eristics of what we call matter. 'There is one flesh of beasts
and another of birds,' says Paul; 'there is one glory of the sun and
another of the moon.' And his old-fashioned argument is perfectly
sound to-day.

Do you know so fully all the possibilities of creation as that you
are warranted in asserting that such a thing as a body which is the
fit organ of the spirit, and is incorruptible like the heavens in
which it dwells, is an impossibility? Surely the forms of matter are
sufficiently varied to make us chary in asserting that other forms
are impossible, to which there may belong, as characteristics, even
these glorious ones of my text. The old story of the king in the
tropics, who laughed to scorn some one who told him that water could
be turned into a solid, may well be quoted in this connection. Let us
be less confident that we know all that is to be known in regard to
the sweep of God's creative power; and let us thankfully accept the
teaching by which we, too, in all our ignorance, may be able to say,
'We know that ... we have a building of God ... eternal in the
heavens.'

Now there is only one more remark that I wish to make about this part
of my subject; and it is this, that the teaching of my text and its
context casts great light--and I think by many people much-needed
light--on what the resurrection of the dead means. That doctrine has
been weighted with a great many incredibilities and I venture to say
absurdities, by well-meaning misconceptions and exaggerations. We
have heard grand platitudes about 'the scattered dust being gathered
from the four winds of heaven,' and so on, but the teaching of my
text is that the contrast between the present physical frame and the
future bodily environment is utter and complete; and that
resurrection does not mean the assuming again of the body that is
left behind and done with, but the reinvestiture of the man with
another body. And so the Scriptural phrase is, not 'the resurrection
of the body,' but 'the resurrection of the dead.' It is a house 'in
the heavens.' It comes 'from heaven.'

We leave the tent. Life and thought

... have gone away, side by side,
Leaving doors and windows wide;
Careless tenants they!

And they may well be careless, because in the heavens they have
another mansion, incorruptible and glorious.

We leave the 'tent'; we enter the 'building.' There is nothing here
of some germ of immortality being somehow extricated from the r