(NOTE: The electronic text obtained from The Electronic Bible Society was
not completely corrected. EWTN has corrected all mistakes found.)

Transliteration of Greek words: All phonetical except: w = omega; h serves
three puposes: 1. = Eta; 2. = rough breathing, when appearing intially
before a vowel; 3. = in the aspirated letters theta = th, phi = ph, chi =
ch. Accents are given immediately after their corresponding vowels: acute =
' , grave = `, circumflex = ^. The character ' doubles as an apostrophe,
when necessary.

TERTULLIAN.

ON THE RESURRECTION OF THE FLESH.

THE HERETICS AGAINST WHOM THIS WORK IS DIRECTED, WERE THE SAME WHO
MAINTAINED THAT THE DEMIURGE, OR THE GOD WHO CREATED THIS WORLD AND GAVE
THE MOSAIC DISPENSATION, WAS OPPOSED TO THE SUPREME GOD. HENCE THEY
ATTACHED AN IDEA OF INHERENT CORRUPTION AND WORTHLESSNESS TO ALL HIS WORKS-
-AMONGST THE REST, TO THE FLESH OR BODY OF MAN; AFFIRMING THAT IT COULD NOT
RISE AGAIN, AND THAT THE SOUL ALONE WAS CAPABLE OF INHERITING
IMMORTALITY.(1)

[TRANSLATED BY DR. HOLMES.]

CHAP. I.--THE DOCTRINE OF THE RESURRECTION OF THE BODY BROUGHT TO LIGHT BY
THE GOSPEL. THE FAINTEST' GLIMPSES OF SOMETHING LIKE IT OCCASIONALLY MET
WITH IN HEATHENISM. INCONSISTENCIES OF PAGAN TEACHING.

   The resurrection of the dead is the Christian's trust.(2) By it we are
believers. To the belief of this (article of the faith) truth compels us--
that truth which God reveals, but the crowd derides, which supposes that
nothing will survive after death. And yet they do honour(3) to their dead,
and that too in the most expensive way according to their bequest, and with
the daintiest banquets which the seasons can produce,(4) on the presumption
that those whom they declare to be incapable of all perception still retain
an appetite.(5) But (let the crowd deride): I on my side must deride it
still more, especially when it burns up its dead with harshest inhumanity,
only to pamper them immediately afterwards with gluttonous satiety, using
the selfsame fires to honour them and to insult them. What piety is that
which mocks its  victims with cruelty? Is it sacrifice or insult (which the
crowd offers), when it burns its offerings to those it has already
burnt?(6) But the wise, too, join with the vulgar crowd in their opinion
sometimes. There is nothing after death, according to the school of
Epicurus. After death all things come to an end, even death itself, says
Seneca to like effect. It is satisfactory, however, that the no less
important philosophy of Pythagoras and Empedocles, and the Plantonists,
take the contrary view, and declare the soul to be immortal; affirming,
moreover, in a way which most nearly approaches (to our own doctrine)? that
the soul actually returns into bodies, although not the same bodies, and
not even those of human beings invariably: thus Euphorbus is supposed to
have passed into Phythagoras, and Homer into a peacock. They firmly
pronounced the soul's renewal(8) to be in a body,(9) (deeming it) more
tolerable to change the quality (of the corporeal state)than to deny it
wholly: they at least knocked at the door of truth, although they entered
not. Thus the world, with all its errors, does not ignore the resurrection
of the dead.

CHAP. II.--THE JEWISH SADDUCEES A LINK BETWEEN THE PAGAN PHILOSOPHERS AND
THE HERETICS ON THIS DOCTRINE. ITS FUNDAMENTAL IMPORTANCE ASSERTED. THE
SOUL FARES BETTER THAN THE BODY, IN HERETICAL ESTIMATION, AS TO ITS FUTURE
STATE. ITS EXTINCTION, HOWEVER, WAS HELD BY ONE LUCAN.

   Since there is even within the confines of God's Church(1)  a sect
which is more nearly allied to the Epicureans than to the prophets, an
opportunity is afforded us of knowing(2) what estimate Christ forms of the
(said sect, even the) Sadducees. For to Christ was it reserved to lay bare
everything which before was concealed: to impart certainty to doubtful
points; to accomplish those of which men had had but a foretaste; to give
present reality to the objects of prophecy; and to furnish not only by
Himself, but actually in Himself, certain proofs of the resurrection of the
dead. It is, however, against other Sadducees that we have now to prepare
ourselves, but still partakers of their doctrine. For instance, they allow
a moiety of the resurrection; that is, simply of the soul, despising the
flesh, just as they also do the Lord of the flesh Himself. No other
persons, indeed, refuse to concede to the substance of the body its
recovery from death,(3) heretical inventors of a second deity. Driven then,
as they are, to give a different dispensation to Christ, so that He may not
be accounted as belonging to the Creator, they have achieved their first
error in the article of  His very flesh; contending with Marcion and
Basilides that it possessed no reality; or else holding, after the
heretical tenets of Valentinus, and according to Apelles, that it had
qualities peculiar to itself. And so it follows that they shut out from all
recovery from death that substance of which they say that Christ did not
partake, confidently assuming that it furnishes the strongest presumption
against the resurrection, since the flesh is already risen in Christ. Hence
it is that we have ourselves previously issued our volume On the flesh of
Christ; in which we both furnish proofs of its reality,(4) in opposition to
the idea of its being a vain phantom; and claim for it a human nature
without any peculiarity of condition--such a nature as has marked out
Christ to be both man and the Son of man. For when we prove Him to be
invested with the flesh and in a bodily condition, we at the same time
refute heresy, by establishing the rule that no other being than the
Creator must be believed to be God, since we show that Christ, in whom God
is plainly discerned, is precisely of such a nature as the Creator promised
that He should be. Being thus refuted touching God as the Creator, and
Christ as the Redeemer of the flesh, they will at once be defeated also on
the resurrection of the flesh. No procedure, indeed, can be more
reasonable. And we affirm that controversy with heretics should in most
cases be conducted in this way. For due method requires that conclusions
should always be drawn from the most important premises, in order that
there be a prior agreement on the essential point, by means of which the
particular question under review may be said to have been determined. Hence
it is that the heretics, from their conscious weakness, never conduct
discussion in an orderly manner. They are well aware how hard is their task
in insinuating the existence of a second god, to the disparagement of the
Creator of the world, who is known to all men naturally by the testimony of
His works, who is before all others in the mysteries(5)of His being, and is
especially manifested in the prophets;(6) then, under the pretence of
considering a more urgent inquiry, namely man's own salvation--a question
which transcends all others in its importance--they begin with doubts about
the resurrection; for there is greater difficulty in believing the
resurrection of the flesh than the oneness of the Deity. In this way, after
they have deprived the discussion of the advantages of its logical order,
and have embarrassed it with doubtful insinuations(7) in disparagement of
the flesh, they gradually draw their argument to the reception of a second
god after destroying and changing the very ground of our hopes. For when
once a man Is fallen or removed from the sure hope which he had placed in
the Creator, he is easily led away to the object of a different hope, whom
however of his own accord he can hardly help suspecting. Now it is by a
discrepancy in the promises that a difference of gods is insinuated. How
many do we thus see drawn into the net vanquished on the resurrection of
the flesh, before they could carry their point on the oneness of the Deity
!In respect, then, of the heretics, we have shown with what weapons we
ought to meet them. And indeed we have already encountered them in
treatises severally directed against them: on the one only God and His
Christ, in our work against Marcion,(8) on the Lord's flesh, in our book
against the four heresies,(1) for the special purpose of opening the way to
the present inquiry: so that we have now only to discuss the resurrection
of the flesh, (treating it) just as if it were uncertain in regard to
ourselves also, that is, in the system of the Creator.(2) Because many
persons are uneducated; still more are of faltering faith, and several are
weak-minded: these will have to be instructed, directed, strengthened,
inasmuch as the very oneness of the Godhead will be defended along with the
maintenance of our doctrine.(3) For if the resurrection of the flesh be
denied, that prime article of the faith is shaken; if it be asserted, that
is established. There is no need, I suppose, to treat of the soul's safety;
for nearly all the heretics, in whatever way they conceive of it, certainly
refrain from denying that. We may ignore a certain Lucan,(4) who does not
spare even this part of our nature, which he follows Aristotle in reducing
to dissolution, and substitutes some other thing in lieu of it. Some third
nature it is which, according to him, is to rise again, neither soul nor
flesh; in other words, not man, but a bear perhaps--for instance, Lucan
himself.(5) Even he(6) has received from us a copious notice in our book on
the entire condition of the soul,(7) the especial immortality of which we
there maintain, whilst we also both acknowledge the dissolution of the
flesh alone, and emphatically assert its restitution. Into the body of that
work were collected whatever points we elsewhere had to reserve from the
pressure of incidental causes. For as it is my custom to touch some
questions but lightly on their first occurrence, so I am obliged also to
postpone the consideration of them, until the outline can be filled in with
complete detail, and the deferred points be taken up on their own merits.

