Page:The Last Judgement and Second Coming of the Lord Illustrated.djvu/143

 ticipated. This view, however, supposes the body to be an active agent, whereas it is only a passive instrument. It is the soul which has impelled it to do whatever it has done, and, therefore, all its doings are of the soul. Besides, they who place the matter on the supposed justice of the case, should, to be consistent, maintain that the body ought not to die any more than the soul; but, as the body does die, and is obviously, for unnumbered years, deprived of the consciousness and everything else that the soul possesses, it is plain, that equal participation in the consequences of that, which it has been instrumental in doing, is impossible, and that the argument on the ground of justice is an evident fallacy.

The resurrection of the material body may be a theme for the poet, but it affords no grasp for the consideration of philosophy, and it vanishes before the light of revelation. Look for a moment at the condition in which bodies are placed by death. Some, indeed, may be quietly mouldering into dust: but others have been burnt, driven into vapours, scattered by the winds, devoured by beasts, converted into vegetables; some have been eaten by cannibals, and so been incorporated into the bodies of other men; while the limbs of some have been deposited in one portion of the world, and their bodies in another. Moreover, the natural body is continually changing; indeed, it is said that at the end of one period of seven years we have not the same body that we had at its commencement. It is quite certain that the body of the infant is not the body of the man. On this doctrine of physical mutations, a man who has lived seventy years will have changed or renewed his body ten different times; in each and all of which some good and evil have been done. Which body is, then, to be raised? If the argument that the bodies in which vice and