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others will ever, even temporarily, reassume their cast off forms.

The Christian Scriptures do not in a single passage teach the
popular doctrine of the resurrection of the body. Every text in
the New Testament finds its full and satisfactory explanation
without implying that dogma at all. In the first place, it is
undeniably implied throughout the New Testament that the soul does
not perish with the body. It also appears, in the next place, from
numerous explicit passages, that the New Testament authors, in
common with their countrymen, supposed the souls of the departed
to be gathered and tarrying in what the Church calls the
intermediate state, the obscure under world. In this subterranean
realm they were imagined to be awaiting the advent of the Messiah
to release them. Now, we submit that every requirement of the
doctrine of the resurrection as it is stated or hinted in the New
Testament is fully met by the simple ascension of this
congregation of souls from the vaults of Sheol to the light of the
upper earth, there to be judged, and then some to be sent up to
heaven, some sent back to their prison. For, let it be carefully
observed, there is not one text in the New Testament, as before
stated, which speaks of the resurrection of the "body" or of the
"flesh." The expression is simply the resurrection of "the dead,"
or of "them that slept." If by "the dead" was meant "the bodies,"
why are we not told so? Locke, in the Third Letter of his
controversy with the Bishop of Worcester on this subject, very
pointedly shows the absurdity of a literal interpretation of the
words "All that are in their graves shall hear my voice and shall
come forth." Nothing can come out of the grave except what is in
it. And there are no souls in the grave: they are in the separate
state. And there are no bodies in millions of graves: they long
ago, even to the last grain of dust, entered into the circulations
of the material system. "Coming forth from their graves unto the
resurrection" either denotes the rising of souls from the under
world, or else its meaning is something incredible. At all events,
nothing is said about any resurrection of the body: that is a
matter of arbitrary inference. The angels are not thought to have
material bodies; and Christ declares, "In the resurrection ye
shall neither marry nor be given in marriage, but shall be as the
angels of heaven." It seems clear to us that the author of the
Epistle to the Hebr