f belief into pieces. And yet the doctrine, as has been
shown in a previous chapter, is unscriptural and of a purely pagan
origin, the New Testament foretelling a resurrection of spirits
from the underworld, not of bodies from the grave. It has no real
analogies in the world, but is a figment of fancy, unsupported by
reason on any authentic physical or moral grounds. It is,
furthermore, a doctrine whose realization is impossible, because
it is a self destroying absurdity.

All that we need for demonstrating its absolute incredibility, is
simply to ultimate its implications, carry it out in thought to
the necessary results which its ignorant originators never
foresaw. The doctrine of a physical resurrection presupposes that
our race was originally intended to be immortal on earth, and that
death was a penalty for sin. Fill out the theory. Adam and Eve,
made male and female, were commanded to multiply and replenish the
earth. Their descendants, doubling every twenty five years, would,
after sixty or seventy generations had accumulated, have covered
the whole earth so thickly that they would be packed in one
immovable mass, the whole planet carpeted with their forms and
paved with their upturned faces. Not an inch of room on the globe
for any harvest to grow or any creature to move; the world,
crowded and imbedded at every point with one continuous multitude
of immortal human beings, would have then rolled around the
zodiac, presenting this chronic and motionless picture, to all
eternity!

If it be maintained that had it not been for sin and its penalty,
the successive generations would neither have died nor have
remained forever on the earth, but would have been translated
bodily to some other world, the absurdity just exposed is escaped
only to introduce another one equally glaring. For in time, the
entire solid contents of the globe would thus be removed, and the
disappearance of our planet unhinge the solar system and produce a
general cataclysm. The solid contents of the earth have been
estimated at about thirty nine trillions of cubic feet. Seventy
five doublings of the primal pair would reach to over seventy
trillions of human beings, each containing more than a solid cubic
foot.

It is perfectly clear, therefore, in any view, that the only way
in which the human race, with their reproductive constitution,
could permanently inhabit the world is by the present system of
successive births and deaths; a system, f