CHAP. III.--SOME TRUTHS HELD E. EN BY THE HEATHEN, THEY WERE, HOWEVER, MORE
OFTEN WRONG BOTH IN RELIGIOUS OPINIONS AND IN MORAL PRACTICE. THE HEATHEN
NOT TO BE FOLLOWED IN THEIR IGNORANCE OF THE CHRISTIAN MYSTERY. THE
HERETICS PERVERSELY PRONE TO FOLLOW THEM.

   One may no doubt be wise in the things of God, even from one's natural
powers, but only in witness to the truth, not in maintenance of error;
(only) when one acts in accordance with, not in opposition to, the divine
dispensation. For some things are known even by nature: the immortality of
the soul, for instance, is held by many; the knowledge of our God is
possessed by all. I may use, therefore, the opinion of a Plato, when he
declares, "Every soul is immortal." I may use also the conscience of a
nation, when it attests the God of gods. I may, in like manner, use all the
other intelligences of our common nature, when they pronounce God to be a
judge. "God sees," (say they)(say they); and, "I commend you to God."(8)
But when they say, What has undergone death is dead," and, "Enjoy life
whilst you live," and, "After death all things come to an end, even death
itself;" then I must remember both that "the heart of man is ashes,"(9)
according to the estimate of God, and that the very "Wisdom of the world is
foolishness," (as the inspired word) pronounces it to be.(10) Then, if even
the heretic seek refuge in the depraved thoughts of the vulgar, or the
imaginations of the world, I must say to him: Part company with the
heathen, O heretic !for although you are all agreed in imagining a God, yet
while you do so in the name of Christ, so long as you deem yourself a
Christian, you are a different man from a heathen: give him back his own
views of things, since he does not himself learn from yours. Why lean upon
a blind guide, if you have eyes of your own? Why be clothed by one who is
naked, if you have put on Christ? Why use the shield of another, when the
apostle gives you armour of your own? It would be better for him to learn
from you to acknowledge the resurrection of the flesh, than for you from
him to deny it; because if Christians must needs deny it, it would be
sufficient if they did so from their own knowledge, without any instruction
from the ignorant multitude. He, therefore, will not be a Christian who
shall deny this doctrine which is confessed by Christians; denying it,
moreover, on grounds which are adopted by a man who is not a Christian.
Take away, indeed, from the heretics the wisdom which they share with the
heathen, and let them support their inquiries from the Scriptures alone:
they will then be unable to keep their ground. For that which commends
men's common sense is its very simplicity, and its participation in the
same feelings, and its community of opinions; and it is deemed to be all
the more trustworthy, inasmuch as its definitive statements are naked and
open, and known to all. Divine reason, on the contrary, lies in the very
pith and marrow of things, not on the surface, and very often is at
variance with appearances.

CHAP. IV.--HEATHENS AND HERETICS ALIKE IN THEIR VILIFICATION OF THE FLESH
AND ITS FUNCTIONS, THE ORDINARY CAVILS AGAINST THE FINAL RESTITUTION OF SO
WEAK AND IGNOBLE A SUBSTANCE.

   Hence it is that heretics start at once from this point,(1) from which
they sketch the first draft of their dogmas, and afterwards add the
details, being well aware how easily men's minds are caught by its
influence, (and actuated) by that community of human sentiment which is so
favourable to their designs. Is there anything else that you can hear of
from the heretic, as also from the heathen, earlier in time or greater in
extent? Is not (their burden) from the beginning and everywhere an
invective against the flesh--against its origin, against its substance,
against the casualties and the invariable end which await it; unclean from
its first formation of the dregs of the ground, uncleaner afterwards from
the mire of its own seminal transmission; worthless,(2) weak, covered with
guilt, laden with misery, full of trouble; and after all this record of its
degradation, dropping into its original earth and the appellation of a
corpse, and destined to dwindle away even from this(3) loathsome name into
none henceforth at all--into the very death of all designation? Now you are
a shrewd man, no doubt: will you then persuade yourself, that after this
flesh has been withdrawn from sight, and touch, and memory, it can never be
rehabilitated from corruption to integrity, from a shattered to a solid
State, from an empty to a full condition, from nothing at all to something-
-the devouring fires, and the waters of the sea, and the maws of beasts,
and the crops of birds and the stomachs of fishes, and time's own great
paunch(4) itself of course yielding it all up again? Shall the same flesh
which has fallen to decay be so expected to recover, as that the lame, and
the one-eyed, and the blind, and the leper, and the palsied shall come back
again, although there can be no pleasure in returning to their old
condition? Or shall they be whole, and so have to fear exposure to such
sufferings? What, in that case, (must we say) of the consequences of
resuming the flesh? Will it again be subject to all its present wants,
especially meats and drinks? Shall we have with our lungs to float (in air
or water),(5) and suffer pain in our bowels, and with organs of shame to
feel no shame, and with all our limbs to toil and labour? Must there again
be ulcers, and wounds, and fever, and gout, and once more the wishing to
die? Of course these will be the longings incident on the recovery of the
flesh, only the repetition of desires to escape out of it. Well now, we
have (stated) all this in very subdued and delicate phrases, as suited to
the character of our style; but (would you know) how great a licence of
unseemly language these men actually use, you must test them in their
conferences, whether they be heathens or heretics.

CHAP. V.--SOME CONSIDERATIONS IN REPLY EULOGISTIC OF THE FLESH. IT WAS
CREATED BY GOD. THE BODY OF MAN WAS, IN FACT, PREVIOUS TO HIS SOUL.

   Inasmuch as all uneducated men, therefore, still form their opinions
after these common-sense views, and as the falterers and the weak-minded
have a renewal of their perplexities occasioned by the selfsame views; and
as the first battering-ram which is directed against ourselves is that
which shatters the condition of the flesh, we must on our side necessarily
so manage our defences, as to guard, first of all, the condition of the
flesh, their disparagement of it being repulsed by our own eulogy. The
heretics, therefore, challenged us to use our rhetoric no less than our
philosophy. Respecting, then, this frail and poor, worthless body, which
they do not indeed hesitate to call evil, even if it had been the work of
angels, as Menander and Marcus are pleased to think, or the formation of
some fiery being, an angel, as Apelles teaches, it would be quite enough
for securing respect for the body, that it had the support and protection
of even a secondary deity. The angels, we know, rank next to God. Now,
whatever be the supreme God of each heretic, I should  not unfairly derive
the dignity of the flesh likewise from Him to whom was present the will for
its production. For, of course, if He had not willed its production, He
would have prohibited it, when He knew it was in progress. It follows,
then, that even on their principle the flesh is equally the work of God.
There is no work but belongs to Him who has permitted it to exist. It is
indeed a happy circumstance, that most of their doctrines, including even
the harshest, accord to our God the entire formation of man. How mighty He
is, you know full well who believe that He is the only God. Let, then, the
flesh begin to give you pleasure, since the Creator thereof is so great.
But, you say, even the world is the work of God, and yet "the fashion of
this world passeth away,"(1) as the apostle himself testifies; nor must it
be predetermined that the world will be restored, simply because it is the
work of God. And surely if the universe, after its ruin, is not to be
formed again, why should a portion of it be? You are right, if a portion is
on an equality with the whole. But we maintain that there is a difference.
In the first place, because all things were made by the Word of God, and
without Him was nothing made.(2) Now the flesh, too, had its existence from
the Word of God, because of the principle,(3) that here should be nothing
without that Word. "Let us make man,"(4) said He, before He created him,
and added, "with our hand," for the sake of his pre-eminence, that so he
might not be compared with the rest of creation.(5) And "God," says (the
Scripture), "formed man."(6) There is undoubtedly a great difference in the
procedure, springing of course from the nature of the case. For the
creatures which were made were inferior to him for whom they were made; and
they were made for man, to whom they were afterwards made subject by God.
Rightly, therefore, had the creatures which were thus intended for
subjection, come forth into being at the bidding and command and sole power
of the divine voice; whilst man, on the contrary, destined to be their
lord, was formed by God Himself, to the intent that he might be able to
exercise his mastery, being created by the Master the Lord Himself.
Remember, too, that man is properly called flesh, which had a prior
occupation in man's designation: "And God formed man the clay of the
ground."(7) He now became man, who was hitherto clay. "And He breathed upon
his face the breath of life, and man (that is, the clay) became a living
soul; and God placed the man whom He had formed in the garden."(8) So that
man was clay at first, and only afterwards man entire. I wish to impress
this on your attention, with a view to your knowing, that whatever God has
at all posposed or promised to man, is due not to the soul simply, but to
the flesh also; if not arising out of any community in their origin, yet at
all events by the privilege possessed by the latter in its name.(9)

