eep in the grave,
but said to the penitent thief on the cross, "This day shalt thou
be with me in Paradise:" instantly upon leaving the body their
souls would be together in the state of the blessed.

It is often said that the words of Jesus in relation to the dead
hearing his voice and coming forth must be taken literally; for
the metaphor is of too extreme violence. But it is in keeping with
his usage. He says, "Let the dead bury their dead." It is far less
bold than "This is my body; this is my blood." It is not nearly so
strong as Paul's adjuration, "Awake, thou that sleepest, and rise
from the dead, and Christ shall give thee light." It is not more
daringly imaginative than the assertion that "the heroes sleeping
in Marathon's gory bed stirred in their graves when Leonidas
fought at Thermopyla; or than Christ's own words, "If thou hadst
faith like a grain of mustard seed, thou couldst say to this
mountain, Be thou cast into yonder sea, and it should obey you."
So one might say,

"Where'er the gospel comes,
It spreads diviner light;
It calls dead sinners from their tombs
And gives the blind their sight."

And in the latter days, when it has done its work, and the
glorious measure of human redemption is full, liberty,
intelligence, and love shall stand hand in hand on the mountain
summits and raise up the long generations of the dead to behold
the completed fruits of their toils. In this figurative moral
sense Jesus probably spoke when he said, "Thou shalt be
recompensed at the resurrection of the just." He referred simply
to the rewards of the virtuous in the state beyond the grave. The
phraseology in which he clothed the thought he accommodatingly
adopted from the current speech of the Pharisees. They
unquestionably meant by it the group of notions contained in their
dogma of the destined physical restoration of the dead from their
sepulchres at the advent of the Messiah. And it seems perfectly
plain to us, on an impartial study of the record, that the
evangelist, in reporting his words, took the Pharisaic dogma, and
not merely the Christian truth, with them. But that Jesus himself
modified and spiritualized the meaning of the phrase when he
employed it, even as he did the other contemporaneous language
descriptive of the Messianic offices and times, we conclude for
two reasons. First, he certainly did often use language in that
spiritual way, dressing in bold metaphors moral thoughts of
inspired insight an