about them regards it as a hopeful sign when they are appointed, or wishes their return for a second year. To appoint them at all, the place where they are to go must be kept secret till its name is read out.

How to dispose of them is a question as old as Methodism. It was always a question of principle; in our time it is a question of principle, precedent, and fundamental law.

I believe, and shall attempt to show, that it is in principle essentially right for an Annual Conference to locate ministers without their consent and without formal trial who, without being physically or mentally incapacitated for the work, have become no longer useful, and that such location without formal trial is not a violation of any Restrictive Rule, and is in harmony with all the analogies of Methodism.

The question of principle is one for reasoning; the question of precedent one for history; and that of the Restrictive Rules one of interpretation.

I. THE PRECEDENTS.

Men were by the early Conferences made supernumerary or superannuate, by vote, either at their own request or without it, after representation by their brethren and speaking for themselves, and, generally recognizing their own condition, acquiesced in the judgment of the Conference. If they did