Page:Anastasis A Treatise on the Judgment of the Dead.pdf/7

8 was awaking to renewed corporeal existence—a reorganization of their disintegrated remains with renewed identity. This was awaking, coming, or springing forth, and standing again, or resurrection.

Many passages of like import might be adduced from the prophetic writings; but the limit assigned to these pages will not allow of quotation. I will merely remark here that "the poor and needy," whom David so amply characterizes, "poor in the world, but rich in faith," while strangers and pilgrims among the living, are styled by Isaiah, "Yahweh's dead ones," and "His dead body." Concerning them, he says, "they shall live," "they shall arise." They are to come forth from the dust of sheol; in which, having been reduced thereto, they are considered as dwelling, as well as sleeping. Hence, the Eternal Spirit, who makes them live and spring forth by His power, addresses them prophetically in the words, "Awake and sing, ye that dwell in dust." They must awake in order to sing, which implies previous reorganization—the formation of their dust into bodies again; for dust cannot praise in song, neither any that go down into the silence of "the land of forgetfulness" (Psalm xxx. 9; lxxxviii. 11–12; cxv. 17).

I cannot dismiss this passage in Isaiah without inviting attention to the beautiful figure by which he illustrates the development of these singers from dust. He styles them "dew," and their evolution as its manifestations upon plants. Thus, addressing the Eternal Spirit, he is caused to say, "For Thy dew is as the dew of herbs, and the earth shall cast out the dead" (Isaiah xxvi. 19); and in Psalm cx. 3, "in the brilliancies of holiness from the womb of the dawn, there shall be to thee the dew of thy birth." The sleepers in the dust are styled dew, because of the resemblance subsisting between the process of nature in the formation of dew, and the operation of the Eternal Spirit in the generation of living beings from dust. In comprehending the formation of dew, we are enabled to form some idea of the evolution of a living body from dust. A dew-drop is a sparkling globule of water, secretly and silently deposited upon the leaves of plants. The elements of which it is composed exist previously to its formation, free or uncombined, in the air of night. These are the invisible gases termed oxygen and hydrogen. But, besides these, there is the indispensable formative agent, styled electricity. Without this, there could be no dew-drop visible or invisible. The gases might be mechanically mixed; but without the invisible and silent operation of the electricity, they would not be chemically combined in the manifested product called a dew-drop. This is a visible and tangible thing, generated from invisible and intangible latent elements.