Page:Life, Death, and Immortality.pdf/11

 gaseous and solid materials brought to it by the blood, and when the nervous stimulus is withdrawn life must cease, even in the lowest tissues. But it is interesting to note that the tissues in which life persists the longest are those whose cells most resemble the lower cellular forms of living things. Retaining more independence, they do not at once die with the death of the higher tissues.

It is obvious that if the reasoning applied to life and death in the preceding pages be accepted, the word "immortality" is not predicable of any of the material arrangements there spoken of. Nor, indeed, do the believers in immortality now claim it for what they call the "perishable body". It is true that in the Apostles' Creed, accepted by the whole Catholic Church, Christians constantly repeat their belief in "the resurrection of the body", as well as in "the life everlasting". It is true that in the Visitation of the Sick, in the authorised Book of Common Prayer, the priest is directed to examine the sick person as to his belief, and to ask: "Dost thou believe in the resurrection of the flesh; and everlasting life after death?". And to this the sick person answers: "All this I stedfastly belleve [sic]". But it is very generally understood that these words must be taken in a non-natural sense, and that while they may have, and indeed did, represent the belief of the very ignorant primitive Christians, they are absolutely meaningless at the present day. Knowing, as we now do, what becomes of "the body", "the flesh"; knowing that it passes through various stages of "decay", that is, of disassociation and recombination into simpler and simpler forms, until water, ammonia, and carbon dioxide are all that remains; knowing that many of the intermediate products have been taken up by the roots of plants, and have been broken up and recombined in the wonderful chemical laboratory of the vegetable cells, and that these ultimate products will have the same fate; knowing that many of the vegetables thus built up have supplied food to animals—is not the churchyard a favorite pasture-ground for sheep in many country districts?—and that these animals have in their turn formed food for man, and have thus built the materials of past generations into the living tissues of the present: knowing all this, how can the Christian say with full faith: "I believe in the resurrection of the flesh"?