tained that promise. For it is not said wealth, long life, secu rity, or, in short, the world is thine, but, God is thine : nor is it said God is thine for fifty, an hundred, or seven hundred years, but simply God is thine. When, therefore, God first declared Himself to Abraham to be his God, He conferred, and was acknowledged to have conferred, upon him the everlasting com munion of Himself everlasting. And though the death of the body has intervened in the case of the patriarchs, it cannot last for ever, nor produce a long delay, long in comparison with ever lasting life. For Abraham himself, the whole man, and all that is included under the name Abraham, that is, not only his soul but also his body, which also received the seal of the promise, pos sesses GOD. God, however, is not the God of that which is not : He is the Living God ; they therefore who possess God must themselves also be living, and as to any portion of them in which life has been suspended, must revive for ever. The force of the formula is shown also in Gnomon on Heb. xi. 16, which passage is chiefly to this effect, " He hath prepared for them a city," and that principally in eternity; and therefore He is called their God. And this reasoning of Christ is sound, evident, and then heard for the first time : and most effectually proves both the immortality of the soul, and the resurrection of the body, against the Sadducees, who denied altogether the existence of spirits. The force, however, of the argument does not consist in the verb tip}, I am, nor in the use of its present tense at the time of Moses (for though it is expressed by St Matthew, it is not found in the parallel passages of St Mark or St Luke, or the original of Moses), but in the formula itself.1 And these phrases, My, Thy, His, etc., GOD, are by far the most frequent. This passage, however, here cited against the Sadducees is furthermore the most striking of all of them, on the following grounds : (1) In it God speaks Himself, an irrefragable proof of its truth ; (2) He speaks on the occasion of a most solemn and visible manifestation of Himself; (3) He speaks of Abra ham, Isaac, and Jacob conjointly ; (4) And indeed after their death, and that a long while after, at the very time of perform -
1 For the possession of that which is everlasting implies everlasting pos session, and everlasting possession involves everlasting duration. — (I. 15.)