erely state it. Secondly, it is certain that the doctrine which
makes soul perish with body finds no countenance in the New
Testament. It is inconsistent with the belief in angelic spirits,
in demoniac possessions, in Christ's descent as a spirit to preach
to the spirits of departed men imprisoned in the under world, and
with other conceptions underlying the Gospels and the Epistles.
But, thirdly, admitting it to be true, then, we affirm, the
legitimate deduction from all the arrayed facts of science and all
the presumptive evidence of appearances is not that a future
resurrection will restore the dead man to life, but that all is
over with him, he has hopelessly perished forever. When the breath
ceases, if nothing survives, if the total man is blotted out, then
we challenge the production of a shadow of proof that he will ever
live again. The seeming injustice and blank awfulness of the fate
may make one turn for relief to the hypothesis of a future
arbitrary miraculous resurrection; but that is an artificial
expedient, without a shadow of justification. Once admit that the
body is all, its dissolution a total death, and you are gone
forever. One intuition of the spirit, seizing the conscious
supports of eternal ideas, casts contempt on "The doubtful
prospects of our painted dust,"

18 Drew on Resurrection, ch. vi. sect. vii. pp. 326-332.

19 Eusebius, Eccl. Hist. lib. vi. cap. xxxvii.

and outvalues all the gross hopes of materialism. Between
nonentity and being yawns the untraversable gulf of infinity. No:
the body of flesh falls, turns to dust and air; the soul,
emancipated, rejoices, and soars heavenwards, and is its own
incorruptible frame, mocking at death, a celestial house, whose
maker and builder is God.

Finally, there remain to be weighed the bearings of the argument
from chemical and physiological science on the resurrection. Here
is the chief stumbling block in the way of the popular doctrine.
The scientific absurdities connected with that doctrine have been
marshalled against it by Celsus, the Platonist philosopher, by
Avicenna, the Arabian physician, and by hundreds more, and have
never been answered, and cannot be answered. As long as man lives,
his bodily substance is incessantly changing; the processes of
secretion and absorption are rapidly going forward. Every few
years he is, as to material, a totally new man. Dying at the age
of seventy, he has had at least ten different bodies. He is one