Page:An analysis of religious belief (1877).djvu/637

 I should have been contented simply to admire, but he has unfortunately mingled argument with poetic vision in a very unsatisfactory manner. In the first place, he attempts to deduce the resurrection of the dead from the resurrection of Christ. If, he contends, there be no resurrection of the dead, then Christ is not risen; our preaching is vain, and so also is your faith (1 Cor. xv. 12-20). He fails to perceive that the resurrection of Christ—a man whose whole life, according to him, was full of prodigies—could be no guarantee for the resurrection of any other individual whatever. Christ had already been restored to life in a manner in which no other person had ever been restored. His body had been reanimated after two days, before it had had time to suffer decomposition, and that without the intervention of any other person, competent like Christ himself, to perform a miracle. How then could so unprecedented an occurrence warrant the expectation of the reanimation of those who had been long dead, and whose bodies had suffered decomposition? Plainly there is here a palpable non sequitur. Christ might be raised without this fact involving a general resurrection; and a general resurrection might happen without Christ having been raised. Further on he makes a still more amazing blunder. Answering a supposed antagonist, who puts the natural question, "With what body are the dead raised?" he exclaims, "Fool! that which thou sowest is not quickened except it die;" (1 Cor. xv. 36.) implying that he conceived the change undergone by seed dropped into the ground to resemble the death of the human body. Now it is needless to point out that the organic processes constituting physical life do not cease in the grain which (as he says) grows up into wheat or some other corn; and that if they did cease, that "body that shall be," which he compares to the bodies of men in their expected resurrection, never would appear at all. The grain, in short, would not grow. An adversary, had he been on the alert, might have retorted upon Paul (borrowing his own courteous phraseology): "Idiot! that which thou sowest is not quickened if it die." Such a retort would have been completely crushing. Another very fatal mistake of Paul's is the contention that if the dead do not rise, we have no reason to do anything but enjoy the passing hour. "Let us eat and drink, for to-morrow