, maintained that the souls of the elect go immediately
to heaven, the souls of the reprobate to hell. Here they tarry in
bliss and bale until the resurrection; then, coming to the earth,
they assume their bodies and return to their respective places.
But if the souls live so long in heaven and hell without their
flesh, why need they ever resume it? The cumbrous machinery of the
scheme seems superfluous and unmeaning. As a still further
specimen of the arbitrary thinking the unscientific and
unphilosophical thinking carried into this department of thought
by most who have cultivated it, reference may be made to Bishop
Burnet's work "De Statu Mortuorum et Resurgentium," which teaches
that at the first resurrection the bodies of the risen will be the
same as the present, but at the second resurrection, after the
millennium, from the rudiments of the present body a new spiritual
body will be developed.

The true idea of man's future destiny appears to be that no
resurrection of the flesh is needed, because the real man never
dies, but lives continuously forever. There are two reasonable
ways of conceiving what the vehicle of his life is when he leaves
his present frame. It may be that within his material system lurks
an exquisite spiritual organization, invisibly pervading it and
constituting its vital power. This ethereal structure is
disengaged at last from its gross envelope, and, unfettered, soars
to the Divine realms of ether and light. This theory of an "inner
body" is elaborately wrought out and sustained in Bonnet's
"Palingenesie Philosophique." Or it may be that there is in each
one a primal germ, a deathless monad, which is the organic
identity of man, root of his inmost stable being, triumphant,
unchanging ruler of his flowing, perishable organism. This spirit
germ, born into the present life, assimilates and holds the
present body around it, out of the materials of this world; born
into the future life, it will assimilate and hold around it a
different body, out of the materials of the future world.25 Thus
there are bodies terrestrial and bodies celestial: the glory of
the terrestrial is one, fitted to this scene of things; the glory
of the celestial is another, fitted to the scene of things
hereafter to dawn. Each spirit will be clothed from the material
furnished by the world in which it resides. Not forever shall we
bear about this slow load of weary clay, this corruptible mass,
heir to a thousand ills. O