to the Sadducees
its possibility, by refuting the false notion upon which they
based their denial of it. They said, The resurrection of the body
is impossible, because the principle of life, the consciousness,
has utterly perished, and the body cannot live alone. He replied,
It is possible, because the soul has an existence separate from
the body, and, consequently, may be reunited to it. You admit that
Jehovah said, after they were dead, I am the God of Abraham,
Isaac, and Jacob: but he is the God of the living, and not of the
dead, for all live unto him. You must confess this. The soul,
then, survives the body, and a resurrection is possible. It will
be seen that this implies nothing concerning the nature or
duration of the separate existence, but merely the fact of it.
But, if Christ meant by the resurrection of the dead as we think
he did the introduction of the disembodied and conscious soul into
a state of eternal blessedness, the Sadducees denied its reality
by maintaining that no such thing as a soul existed after bodily
dissolution. He then proved to them its reality in the following
manner. You believe for Moses, to whose authority you implicitly
bow, relates it that God said, "I am the God of Abraham, Isaac,
and Jacob," and this, long after they died. But evidently he
cannot be said to be the God of that which does not exist:
therefore their souls must have been still alive. And if Jehovah
was emphatically their God, their friend, of course he will show
them his loving kindness. They are, then, in a conscious state of
blessedness. The Savior does not imply that God said so much in
substance, nor that Moses intended to teach, or even knew, any
thing like it, but that, by adding to the passage cited a premise
of his own, which his hearers granted to be true, he could deduce
so much from it by a train of new and unanswerable reasoning. His
opponents were compelled to admit the legitimacy of his argument,
and, impressed by its surpassing beauty and force, were silenced,
if not convinced. The credit of this cogent proof of human
immortality, namely, that God's love for man is a pledge and
warrant of his eternal blessedness a proof whose originality and
significance set it far beyond all parallel is due to the dim
gropings of no Hebrew prophet, but to the inspired insight of the
great Founder of Christianity.

The various passages yet unnoticed which purport to have been
uttered by Jehovah or at his command, and