CHAP. VI.--NOT THE LOWLINESS OF THE MATERIAL, BUT THE DIGNITY AND SKILL OF
THE MAKER, MUST BE REMEMBERED, IN GAUGING THE EXCELLENCE OF TIlE FLESH.
CHRIST PARTOOK OF OUR FLESH.

   Let me therefore pursue the subject before me--if I can but succeed in
vindicating for the flesh as much as was conferred on it by Him who made
it, glorying as it even then was, because that poor paltry material, clay,
found its way into the hands of God, whatever these were, happy enough at
merely being touched by them. But why this glorying?  Was it that,(10)
without any further labour, the clay had instantly assumed its form at the
touch of God? The truth is,(11) a great matter was in progress, out of
which the creature under consideration(12) was being fashioned. So often
then does it receive honour, as often as it experiences the hands of God,
when it is touched by them, and pulled, and drawn out, and moulded into
shape. Imagine God wholly employed and absorbed in it--in His hand, His
eye, His labour, His purpose, His wisdom, His providence, and above all, in
His love, which was dictating the lineaments (of this creature). For,
whatever was the form and expression which was then given to the clay (by
the Creator) Christ was in His thoughts as one day to become man, because
the Word, too, was to be both clay and flesh, even as the earth was then.
For so did the Father previously say to the Son: "Let us make man in our
own image, after our likeness."(13) And God made man, that is to say,  the
creature which He moulded and fashioned; after the image of God (in other
words, of Christ) did He make him And the Word was God also, who being(14)
in the image of God, "thought it not robbery to be equal to God."(15) Thus,
that clay which was even then putting on the image of Christ, who was to
come in the flesh, was not only the work, but also the pledge and surety,
of God. To what purpose is it to bandy about the name earth, as that of a
sordid and grovelling element, with the view of tarnishing the origin of
the flesh, when, even if any other material had been available for forming
man, it would be requisite that the dignity of the Maker should be taken
into consideration, who even by His selection of His material deemed it,
and by His management made it, worthy? The hand of Phidias forms the
Olympian Jupiter of ivory; worship is given to the statue, and it is no
longer regarded as a god farmed out of a most silly animal, but as the
world's supreme Deity-not because of the bulk of the elephant, but on
account of the renown of Phidias. Could not therefore the living God, the
true God, purge away by His own operation whatever vileness might have
accrued to His material, and heal it of all infirmity? Or must this remain
to shaw how much more nobly man could fabricate a god, than God could form
a man? Now, although the clay is offensive (for its poorness), it is now
something else. What I possess is flesh, not earth, even although of the
flesh it is said: "Dust thou art, and unto dust shall thou return,"(1) In
these words there is the mention of the origin, not a recalling of the
substance. The privilege has been granted to the flesh to be nobler than
its origin, and to have happiness aggrandized by the change wrought in it.
Now, even gold is earth, because of the earth; but it remains earth no
longer after it becomes gold, but is a far different substance, more
splendid and more noble, though coming from a source which is comparatively
faded and obscure. In like manner, it was quite allowable for God that He
should dear the gold of our flesh from all the taints, as you deem them, of
its native clay, by purging the original substance of its dross.

CHAP. VII.--THE EARTHY MATERIAL OF WHICH FLESH IS CREATED WONDERFULLY
IMPROVED BY GOD'S MANIPULATION. BY THE ADDITION OF THE SOUL IN MAN'S
CONSTITUTION IT BECAME THE CHIEF WORK IN THE CREATION.

   But perhaps the dignity of the flesh may seem to be diminished, because
it has not been actually manipulated by the hand of God, as the clay was at
first. Now, when God handled the clay for the express purpose of the growth
of flesh out of it afterwards, it was for the flesh that He took all the
trouble. But I want you, moreover, to know at what time and in what manner
the flesh flourished into beauty out of its clay. For it cannot be, as some
will have it, that those "coats of skins"(2) which Adam and Eve put on when
they were stripped of paradise, were really themselves the forming of the
flesh out of clay,(3) because long before that Adam had already recognised
the flesh which was in the woman as the propagation of his own substance
("This is now bone of my bone, and flesh of my flesh "4), and the very
taking of the woman out of the man was supplemented with flesh; but it
ought, I should suppose, to have been made good with clay, if Adam was
still clay. The clay, therefore, was obliterated and absorbed into flesh.
When did this happen?  At the time that man became a living soul by the
inbreathing of God--by the breath indeed which was capable of hardening
clay into another substance, as into some earthenware, so now into flesh.
In the same way the potter, too, has it in his power, by tempering the
blast of his fire, to modify his clayey material into a stiffer one, and to
mould one form after another more beautiful than the original substance,
and now possessing both a kind and name of its own. For although the
Scripture says, "Shall the clay say to the potter?"(5) that is, Shall man
contend with God? although the apostle speaks of "ear, then vessels "(6) he
refers to man, who was originally clay. And the vessel is the flesh,
because this was made of clay by the breath of the divine afflatus; and it
was afterwards clothed with "the coats of skins," that is, with the
cutaneous covering which was placed over it. So truly is this the fact,
that if you withdraw the skin, you lay bare the flesh. Thus, that which
becomes a spoil when stripped off, was a vestment as long as it remained
laid over. Hence the apostle, when he call circumcision "' a putting off
(or spoliation) of the flesh,"(7) affirmed the skin to be a coat or tunic.
Now this being the case, you have both the clay made glorious by the hand
of God, and the flesh more glorious still by His breathing upon it, by
virtue of which the flesh not only laid aside its clayey rudiments, but
also took on itself the ornaments of the soul. You surely are not more
careful than God, that you indeed should refuse to mount the gems of
Scythia and India and the pearls of the Red Sea in lead, or brass, or iron,
or even in silver, but should set them in the most precious and most
highly-wrought gold; or, again, that you should provide for your finest
wines and most costly unguents the most fitting vessels; or, on the same
principle, should find for your swords of finished temper scabbards of
equal worth; whilst God must consign to some vilest sheath the shadow of
His own soul, the breath of His own Spirit, the operation of His own mouth,
and by so ignominious a consignment secure, of course, its condemnation.
Well, then, has He placed, or rather inserted and commingled, it with the
flesh? Yes; and so intimate is the union, that it may be deemed to be
uncertain whether the flesh bears about the soul, or the soul the flesh; or
whether the flesh acts as apparitor  to the soul, or the soul to the flesh.
It is, However, more credible that the soul has service rendered to it,(1)
and has the mastery,(2) as being more proximate in character to God.(3)
This circumstance even redounds to the glory of the flesh, inasmuch as it
both contains an essence nearest to God's, and renders itself a partake of
(the soul's) actual sovereignty. For what enjoyment of nature is there,
what produce of the world, what relish of the  elements, which is not
imparted to the soul by means of the body? How can it be otherwise? Is it
not by its means that the saul is supported by the entire apparatus of the
senses--the sight, the hearing, the taste, the smell, the touch? Is it not
by its means that it has a sprinkling of the divine power, there being
nothing which it does not effect by its faculty of speech, even when it is
only tacitly indicated? And speech is the result of a fleshly organ. The
arts come through the flesh; through the flesh also effect is given to the
mind's pursuits and powers; all work, too, and business and offices of
life, are accomplished by the flesh; and so utterly, are the living acts of
the soul the work of the flesh, that for the soul to cease to do living
acts, would be nothing else than sundering itself from the flesh. So also
the very act of dying is a function of the flesh, even as the process of
life is. Now, if all things are subject to the soul through the flesh,
their subjection is equally due to the flesh. That which is the means and
agent of your enjoyment, must needs be also the partaker and sharer of your
enjoyment. So that the flesh, which is accounted the minister and servant
of the soul, turns out to be also its associate and co-heir. And if all
this in temporal things, why not also in things eternal?

