sense of the Apostle, when he formally assures us, yea, even
threatens us, that corruption cannot inherit incorruption. 'Neither
doth corruption inherit incorruption'. What then may this singular
expression mean? This is what it manifestly means;--that no person,
whoever he may be, without any exception, who possesseth a corrupt
heart and corrupt actions, and therein persevereth unto death, shall
have reason to expect in the resurrection a pure, subtile, active and
impassible body.

This is actually dangerous tampering with the written letter.

Without touching on the question whether St. Paul in this celebrated
chapter (1 'Cor'. xv.) speaks of a partial or of the general
resurrection, or even conceding to Lacunza that the former opinion is
the more probable; I must still vehemently object to this Jesuitical
interpretation of corruption, as used in a moral sense, and distinctive
of the wicked souls. St. Paul nowhere speaks dogmatically or
preceptively (not popularly and incidentally,) of a soul as the proper
'I'. It is always 'we', or the man. How could a regenerate saint put off
corruption at the sound of the trump, if up to that hour it did not in
some sense or other appertain to him? But what need of many words? It
flashes on every reader whose imagination supplies an unpreoccupied,
unrefracting, 'medium' to the Apostolic assertion, that corruption in
this passage is a descriptive synonyme of the material sensuous organism
common to saint and sinner,--standing in precisely the same relation to
the man that the testaceous offensive and defensive armour does to the
crab and tortoise. These slightly combined and easily decomponible
stuffs are as incapable of subsisting under the altered conditions of
the earth as an hydatid in the blaze of a tropical sun. They would be no
longer 'media' of communion between the man and his circumstances.

A heavy difficulty presses, as it appears to me, on Lacunza's system, as
soon as we come to consider the general resurrection. Our Lord (in books
of indubitable and never doubted catholicity) speaks of some who rise to
bliss and glory, others who at the same time rise to shame and
condemnation. Now if the former class live not during the whole interval
from their death to the general resurrection, including the Millennium,
or 'Dies Messiae',--how should they, whose imperfect or insufficient
merits excluded them from the kingdom of the Messiah on earth, be all at
once fi