almost synonymous with 'Nature.' Observing the distinction which the
Apostle draws by the use of these two words, and remembering their force
in the former instance of their occurrence, we shall not fail to give
force to the representation that in the Resurrection the fleeting
fashion of the bodily frame will be altered, and the glorified bodies of
the saints made participant of the essential qualities of His.

We further note that there is no trace of false asceticism or of gnostic
contempt for the body in its designation as 'of our humiliation.' Its
weaknesses, its limitations, its necessities, its corruption and its
death, sufficiently manifest our lowliness, while, on the other hand,
the body in which Christ's glory is manifested, and which is the
instrument for His glory, is presented in fullest contrast to it.

The great truth of Christ's continual glorified manhood is the first
which we draw from these words. The story of our Lord's Resurrection
suggests indeed that He brought the same body from the tomb as loving
hands had laid there. The invitation to Thomas to thrust his hands into
the prints of the nails, the similar invitation to the assembled
disciples, and His partaking of food in their presence, seemed to forbid
the idea of His rising changed. Nor can we suppose that the body of His
glory would be congruous with His presence on earth. But we have to
think of His ascension as gradual, and of Himself as 'changed by still
degrees' as He ascended, and so as returned to where the 'glory which He
had with the Father before the world was,' as the Shechinah cloud
received Him out of the sight of the gazers below. If this be the true
reading of His last moments on earth, He united in His own experience
both the ways of leaving it which His followers experience--the way of
sleep which is death, and the way of 'being changed.'

But at whatever point the change came, He now wears, and for ever will
wear, the body of a man. That is the dominant fact on which is built the
Christian belief in a future life, and which gives to that belief all
its solidity and force, and separates it from vague dreams of
immortality which are but a wish tremblingly turned into a hope, or a
dread shudderingly turned into an expectation. The man Christ Jesus is
the pattern and realised ideal of human life on earth, the revelation of
the divine life through a human life, and in His glorified humanity is
no less the pattern and realised ide