rtions of flesh and blood in our present state; and the fourth
stage is that of its residence in the grave. All these stages are
undoubtedly necessary to the full perfection of the body: they are
alembics through which its parts must necessarily move to attain
that vigor which shall continue forever."18 To state this figment
is enough. It would be folly to attempt any refutation of a fancy
so obviously a pure contrivance to fortify a preconceived opinion,
a fancy, too, so preposterous, so utterly without countenance,
either from experience, observation, science, reason, or
Scripture. The egg of man's divinity is not laid in the nest of
the grave.

Another motive for believing the resurrection of the body has been
created by the exigencies of a materialistic philosophy. There was
in the early Church an Arabian sect of heretics who were reclaimed
from their errors by the powerful reasonings and eloquence of
Origen.19 Their heresy consisted in maintaining that the soul dies
with the body being indeed only its vital breath and will be
restored with it at the last day. In the course of the Christian
centuries there have arisen occasionally a few defenders of this
opinion. Priestley, as is well known, was an earnest supporter of
it. Let us scan the ground on which he held this belief. In the
first place, he firmly believed that the fact of an eternal life
to come had been supernaturally revealed to men by God through
Christ. Secondly, as a philosopher he was intensely a materialist,
holding with unwavering conviction to the conclusion that life,
mind, or soul, was a concomitant or result of our physical
organism, and wholly incapable of being without it. Death to him
was the total destruction of man for the time. There was therefore
plainly no alternative for him but either to abandon one of his
fundamental convictions as a Christian and a philosopher, or else
to accept the doctrine of a future resurrection of the body into
an immortal life. He chose the latter, and zealously taught always
that death is an annihilation lasting till the day of judgment,
when all are to be summoned from their graves. To this whole
course of thought there are several replies to be made. In the
first place, we submit that the philosophy of materialism is
false: standing in the province of science and reason, it may be
affirmed that the soul is not dependent for its existence on the
body, but will survive it. We will not argue this point, but
m