al of what human nature may become.
The present state of the departed is incomplete in that they have not a
body by which they can act on, and be acted on by, an external universe.
We cannot indeed suppose them lapped in age-long unconsciousness, and it
may be that the 'dead in Christ' are through Him brought into some
knowledge of externals, but for the full-summed perfection of their
being, the souls under the altar have to wait for the resurrection of
the body. If resurrection is needful for completion of manhood, then
completed manhood must necessarily be set in a locality, and the
glorified manhood of Jesus must also now be in a place. To think thus of
it and of Him is not to vulgarise the Christian conception of Heaven,
but to give it a definiteness and force which it sorely lacks in popular
thinking. Nor is the continual manhood of our Lord less precious in its
influence in helping our familiar approach to Him. It tells us that He
is still and for ever the same as when on earth, glad to welcome all who
came and to help and heal all who need Him. It is one of ourselves who
'sitteth at the right hand of God.' His manhood brings Him memories
which bind Him to us sorrowing and struggling, and His glory clothes Him
with power to meet all our needs, to stanch all our wounds, to satisfy
all our desires.

Our text leads us to think of the wondrous transformation into Christ's
likeness. We know not what are the differences between the body of our
humiliation and the body of His glory, but we must not be led away by
the word Resurrection to fall into the mistake of supposing that in
death we 'sow that body which shall be.' Paul's great chapter in I.
Corinthians should have destroyed that error for ever, and it is a
singular instance of the persistency of the most unsupported mistakes
that there are still thousands of people who in spite of all that they
know of what befalls our mortal bodies, and of how their parts pass into
other forms, still hold by that crude idea. We have no material by which
to construct any, even the vaguest, outline of that body that shall be.
We can only run out the contrasts as suggested by Paul in 1st
Corinthians, and let the dazzling greatness of the positive thought
which he gives in the text lift our expectations. Weakness will become
power, corruption incorruption, liability to death immortality,
dishonour glory, and the frame which belonged and corresponded to 'that
which was natural,' shall