CHAP. VIII.--CHRISTIANITY, BY ITS PROVISION FOR THE FLESH, HAS PUT ON IT
THE GREATEST HONOUR. THE PRIVILEGES OF OUR RELIGION IN CLOSEST CONNECTION
WITH OUR FLESH. WHICH ALSO BEARS A LARGE SHARE IN THE DUTIES AND SACRIFICES
OF RELIGION.

   Now such remarks have I wished to advance in defence of the flesh, from
a general view of the condition of our human nature. Let us now consider
its special relation to Christianity, and see how vast a privilege before
God has been conferred on this poor and worthless substance. It would
suffice to say, indeed, that there is not a soul that can at all procure
salvation, except it believe whilst it is in the flesh, so true is it that
the flesh is the very condition on which salvation hinges.  And since the
soul is, in consequence of its salvation, chosen to the service of God, it
is the flesh which actually renders it capable of such service. The flesh,
indeed, is washed, in order that the soul may be cleansed; the flesh is
anointed, that the soul may be consecrated; the flesh is signed (with the
cross), that the soul too may be fortified; the flesh is shadowed with the
imposition of hands, that the soul also maybe illuminated by the Spirit;
the flesh feeds on the body and blood of Christ, that the soul likewise may
fatten on its God. They cannot then be separated in their recompense, when
they are united in their service. Those sacrifices, moreover, which are
acceptable to God--I mean conflicts of the soul, fastings, and abstinences,
and the humiliations which are annexed to such duty--it is the flesh which
performs again and again(4) to its own especial suffering. Virginity,
likewise, and widowhood, and the modest restraint in secret on the
marriage-bed, and the one only adoption(5) of it, are fragrant offerings to
God paid out of the good services of the flesh. Come, tell me what is your
opinion of the flesh, when it has to contend for the name of Christ,
dragged out to public view, and exposed to the hatred of all men; when it
pines in prisons under the cruellest privation of light, in banishment from
the world, amidst squalor, filth, and noisome food, without freedom even in
sleep, for it is bound on its very pallet and mangled in its bed of straw;
when at length before the public view it is racked by every kind of torture
that can be devised, and when finally it is spent beneath its agonies,
struggling to render its last turn for Christ by dying for Him--upon His
own cross many times, not to say by still more atrocious devices of
torment. Most blessed, truly, and most glorious, must be the flesh which
can repay its Master Christ so vast a debt, and so completely, that the
only obligation remaining due to Him is, that it should cease by death  to
owe Him more--all the more bound even then in gratitude, because (for ever)
set free.

CHAP. IX.--GOD'S LOVE FOR THE FLESH OF MAN, AS DEVELOPED IN THE GRACE OF
CHRIST TOWARDS IT. THE FLESH THE BEST MEANS OF DISPLAYING THE BOUNTY AND
POWER OF GOD.

   To recapitulate, then: Shall that very flesh, which the Divine Creator
formed with His own hands in the image of God; which He animated with His
own afflatus, after the likeness of His own vital vigour; which He set over
all the works of His hand, to dwell amongst, to enjoy, and to rule them;
which He clothed with His sacraments and His instructions; whose purity He
loves, whose mortifications He approves; whose sufferings for Himself He
deems precious;--(shall that flesh, I say), so often brought near to God,
not rise again? God forbid, God forbid, (I repeat), that He should abandon
to everlasting destruction the labour of His own hands, the care of His own
thoughts, the receptacle of His own Spirit,(1) the queen of His creation,
the inheritor of His own liberality, the priestess of His religion, the
champion of His testimony, the sister of His Christ! We know by experience
the goodness of God; from His Christ we learn that He is the only God, and
the very good. Now, as He requires from us love to our neighbour after love
to Himself,(2) so He will Himself do that which He has commanded. He will
love the flesh which is, so very closely and in so many ways, His
neighbour--(He will love it), although infirm, since His strength is made
perfect in weakness;(3) although disordered, since "they that are whole
need not the physician, but they that are sick;"(4) although not
honourable, since "we bestow more abundant honour upon the less honourable
members;"(5)  although ruined, since He says, "I am come to save that which
was lost;"(6) although sinful, since He says, "I desire rather the
salvation of the sinner than his death;"(7) although condemned, for says
He, "I shall wound, and also heal. "(8) Why reproach the flesh with those
conditions  which wait for God, which hope in God, which receive honour
from God, which He succours? I venture to declare, that if such casualties
as these had never befallen the flesh, the bounty, the grace, the mercy,
(and indeed) all the beneficent power of God, would have had no opportunity
to work.(9)

CHAP. X.--HOLY SCRIPTURE MAGNIFIES THE FLESH, AS TO ITS NATURE AND ITS
PROSPECTS.

   You hold to the scriptures in which the flesh is disparaged; receive
also those in which it is ennobled. You read whatever passage abases it;
direct your eyes also to that which elevates it. "All flesh is grass."(10)
Well, but Isaiah was not content to say only this; but he also declared,
"All flesh shall see the salvation of God. "(11) They notice God when He
says in Genesis, "My Spirit shall not remain among these men, because they
are flesh; "(12) but then He is also heard saying by Joel, "I will pour I
out of my Spirit upon all flesh."(13) Even the  apostle ought not to be
known for any one statement in which he is wont to reproach the flesh. For
although he says that "in his flesh dwelleth no good thing;"(14) although
he affirms that "they who are in the flesh cannot please God,"15 because
"the flesh lusteth against the Spirit;"(16) yet in these and similar
assertions which he makes, it is not the substance of the flesh, but its
actions, which are censured. Moreover, we shall elsewhere(17) take occasion
to remark, that no reproaches can fairly be cast upon the flesh, without
tending also to the castigation of the soul, which compels the flesh to do
its bidding. However, let me meanwhile add that in the same passage Paul
"carries about in his body the marks of the Lord Jesus;"(18) he also
forbids our body to be  profaned, as being "the temple of God;"(19) he
makes our bodies "the members of Christ;"(20) and he exhorts us to exalt
and "glorify God in our body."(21) If, therefore, the humiliations of the
flesh thrust off its resurrection, why shall not its high prerogatives
rather avail to bring it about?--since it better suits the character of God
to restore to salvation what for a while He rejected, than to surrender to
perdition what He once approved.

CHAP. XI.--THE POWER OF GOD FULLY COMPETENT TO EFFECT THE RESURRECTION OF
THE FLESH.

