Page:Complete Works of Count Tolstoy - 13.djvu/454

 then the living shall be changed. It is proved by Holy Scripture that there shall certainly be a resurrection of the dead, and that the possibility of the resurrection of the dead cannot be subject to doubt. This is the way it is proved:

“In the world nothing is destroyed or annihilated, but everything remains whole in the power and in the right hand of the Almighty; our bodies lose their existence through death only for us, but not for God, who knows full well all the smallest particles of each dead body, though they may be scattered everywhere and may be united with other bodies, and is always able to reunite these particles into the former organism.” (p. 625.)

When it comes to talking about particles, the question is not about replacing the particles, but about the fact that there will not be enough particles to go around. The body of my great-grandfather is rotten parts of his body have gone into the grass; a cow has eaten the grass; a peasant boy has drunk those parts in his milk, and these particles have become his body, and his body has rotted. There will not be enough particles to go around, so that it is absolutely impossible for God to do that by means of the particles. It would be better to prove that in the old way like this:

“(a) In reply to the objection that the resurrection of the dead is incomprehensible to us, men have pointed to other, not less incomprehensible things, such as: the birth of each man, the original formation of the human body out of the dust, the creation of the world out of nothing, and so forth.”

That proves the possibility of the resurrection in the body, and the necessity of it is proved like this:

“By the very nature of Christianity it is necessary that, as in Adam all die, even so in Christ shall all be made alive (1 Cor. xv. 22), and that not only our first enemy, the devil, but also our last enemy, death, shall be des-