was the one thing required to counteract
their feeling that all was lost, and the best means of demonstrating
this victory over death was to enable them to behold Him in the body
with which they were already familiar and which they loved so well.
For, after all, that body was but a thought-form, a kind of language, a
mode of communication between mind and mind; it was no more and no less
a thought-form than an apparition would have been, and, from the point
of view of monistic idealism, it is no more difficult to believe in the
reanimation of a physical body than in the use of any other
thought-form to express a fact of consciousness. Here, then, we have a
being whose consciousness belongs to the fourth-dimensional plane
adjusting Himself to the capacity of those on a three-dimensional plane
for the sake of proving to them beyond dispute that--

"Life is ever lord of death,
And love can never love its own."

This seems to me the most reasonable explanation of the
post-resurrection appearances of Jesus, and the impression produced by
them on the minds of His disciples. Most of my New Theology friends
will probably reject it at first sight, but at least it is consistent
with the philosophic position assumed throughout this book, and seems
to me to present fewer difficulties than any other in face of the New
Testament accounts. But no theory of the resurrection of Jesus is
absolutely indispensable or of first-rate importance; the main thing to
be agreed upon is that Christianity started with the belief that its
Founder had risen from the dead in order to demonstrate that death has
no power to destroy anything worthy of God. In consonance with this
idealistic view of the subject the ascension becomes understandable; it
simply means that when Jesus had done what He wanted, the body was
dissipated. No doubt primitive Christian thought naively regarded
heaven as a place above the sky to which the physical body actually
went, and Hades, or the under-world, as the place from which the spirit
of Jesus returned to reanimate it before ascending to the abode of the
Father. Plainly enough this is what Paul thought about it, but such a
conception is now impossible to anyone; it could only exist under a
geocentric view of the universe which has long since passed away. But
when Paul speaks even about the resurrection of the saints, this is
what he means. All the good who have died are waiting in the
under-world, the shado