Page:Post-Mediaeval Preachers.djvu/172

 in the Old and New Testaments; Christ proves this from the words, The God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, saying, He is not the God of the dead, but of the living.

For the Sadducees denied the existence of angel or spirit, and a state of life after death.

If God is God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, and He is God of the living, then these patriarchs are in a state of existence after death.

Christ quoted from Moses, and not from passages in the prophets, because the Sadducees accepted the Pentateuch only.

Christ raised some from the dead as an earnest of what he would do hereafter, as for instance, Lazarus, the widow’s son, and the daughter of Jairus.

Proposition 2. The resurrection of the body, though naturally hard to be understood, is most easy to be performed by God.

The doctrine of the resurrection was unknown to the philosophers.

There are natural difficulties in the way, yet it is possible with God, as illustrated by the vision of Ezekiel (xvii.).

Daniel also was promised the resurrection (xii. 2).

Marchant relates the story of the seven sleepers as an illustration of the manner in which those sleeping in their graves may awake in the flesh and in the likeness of their former selves.

Nature gives us figures and types of