son. And that is something to
keep firm hold of in these days when we are being told that life and
consciousness are but a function of organisation, and that if the one
be annihilated the other cannot persist. No; though all illustrations
and metaphors must necessarily fail, the two which lie side by side
here in my text and its context are far truer than that
pseudo-science--which is not science at all, but only inference from
science--which denies that the man is one thing and his house
altogether another.

Then again, note, as part of the elements of this Christian
certitude, the blessed thought that a body is part of the perfection
of manhood. No mere dim, ghostly future, where consciousness somehow
persists, without environment or tools to act upon an outer world,
completes the idea of God in reference to man. But the old trinity is
the eternal trinity for humanity, body, soul, and spirit. Corporeity,
with all that it means of definiteness, with all that it means of
relation to an external universe, is the perfection of manhood. To
dwell naked, as the Apostle says in the context, is a thing from
which man shudderingly recoils; and it is not to be his final fate.
Let us take this as no small gain in reference to our conceptions of
a future--the emphatic drawing into light of that thought that for
his perfection man requires body, soul, and spirit. And now, if we
turn for a moment to the characteristics of the two conditions with
which my text deals, we get some familiar enough but yet great and
strengthening thoughts. The 'earthly house of this tabernacle is
dissolved,' or, more correctly, retaining the metaphor of the house,
is to be pulled down--and in its place there comes a building of God,
a 'house not made with hands, eternal in the heavens.'

Now the contrast that is drawn here, whilst it would run out into a
great many other particulars, about which we know nothing, and
therefore had better say nothing, revolves in the Apostle's mind
mainly round these two 'earthly' as contrasted with 'in the heavens';
and 'tabernacle,' or tent, as contrasted, first of all with a
'building,' and then with the predicate 'eternal.'

That is to say, the first outstanding difference which arises before
the Apostle as blessed and glorious, is the contrast between the
fragile dwelling-place, with its thin canvas, its bending poles, its
certain removal some day, and the permanence of that which is not a
'tent,' but a 'building'