   Thus far touching my eulogy of the flesh, in opposition to its enemies,
who are, notwithstanding, its greatest friends also; for there is nobody
who lives so much in accordance with the flesh as they who deny the
resurrection of the flesh, inasmuch as they despise all its discipline,
while they disbelieve its punishment. It is a shrewd saying which the
Paraclete utters concerning these persons by the mouth of the prophetess
Prisca: "They are carnal,(22) and yet they hate the flesh." Since, then,
the flesh has the best guarantee that could possibly accrue for securing to
it the recompense of salvation, ought we not also to consider well the
power, and might, and competency(23) of God Himself, whether He be so great
as to be able to rebuild and restore the edifice of the flesh, which had
become dilapidated and blocked up,(1) and in every possible way
dislocated?--whether He has promulgated in the public domains of nature any
analogies to convince us of His power in this respect, lest any should
happen to be still thirsting for the knowledge of God, when faith in Him
must rest on no other basis than the belief that He is able to do all
things? You have, no doubt amongst your philosophers men who maintain that
this world is without a beginning or a maker. It is, however, much more
true, that nearly all the heresies allow it an origin and a maker, and
ascribe its creation to our God. Firmly believe, therefore, that He
produced it wholly out of nothing, and then you have found the knowledge of
God, by believing that He possesses such mighty power. But some persons are
too weak to believe all this at first, owing to their views about Matter.
They will rather have it, after the philosophers, that the universe was in
the beginning made by God out of underlying matter. Now, even if this
opinion could be held in truth, since He must be acknowledged to have
produced in His reformation of matter far different substances and far
different forms from those which Matter itself possessed, I should
maintain, with no less persistence, that He produced these things out of
nothing, since they absolutely had no existence at all previous to His
production of them. Now, where is the difference between a thing's being
produced out of nothing or out of something, if so be that what existed not
comes into being, when even to have had no existence is tantamount to
having been nothing? The contrary is likewise true; for having once existed
amounts to having been something. If, however, there is a difference, both
alternatives support my position. For if God produced all things whatever
out of nothing, He will be able to draw forth from nothing even the flesh
which had fallen into nothing; or if He moulded other things out of matter,
He will be able to call forth the flesh too from somewhere else, into
whatever abyss it may have been engulphed. And surely He is most competent
to re-create who created, inasmuch as it is a far greater work to have
produced than to have reproduced, to have imparted a beginning, than to
have maintained a continuance. On this principle, you may be quite sure
that the restoration of the flesh is easier than its first formation.

CHAP. XII.--SOME ANALOGIES IN NATURE WHICH CORROBORATE THE RESURRECTION OF
THE FLESH.

   Consider now those very analogies of the divine power (to which we have
just alluded). Day dies into night, and is buried everywhere in darkness.
The glory of the world is obscured in the shadow of death; its entire
substance is tarnished with blackness; all things become sordid, silent,
stupid; everywhere business ceases, and occupations rest. And so over the
loss of the light there is mourning. But yet it again revives, with its own
beauty, its own dowry, is own sun, the same as ever, whole and entire, over
all the world, slaying its own death, night--opening its own sepulchre, the
darkness--coming forth the heir to itself, until the night also revives--
it, too, accompanied with a retinue of its own. For the stellar rays are
rekindled, which had been quenched in the morning glow; the distant groups
of the constellations are again brought back to view, which the day's
temporary interval had removed out of sight. Readorned also are the mirrors
of the moon, which her monthly course had worn away. Winters and summers
return, as do the spring-tide and autumn, with their resources, their
routines, their fruits. Forasmuch as earth receives its instruction from
heaven to clothe the trees which had been stripped, to colour the flowers
afresh, to spread the grass again, to reproduce the seed which had been
consumed, and not to reproduce them until consumed. Wondrous method! from a
defrauder to be a preserver, in order to restore, it takes away; in order
to guard, it destroys; that it may make whole, it injures; and that it may
enlarge, it first lessens. (This process) indeed, renders back to us richer
and fuller blessings than it deprived us of--by a destruction which is
profit, by an injury which is advantage, and by a loss which is gain. In a
word, I would say, all creation is instinct with renewal. Whatever you may
chance upon, has already existed; whatever you have lost, returns again
without fail. All things return to their former state, after having gone
out of sight; all things begin after they have ended; they come to an end
for the very purpose of coming into existence again. Nothing perishes but
with a view to salvation. The whole, therefore, of this revolving order of
things bears witness to the resurrection of the dead. In His works did God
write it, before He wrote it in the Scriptures; He proclaimed it in His
mighty deeds earlier than in His inspired words. He first sent Nature to
you as a teacher, meaning to send Prophecy also as a supplemental
instructor, that, being Nature's disciple, you may more easily believe
Prophecy, and without hesitation accept (its testimony) when you come to
hear what you have seen already on every side; nor doubt that God, whom you
have discovered to be the restorer of all things, is likewise the reviver
of the flesh. And surely, as all things rise again for man, for whose use
they have been provided-but not for man except for his flesh also--how
happens it that (the flesh) itself can perish utterly, because of which and
for the service of which nothing comes to nought?

CHAP. XIII.--FROM OUR AUTHOR'S VIEW OF A VERSE IN THE NINETY-SECOND PSALM,
THE PHOENIX IS MADE A SYMBOL OF THE RESURRECTION OF OUR BODIES.

   If, however, all nature but faintly figures our resurrection; if
creation affords no sign precisely like it, inasmuch as its several
phenomena can hardly be said to die so much as to come to an end, nor again
be deemed to be reanimated, but only re-formed; then take a most complete
and unassailable, symbol of our hope, for it shall be an animated being,
and subject alike to life and death. I refer to the bird which is peculiar
to the East, famous for its singularity, marvelous from its posthumous
life, which renews its life in a voluntary death; its dying day is its
birthday, for on it it departs and returns; once more a phoenix where just
now there was none; once more himself, but just now out of existence;
another, yet the same. What can be more express and more significant for
our subject; or to what other thing can such a phenomenon bear witness? God
even in His own Scripture says: "The righteous shall flourish like the
phoenix;"(1) that is, shall flourish or revive, from death, from the grave-
-to teach you to believe that a bodily substance may be recovered even from
the fire. Our Lord has declared that we are "better than many sparrows:"(2)
well, if not better than many a phoenix too, it were no great thing. But
must men die once for all, while birds in Arabia are sure of a
resurrection?

CHAP. XIV.--A SUFFICIENT CAUSE FOR THE RESURRECTION OF THE FLESH OCCURS IN
THE FUTURE JUDGMENT OF MAN, IT WILL TAKE COGNISANCE OF THE WORKS OF THE
BODY NO LESS THAN OF THE SOUL.

   Such, then, being the outlines of the divine energies which God has
displayed as much in the parables of nature as in His spoken word, let us
now approach His very edicts and decrees, since this is the division which
we mainly adopt in our subject-matter. We began with the dignity of the
flesh, whether it were of such a nature that when once destroyed it was
capable of being restored. Then we pursued an inquiry touching the power of
God, whether it was sufficiently great to be habitually able to confer this
restoration on a thing which had been destroyed. Now, if we have proved
these two points, I should like you to inquire into the (question of)
cause, whether it be one of sufficient weight to claim the resurrection of
the flesh as necessary and as conformable in every way to reason; because
there underlies this demurrer: the flesh may be quite capable of being
restored, and the Deity be perfectly able to effect the restoration, but a
cause for such recovery must needs pre-exist. Admit then a sufficient one,
you who learn of a God who is both supremely good as well as just(3)__
supremely good from His own (character), just in consequence of ours. For
if man had never sinned, he would simply and solely have known God in His
superlative goodness, from the attribute of His nature. But now he
experiences Him to be a just God also, from the necessity of a cause;
still, however, retaining under this very circumstance His excellent
goodness, at the same time that He is also just. For, by both succouring
the good and punishing the evil, He displays His justice, and at the same
time makes both processes contribute proofs of His goodness, whilst on the
one hand He deals vengeance, land on the other dispenses reward. But with
Marcion(4) you will have the opportunity of more fully learning whether
this be the whole character of God. Meanwhile, so perfect is our (God),
that He is rightly Judge, because He is the Lord; rightly the Lord, because
the Creator; rightly the Creator, because He is God. Whence it happens that
that heretic, whose name I know not, holds that He properly is not a Judge,
since He is not Lord; properly not Lord, since He is not the Creator. And
so I am at a loss to know how He is God, who is neither the Creator, which
God is; nor the Lord, which the Creator is. Inasmuch, then, as it is most
suitable for the great Being who is  God, and Lord, and Creator to summon
man to a judgment on this very question, whether he has taken care or not
to acknowledge and honour his Lord and Creator, this is just such a
judgment as the resurrection shall achieve. The entire cause, then, or
rather necessity of the resurrection, will be this, namely, that
arrangement of the final judgment which shall be most suitable to God. Now,
in effecting this arrangement, you must consider whether the divine censure
superintends a judicial examination of the two natures of man--both his
soul and his flesh. For that which is a suitable object to be judged, is
also a competent one to be raised. Our position is, that the judgment of
God must be believed first of all to be plenary, and then absolute, so as
to be final, and therefore irrevocable; to be also righteous, not bearing
less heavily on any particular part; to be moreover worthy of God, being
complete and definite, in keeping with His great patience. Thus it follows
that the fulness and perfection of the judgment consists simply in
representing the interests of the entire human being. Now, since the entire
man consists of the union of the two natures, he must therefore appear in
both, as it is right  that he should be judged in his entirety; nor, of
course, did he pass through life except in his entire state. As therefore
he lived, so also must he be judged, because he has to be judged concerning
the way in which he lived. For life is the cause of judgment, and it must
undergo investigation in as many natures as it possessed when it discharged
its vital functions.

