maginative
contemplations on the phenomena of burials and graves; spectres
seen in dreams; conceptions of the dead as shadowy shapes in the
under world; ideas of God as the deliverer of living men from the
open gates of the under world when they experienced narrow escapes
from destruction; vast and fanatical national hopes. Before
advancing another step, it is necessary only to premise that some
of the Jews appear to have expected that the souls on rising from
the under world would be clothed with new, spiritualized,
incorruptible bodies, others plainly expected that the identical
bodies they formerly wore would be literally restored.

Now, when Christianity, after the death of its Founder, arose and
spread, it was in the guise of a new and progressive Jewish sect.
Its apostles and its converts for the first hundred years were
Christian Jews. Christianity ran its career through the apostolic
age virtually as a more liberal Jewish sect. Most natural was it,
then, that infant Christianity should retain all the salient
dogmas of Judaism, except those of exclusive nationality and
bigoted formalism in the throwing off of which the mission of
Christianity partly consisted. Among these Jewish dogmas retained
by early Christianity was that of the bodily resurrection. In the
New Testament itself there are seeming references to this
doctrine. We shall soon recur to these. The phrase "resurrection
of the body" does not occur in the Scriptures. Neither is it found
in any public creed whatever among Christians until the fourth
century.6 But these admissions by no means prove that the doctrine
was not believed from the earliest days of Christianity. The fact
is, it was the same with this doctrine as with the doctrine of the
descent of Christ into Hades: it was not for a long time called in
question at all. It was not defined, discriminated, lifted up on
the symbols of the Church, because that was not called for. As
soon as the doctrine came into dispute, it was vehemently and all
but unanimously affirmed, and found an emphatic place in every
creed. Whenever the doctrine of a bodily resurrection has been
denied, that denial has been instantly stigmatized as heresy and
schism, even from the days of "Hymeneus and Philetas, who
concerning the truth erred, saying that the resurrection was past
already." The uniform orthodox doctrine of the Christian Church
has always been that in the last day the identical fleshly bodies
formerly inhab