^ Our nature, as a whole, has been ennobled as well as invigorated by the Son of God. Bending from His throne of Heaven, in the immensity of His love. He has taken it upon Him in its integrity. He has taken body and soul alike, and joined it by an indissoluble union to His own eternal Person. That body which was born of Mary, which lived on this planet for thirty- three years, which was spat upon, which was buffeted, which was scourged, which was crucified, which underwent the stiffness and coldness of death, and was raised again in glory — that body exists somewhere still in space at the right hand of God the Father Almighty (so our poor human language struggles to speak out the
1 W. G. Rainsford.
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tremendous truth), and thereby it confers on all who are partakers in human i3esh and blood a patent of nobility of which our race can never be deprived. " Forasmuch then as the children are partakers of tiesh and blood, he also himself likewise took part of the same." Yes, He has ennobled us, and yet, while this life lasts, how great is the interval between our condition and His ! How unlike is that body of glory which rose from the tomb on Easter morning to our body — unlike in its indescribable beauty, in its freedom of movement, in its inaccessibility to decay, in its spirituality of texture.^
4. The power by which Christ shall subdue all things unto Himself, will be sufficient to change our mortal bodies. If we are in Him He will gather up what death has left ; He will transfigure it with the splendour of a new life ; He will change our body of humiliation that it may be fashioned like unto the body of His glory. Sown in corruption, it will be raised in incorruption ; sown in dishonour, it will be raised in glory ; sown in the very extreme of physical weakness, it will be raised in a strictly super- human power ; sown a natural body, controlled on every side by physical law, it will be a true body still, but a body that belongs to the sphere of the spirit. Most difficult indeed it is even to the imagination to understand how this poor body, our companion for so many years — rather, indeed, part of our very selves — is to be first wrenched from us at death and then restored to us if we will, transfigured thus by the majestic glory of the Son of God.
^ There was a time when science rather mocked at the possibility of the resurrection. That is changed now, I think. At least I have heard the utterance of a great biologist who said, " If there is a resurrection, it must be a resurrection of the body. Body and spirit are so intimately connected that the one cannot be conceived as existing for ever in a perfect state without the other." 2
^ The Catholic Faith proclaims "the Eesurrection of the Body." What does it mean ? It means that for every child of man the hour is coming when the body — the frail and crumbling temple of the soul — shall pass from the home of corruption to conditions of an evident and sensible existence, endowed with movement, gifted with life ; the form will be the same as in the days of the old life long ago. And if it be asked by what power
1 H. P. Liddon. 2 Bishop M. Creighton, The Mind of St. Peter, 107.
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this overwhelming miracle is wrought, the answer is, in apostolic phrase, by " the glory of God." It was Christ who brought life and immortality to light by the Gospel ; it was also Christ who clearly taught and evidenced the fact that the body shall rise again, whilst He also evidenced the truth in His own Divine Person that in very deed it must die. That death may be sad, may be tragic. It is. The heart sinks and withers beneath the thought that the form so dear to it, so expressive of the light and beautiful soul, should be, must be, the slave of corruption. But this, at least, is a consoling consequence. If the whole man has had to pay the penalty of sin, the body in its dissolution, the soul in its dis- embodiment, Eeason herself demands, what Eevelation asserts, that the whole man should share the victory — the body by a splendid reconstruction, the soul by restoration to its ancient home. God's promise of man's entire beatitude is a pledge that this article of the Christian creed is true. The Church does not trouble herself with any details about particles of matter, about its mysterious onward march in bodies she has nothing to say ; but she does assert continuous identity, and she has on her side two important teachers : (1) the affections and yearnings of the human heart, and (2) which is more to the point — Divine Eevelation.
(1) There is an infinity about pure human affection which points to another life. Here we have time enough given us just to have great hopes and strong loves, and then what seemed so stable has vanished like a morning dream. They vanish — they do not end. The practical instincts of pure affection and noble aspiration point imperiously to a better world. As well say that the evidence of the affections goes for nothing as that the robin's song does not speak of autumn, or the coming swallow of the spring ; as well say your strong desire for happiness with those you love, your deep longing for continued converse with souls blessed and beautiful, but gone, goes for nothing, as that discord in resolution does not delight you because it teaches of the coming mystery of harmonious union, or that the first faint shafts of the eastern colour do not herald the morning dawn.