CHAP. XV.--AS THE FLESH IS A PARTAKER WITH THE SOUL IN ALL HUMAN CONDUCT,
SO WILL IT BE IN THE RECOMPENSE OF ETERNITY.

   Come now, let our opponents sever the connection of the flesh with the
soul in the affairs of life, that they may be emboldened to sunder it also
in the recompense of life. Let them deny their association in acts, that
they may be fairly able to deny also their participation in rewards. The
flesh ought not to have any share in the sentence, if it had none in the
cause of it. Let the soul alone be called back, if it alone went away. But
(nothing of the kind ever happened); for the soul alone no more departed
from life, than it ran through alone the course from which it departed--I
mean this present life. Indeed, the soul alone is so far from conducting
(the affairs of) life, that we do not withdraw from community with the
flesh even our thoughts, however isolated they be, however unprecipitated
into act by means of the flesh; since whatever is done in man's heart is
done by the soul in the flesh, and with the flesh, and through the flesh.
The Lord Himself, in short, when rebuking our thoughts, includes in His
censures this aspect of the flesh, (man's heart), the citadel of the soul:
"Why think ye evil in your hearts?"(1) and again: "Whosoever looketh on a
woman, to lust after her, hath already committed adultery with her in his
heart."(2) So that even the thought, without operation and without effect,
is an act of the flesh. But if you allow that the faculty which rules the
senses, and which they call Hegemonikon,(3) has its sanctuary in the brain,
or in the interval between the eyebrows, or wheresoever the philosophers
are pleased to locate it, the flesh will still be the thinking place of the
soul. The soul is never without the flesh, as long as it is in the flesh.
There is nothing which the flesh does not transact in company with the
soul, when without it does not exist. Consider carefully, too, whether the
thoughts are not administered by the flesh, since it is through the flesh
that they are distinguished and known externally. Let the soul only
meditate some design, the face gives the indication--the face being the
mirror of all our intentions. They may deny all combination in acts, but
they cannot gainsay their co-operation in thoughts. Still they enumerate
the sins of the flesh; surely, then, for its sinful conduct it must be
consigned to punishment. But we, moreover, allege against them the virtues
of the flesh; surely also for its virtuous conduct it deserves a future
reward. Again, as it is the soul which acts and impels us in all we do, so
it is the function of the flesh to render obedience. Now we are not
permitted to suppose that God is either unjust or idle. Unjust, (however He
would be,) were He to exclude from reward the flesh which is associated in
good works; and idle, were He to exempt it from punishment, when it has
been an accomplice in evil deeds: whereas human judgment is deemed to be
the more perfect, when it discovers the agents in every deed, and neither
spares the guilty nor grudges the virtuous their full share of either
punishment or praise with the principals who employed their services.

CHAP. XVI.--THE HERETICS CALLED THE FLESH "THE VESSEL OF THE SOUL," IN
ORDER TO DESTROY THE RESPONSIBILITY OF THE BODY. THEIR CAVIL TURNS UPON
THEMSELVES AND SHOWS THE FLESH TO BE A SHARER IN HUMAN. ACTIONS.

   When, however, we attribute to the soul authority, and to the flesh
submission, we must see to it that (our opponents) do not turn our position
by another argument, by insisting on so placing the flesh in the service of
the soul, that it be not (considered as) its servant, lest they should be
compelled, if it were so regarded, to admit its companionship (to the
soul). For they would argue that servants and companions possess a
discretion in discharging the functions of their respective office, and a
power over their will in both relations: in short, (they would claim to be)
men themselves, and therefore (would expect) to share the credit with their
principals, to whom they voluntarily yielded their assistance; whereas the
flesh had no discretion, no sentiment in itself, but possessing no power of
its own of willing or refusing, it, in fact, appears to stand to the soul
in the stead of a vessel as an instrument rather than a servant. The soul
alone, therefore, will have to be judged (at the last day) pre-eminently as
to how it has employed the vessel of the flesh; the vessel itself, of
course, not being amenable to a judicial award: for who condemns the cup if
any. man has mixed poison in it? or who sentences the sword to the beasts,
if a man has perpetrated with it the atrocities of a brigand? Well, now, we
will grant that the flesh is innocent, in so far as bad actions will not be
charged upon it: what, then, is there to hinder its being saved on the
score of its innocence? For although it is free from all imputation of good
works, as it is of evil ones, yet it is more consistent with the divine
goodness to deliver the innocent. A beneficent man, indeed, is bound to do
so: it suits then the character of the Most Bountiful to bestow even
gratuitously such a favour. And yet, as to the cup, I will not take the
poisoned one, into which some certain death is injected, but one which has
been infected with the breath of a lascivious woman,(1) or of Cybele's
priest, or of a gladiator, or of a hangman: then I want to know whether you
would pass a milder condemnation on it than on the kisses of such persons?
One indeed which is soiled with our own filth, or one which is not mingled
to our own mind we are apt to dash to pieces, and then to increase our
anger with our servant. As for the sword, which is drunk with the blood of
the brigand's victims, who would not banish it entirely from his house,
much more from his bed-room, or from his pillow, from the presumption that
he would be sure to dream of nothing but the apparitions of the souls which
were pursuing and disquieting him for lying down with the blade which shed
their own blood? Take, however, the cup which has no reproach on it, and
which deserves the credit  of a faithful ministration, it will be adorned
by its drinking-master with chaplets, or be honoured with a handful of
flowers. The sword also which has received honourable stains in war, and
has been thus engaged in a better manslaughter, will secure its own praise
by consecration. It is quite possible, then, to pass decisive sentences
even on vessels and on instruments, that so they too may participate in the
merits of their proprietors and employers. Thus much do I say  from a
desire to meet even this argument, although there is a failure in the
example, owing to the diversity in the nature of the objects. For every
vessel or every instrument becomes useful from without, consisting as it
does of material perfectly extraneous to the substance of the human owner
or employer;  whereas the flesh, being conceived, formed, and generated
along with the soul from its earliest existence in the womb, is mixed up
with it likewise in all its operations. For although it is called "a
vessel" by the apostle, such as he enjoins to be treated "with honour,"(2)
it is yet designated by the same apostle as "the outward man,"(3)--that
clay, of course, which at the first was inscribed with the title of a man,
not of a cup or a sword, or any paltry vessel. Now it is called a "vessel"
in consideration of its capacity, whereby it receives and contains the
soul; but "man," from its community of nature, which renders it in all
operations a servant and not an instrument. Accordingly, in the judgment it
will be held to be a servant (even though it may have no independent
discretion of its own), on the ground of its being an integral portion of
that which possesses such discretion, and is not a mere chattel. And
although the apostle is well aware that the flesh does nothing of itself
which is not also imputed to the soul, he yet deems the flesh to be
"sinful;"(4) lest it should be supposed to be free from all responsibility
by the mere fact of its seeming to be impelled by the soul. So, again, when
he is ascribing certain praiseworthy actions to the flesh, he says,
"Therefore glorify and exalt God in your body,"(5)--being certain that such
efforts are actuated by the soul; but still he ascribes them to the flesh,
because it is to it that he also promises the recompense. Besides, neither
rebuke, (on the one hand), would have been suitable to it, if free from
blame; nor, (on the other hand), would exhortation, if it were incapable of
glory. Indeed, both rebuke and exhortation would be alike idle towards the
flesh, if it were an improper object for that recompence which is certainly
received in the resurrection.

