vor its influences, and the sooner reduce to our own possession whatever benefits it may have been intended to confer. I rely, with confidence, upon the candor of those who hear me,--to their personal kindness I might appeal with equal confidence, could I believe such an appeal necessary;-I look to their seriousness, and their love of truth, and to their reverence for the teachings of him who spake as never man had spoken before,-to protect me from a voluntary or a careless misconstruction of anything that may be advanced, this evening, which may not accord with the prevalent opinions of the christian world, so long as it shall appear that it does accord with the language of Jesus himself, with the great end of his mission, and with the perfections of that glorious Being by whom he was sent. To me, then, it appears, in opposition to what has been the generally received opinion among the disciples of Jesus, that the object or end of his resurrection from the dead was not that it might be regarded, in all ages, either as an emblem or an evidence of the bodily resurrection at a future day, either of all mankind, or of all, or yet of any part of his disciples. I know that "the resurrection of the body, and the life everlasting," have long been joined together in perhaps the most popular creed that has ever been prescribed to the christian church; and perhaps it is not too much to say, that both these articles have been generally received as of equal authority, if not even of the same import; though to any one who will think of the subject, but for a moment, it must be obvious, that there is not necessarily any connexion between them; but, that the forgiven and sanctified spirit may eternally enjoy the blessed so ciety of the redeemed, while the body in which it once dwelt, may for interminable ages be "commingling slowly with its mother earth;"-as the spirit of the expiring robber might, on the night of his death, be with the Lord in paradise, and if God will have it so, it may be there for ever, though his body may continue to undergo all the countless changes and combinations that it has undergone since it fed the vultures or the fires of the valley of Hin nom. But it is foreign to the design of this discourse to argue against the doctrine of a resurrection of the body. It may be true that the bodies of all who have ever slept in death shall hereafter be raised to life. But what we ad was the object of vance is, that it does not appear that it being, but one who was not strictly and properly God, nor yet strictly and properly man, be convinced that his own body was to be raised because the body of his Lord had been? Because a spirit who was above all angels and before them all, had returned to the clay in which for a season it had dwelt, does it follow that the spirit of one would return who was made "a little lower than the angels ? "—that the body of a human being must be raised from the dead because the body of a superhuman being had been?—that the body of a man will be raised from the dead, because the body of his preexistent creator, the ministerial creator of the worlds has been? Or, again— Would the disciple who believes in the simple humanity of his Lord, in the fact that the body of his Lord had been raised from the dead, considering the peculiar circumstances of that event, see any evidence that his own would be, or that the body of any other man would be, under circumstances so entirely different? Because the body of one man had been raised, who had been endued from on high with wisdom and power such as never before had been imparted to man, does it follow that the body of another will be, who has had nothing to distinguish him from the rest of his kind?—or because one body has been restored to life by divine power, on the morning of the third day after the spirit had left it, can it be rationally, or philosophically, or safely inferred that all other bodies will be, after they have been dead for centuries ?or that, because one body has been revisited by its spiritual occupant before it saw corruption, that all others must be at length by theirs, even after they have, for thousands of years, been saying "to corruption, Thou art my father, and to the worm, Thou art my mother and my sister?" It does seem to me, that by the simple fact of the bo dily resurrection of Jesus, no serious man, accustomed to analogical reasoning, or to experimental philosophy, would be satisfied of the resurrection of his own body, any more than he would be by the resurrection of the body of the Shunamite's child, by the power of God manifesting itself in the prophet Elisha, while he was living ; or by the resurrection of the dead body that returned to life when it touched the bones of the same prophet, while sleeping in his sepulchre. The nature of the person, then, or the circumstances under which the body was raised, or both these considerations taken together, in the case of Jesus, being so entirely different from the same considerations in the case of other men, that it is altogether unreasonable and inconclusive to argue from one to the other, it is very obvious that, without the direct and explicit declarations of the sacred writers, the resurrection of the body of Jesus is not to be regarded as either an evidence or an emblem of the resurrection of the body in the case of any other person; and consequently it could not, in the divine mind, have been the object of the resurrection of our Lord to prove the bodily resurrection, at some future time, either of his disciples in particular, or of the human race in general. Whether there are such express and explicit declarations in the new covenant, declarations either of Christ or his apostles, it does not fall fairly within the purpose of this discourse to inquire. But, lest it be understood that those doctrines or facts are denied, which are only doubted, I think I ought to remark that, by those who feel a sufficient interest in the question to make it the subject of an examination of the sacred oracles, in order that they may learn whether 18* VOL. II. NO. V. these things are so, it will probably be found, that, although the apostle Paul sometimes-in his reasoning with his countrymen, many of whom believed the doctrine of the resurrection of the body that had been laid in the grave-uses language that might lead us to suppose that he believed it also, yet, at other times, as when he distinctly declares that "flesh and blood cannot inherit the kingdom of God," he uses language incompatible with the idea of the resurrection of the body; and, consequently, we must understand that the resurrection, which he preached, had no concern with the flesh and blood that compose the body while we live. And it will probably be found that our Lord himself, although, in speaking either to the Pharisees, who held to the resurrection of the body,-a doctrine which was taught by Zoroaster to the Chaldeans, and had been brought from Chaldea by the Jews, on their return from their captivity—or to the Sadducees, who denied that doctrine, he sometimes appears to accommodate his language to the previously existing opinions of the age,-never, yet, taught the resurrection of the body as a doctrine of his own; but that, on the contrary, when speaking, as he often spoke, of the resurrection of the dead, he meant the survivorship of the spirit the inextinguishable life, the immortality of the soul-the springing-up and going-forth of the man,— the intellectual and moral being,-his escape from his house of clay, and his rising to the righteous retributions of futurity. "But, as touching the resurrection of the dead, have ye not read that which God spake unto you, saying, I am the God of Abraham, and the God of Isaac, and the God of Jacob ? God is not the God of the dead but of the living." Abraham, and Isaac, and Jacob, then, are alive-they have risen up. But the |