CHAP. XVII.--THE FLESH WILL BE ASSOCIATED WITH THE SOUL IN ENDURING THE
PENAL SENTENCES OF THE FINAL JUDGMENT.

   "Every uneducated(6) person who agrees with our opinion will be apt to
suppose that the flesh will have to be present at the final judgment even
on this account, because otherwise the soul would be incapable of suffering
pain or pleasure, as being incorporeal; for this is the common opinion. We
on our part, however, do here maintain, and in a special treatise on the
subject prove, that the soul is corporeal, possessing a peculiar kind of
solidity in its nature, such as enables it both to perceive and suffer.
That souls are even now susceptible of torment and of blessing in Hades,
though they are disembodied, and notwithstanding their banishment from the
flesh, is proved by the case of Lazarus. I have no doubt given to my
opponent room to say: Since, then, the soul has a bodily substance of its
own, it will be sufficiently endowed with the faculty of suffering and
sense, so as not to require the presence of the flesh. No, no, (is my
reply): it will still need the flesh; not as being unable to feel anything
without the help of the flesh, but because it is necessary that it should
possess such a faculty along with the flesh. For in as far as it has a
sufficiency of its own for action, in so far has it likewise a capacity for
suffering. But the truth is, in respect of action, it labours under some
amount of incapacity; for in its own nature it has simply the ability to
think, to will, to desire, to dispose: for fully, carrying out the purpose,
it looks for the assistance of the flesh. In like manner, it also requires
the conjunction of the flesh to endure suffering, in order that by its aid
it may be as fully able to suffer, as without its assistance it was not
fully able to act. In respect, indeed, of those sins, such as
concupiscence, and thought, and wish, which it has a competency of its own
to commit, it at once(1) pays the penalty of them. Now, no doubt, if these
were alone sufficient to constitute absolute desert without requiring the
addition of acts, the soul would suffice in itself to encounter the full
responsibility of the judgment, being to be judged for those things in the
doing of which it alone had possessed a sufficiency. Since, however, acts
too are indissolubly attached to deserts; since also acts are ministerially
effected by the flesh, it is no longer enough that the soul apart from the
flesh be requited with pleasure or pain for what are actually works of the
flesh, although it has a body (of its own), although it has members (of its
own), which in like manner are insufficient for its full perception, just
as they are also for its perfect action. Therefore as it has acted in each
several instance, so proportionably does it suffer in Hades, being the
first to taste of judgment as it was the first to induce to the commission
of sin; but still it is waiting for the flesh in order that it may through
the flesh also compensate for its deeds, inasmuch as it laid upon the flesh
the execution of its own thoughts. This, in short, will be the process of
that judgment which is postponed to the last great day, in order that by
the exhibition of the flesh the entire course of the divine vengeance may
be accomplished. Besides, (it is obvious to remark) there would be no
delaying to the end of that doom which souls are already tasting in Hades,
if it was destined for souls alone.

CHAP. XVIII.--SCRIPTURE PHRASES AND PASSAGES CLEARLY ASSERT "THE
RESURRECTION OF THE DEAD." THE FORCE OF THIS VERY PHRASE EXPLAINED AS
INDICATING THE PROMINENT PLACE OF THE FLESH IN THE GENERAL RESURRECTION.

   Thus far it has been my object by prefatory remarks to lay a foundation
for the defence of all the Scriptures which promise a resurrection of the
flesh. Now, inasmuch as this verity is supported by so many just and
reasonable considerations--I mean the dignity of the flesh itself,(2) the
power and might of God,(3) the analogous cases in which these are
displayed,(4) as well as the good reasons for the judgment, and the need
thereof(5)--it will of course be only right and proper that the Scriptures
should be understood in the sense suggested by such authoritative
considerations, and not after the conceits of the heretics, which arise
from infidelity solely, because it is deemed incredible that the flesh
should be recovered from death and restored to life; not because (such a
restoration) is either unattainable by the flesh itself, or impossible for
God to effect, or unsuitable to the final judgment. Incredible, no doubt,
it might be, if it had not been revealed in the word of God;(6) except
that, even if it had not been thus first announced by God, it might have
been fairly enough assumed, that the revelation of it had been withheld,
simply because so many strong presumptions in its favour had been already
furnished. Since, however, (the great fact) is proclaimed in so many
inspired passages, that is so far a dissuasive against understanding it in
a sense different from that which is attested by such arguments as persuade
us to its reception, even irrespective of the testimonies of revelation.
Let us see, then, first of all in what title this hope of ours is held out
to our view.(7) There is, I imagine, one divine edict which is exposed to
the gaze of all men: it is "The Resurrection of the Dead."(1) These words
are prompt, decisive, clear. I mean to take these very terms, discuss them,
and discover to what substance they apply. As to the word resurrectio,
whenever I hear of its impending over a human being, I am forced to inquire
what part of him has been destined to fall, since nothing can be expected
to rise again, unless it has first been prostrated. It is only the man who
is ignorant of the fact that the flesh falls by death, that can fail to
discover that it stands erect by means of life. Nature pronounces God's
sentence: "Dust thou art, and unto dust shall thou return."(2) Even the man
who has not heard the sentence, sees the fact. No death but is the ruin of
our limbs. This destiny of the body the Lord also described, when, clothed
as He was in its very substance, He said, "Destroy this temple, and in
three days I will raise it up again."(3) For He showed to what belongs (the
incidents of) being destroyed, thrown down, and kept down--even to that to
which it also appertains to be lifted and raised up again; although He was
at the same time bearing about with Him "a soul that was trembling even
unto death,"(4) but which did not fall through death, because even the
Scripture informs us that "He spoke of His body."(5) So that it is the
flesh which falls by death; and accordingly it derives its name, cadaver,
from cadendo.(6) The soul, however, has no trace of a fall in its
designation, as indeed there is no mortality in its condition. Nay it is
the soul which communicates its ruin to the body when it is breathed out of
it, just as it is also destined to raise it up again from the earth when it
shall re-enter it. That cannot fall which by its entrance raises; nor can
that droop which by its departure causes ruin. I will go further, and say
that the soul does not even fall into sleep along with the body, nor does
it with its companion even lie down in repose. For it is agitated in
dreams, and disturbed: it might, however, rest, if it lay down; and lie
down it certainly would, if it fell. Thus that which does not fall even
into the likeness of death, does not succumb to the reality thereof.
Passing now to the other word mortuorum, I wish you to look carefully, and
see to what substance it is applicable. Were we to allow, under this head,
as is sometimes held by the heretics, that the soul is mortal, so that
being mortal it shall attain to a resurrection; this would afford a
presumption that the flesh also, being no less mortal, would share in the
same resurrection. But our present point is to derive from the proper
signification of this word an idea of the destiny which it indicates. Now,
just as the term resurrection is predicated of that which falls--that is,
the flesh--so will there be the same application of the word dead, because
what is called "the resurrection of the dead" indicates the rising up again
of that which is fallen down. We learn this from the case of Abraham, the
father of the faithful, a man who enjoyed close intercourse with God. For
when he requested of the sons of Heth a spot to bury Sarah in, he said to
them, "Give me the possession of a burying place with you, that I may bury
my dead,"(7)--meaning, of course, her flesh; for he could not have desired
a place to bury her soul in, even if the soul is to be deemed mortal, and
even if it could bear to be described by the word "dead." Since, then, this
word indicates the body, it follows that when "the resurrection of the
dead" is spoken of, it is the rising again of men's bodies that is meant.

CHAP. XIX.--THE SOPHISTICAL SENSE PUT BY HERETICS ON THE PHRASE
"RESURRECTION OF THE DEAD," AS IF IT MEANT THE MORAL CHANGE OF A NEW LIFE.

   Now this consideration of the phrase in question, and its
signification--besides maintaining, of course, the true meaning of the
important words--must needs contribute to this further result, that
whatever obscurity our adversaries throw over the subject under the
pretence of figurative and allegorical language, the truth will stand out
in clearer light, and out of uncertainties certain and definite rules will
be prescribed. For some, when they have alighted on a very usual form of
prophetic statement, generally expressed in figure and allegory, though not
always, distort into some imaginary sense even the most clearly described
doctrine of the resurrection of the dead, alleging that even death itself
must be understood in a spiritual sense. They say that which is commonly
supposed to be death is not really so,--namely, the separation of body and
soul: it is rather the ignorance of God, by reason of which man is dead to
God, and is not less buried in error than he would be in the grave.
Wherefore that also must be held to be the resurrection, when a man is
reanimated by access to the truth, and having dispersed the death of
ignorance, and being endowed with new life by God, has burst forth from the
sepulchre of the old man, even as the Lord likened the scribes and
Pharisees to "whited sepulchres."(1) Whence it follows that they who have
by faith attained to the resurrection, are with the Lord after they have
once put Him on in their baptism. By such subtlety, then, even in
conversation have they often been in the habit of misleading our brethren,
as if they held a resurrection of the dead as well as we. Woe, say they, to
him who has not risen in the present body; for they fear that they might
alarm their hearers if they at once denied the resurrection. Secretly,
however, in their minds they think this: Woe betide the simpleton who
during his present life fails to discover the mysteries of heresy; since
this, in their view, is the resurrection. There are however, a great many
also, who, claiming to hold a resurrection after the soul's departure,
maintain that going out of the sepulchre means escaping out of the world,
since in their view the world is the habitation of the dead--that is, of
those who know not God; or they will go so far as to say that it actually
means escaping out of the body itself, since they imagine that the body
detains the soul, when it is shut up in the death of a worldly life, as in
a grave.

CHAP. XX.--FIGURATIVE SENSES HAVE THEIR FOUNDATION IN LITERAL FACT.
BESIDES, THE ALLEGORICAL STYLE IS BY NO MEANS THE ONLY ONE FOUND IN THE
PROPHETIC SCRIPTURES, AS ALLEGED BY THE HERETICS.

   Now, to upset all conceits of this sort, let me dispel at once the
preliminary idea on which they rest--their assertion that the prophets make
all their announcements in figures of speech. Now, if this were the case,
the figures themselves could not possibly have been distinguished, inasmuch
as the verities would not have been declared, out of which the figurative
language is stretched. And, indeed, if all are figures, where will be that
of which they are the figures? How can you hold up a mirror for your face,
if the face nowhere exists? But, in truth, all are not figures, but there
are also literal statements; nor are all shadows, but there are bodies too:
so that we have prophecies about the Lord Himself even, which are clearer
than the day For it was not figuratively that the Virgin conceived in her
womb; nor in a trope did she bear Emmanuel, that is, Jesus, God with us.(2)
Even granting that He was figuratively to take the power of Damascus and
the spoils of Samaria,(3) still it was literally that He was to "enter into
judgment with the elders and princes of the people."(4) For in the person
of Pilate "the heathen raged," and in the person of Israel "the people
imagined vain things;" "the kings of the earth" in Herod, and the rulers in
Annas and Caiaphas, were gathered together against the Lord, and against
His anointed."(5) He, again, was "led as a sheep to the slaughter, and as a
sheep before the shearer," that is, Herod, "is dumb, so He opened not His
mouth."(6) "He gave His back to scourges, and His cheeks to blows, not
turning His face even from the shame of spitting."(7) "He was numbered with
the transgressors;"(8) "He was pierced in His hands and His feet;"(9) "they
cast lots for his raiment"(10) "they gave Him gall, and made Him drink
vinegar;" "they shook their heads, and mocked Him;" "He was appraised by
the traitor in thirty pieces of silver."(13) What figures of speech does
Isaiah here give us? What tropes does David? What allegories does Jeremiah?
Not even of His mighty works have they used parabolic language. Or else,
were not the eyes of the blind opened? did not the tongue of the dumb
recover speech?(14) did not the relaxed hands and palsied knees become
strong,(15) and the lame leap as an hart?(16) No doubt we are accustomed
also to give a spiritual significance to these statements of prophecy,
according to the analogy of the physical diseases which were healed by the
Lord; but still they were all fulfilled literally: thus showing that the
prophets foretold both senses, except that very many of their words can
only be taken in a pure and simple signification, and free from all
allegorical obscurity; as when we hear of the downfall of nations and
cities, of Tyre and Egypt, and Babylon and Edom, and the navy of Carthage;
also when they foretell Israel's own chastisements and pardons, its
captivities, restorations, and at last its final dispersion. Who would
prefer affixing a metaphorical interpretation to all these events, instead
of accepting their literal truth? The realities are involved in the words,
just as the words are read in the realities. Thus, then, (we find that) the
allegorical style is not used in all parts of the prophetic record,
although it occasionally occurs in certain portions of it.

CHAP. XXI.--NO MERE METAPHOR IN THE PHRASE RESURRECTION OF THE DEAD. IN
PROPORTION TO THE IMPORTANCE OF ETERNAL TRUTHS, IS THE CLEARNESS OF THEIR
SCRIPTURAL ENUNCIATION.

   Well, if it occurs occasionally in certain portions of it, you will
say, then why not in that phrase,(1) where the resurrection might be
spiritually understood? There are several reasons why not. First, what must
be the meaning of so many important passages of Holy Scripture, which so
obviously attest the resurrection of the body, as to admit not even the
appearance of a figurative signification? And, indeed, (since some passages
are more obscure than others), it cannot but be right--as we have shown
above(2)--that uncertain statements should be determined by certain ones,
and obscure ones by such as are clear and plain; else there is fear that,
in the conflict of certainties and uncertainties, of explicitness and
obscurity, faith may be shattered, truth endangered, and the Divine Being
Himself be branded as inconstant. Then arises the improbability that the
very mystery on which our trust wholly rests, on which also our instruction
entirely depends, should have the appearance of being ambiguously announced
and obscurely propounded, inasmuch as the hope of the resurrection, unless
it be clearly set forth on the sides both of punishment and reward, would
fail to persuade any to embrace a religion like ours, exposed as it is to
public detestation and the imputation of hostility to others. There is no
certain work where the remuneration is uncertain. There is no real
apprehension when the peril is only doubtful. But both the recompense of
reward, and the danger of losing it, depend on the issues of the
resurrection. Now, if even those purposes of God against cities, and
nations, and kings, which are merely temporal, local, and personal in their
character, have been proclaimed so clearly in prophecy, how is it to be
supposed that those dispensations of His which are eternal, and of
universal concern to the human race, should be void of all real light in
themselves? The grander they are, the clearer should be their announcement,
in order that their superior greatness might be believed. And I apprehend
that God cannot possibly have ascribed to Him either envy, or guile, or
inconsistency, or artifice, by help of which evil qualities it is that all
schemes of unusual grandeur are litigiously promulgated.

CHAP. XXII.--THE SCRIPTURES FORBID OUR SUPPOSING EITHER THAT THE
RESURRECTION IS ALREADY PAST, OR THAT IT TAKES PLACE IMMEDIATELY AT DEATH.
OUR HOPES AND PRAYERS POINT TO THE LAST GREAT DAY AS THE PERIOD OF ITS
ACCOMPLISHMENT.

   We must after all this turn our attention to those scriptures also
which forbid our belief in such a resurrection as is held by your
Animalists (for I will not call them Spiritualists),(3) that it is either
to be assumed as taking place now, as soon as men come to the knowledge of
the truth, or else that it is accomplished immediately after their
departure from this life. Now, forasmuch as the seasons of our entire hope
have been fixed in the Holy Scripture, and since we are not permitted to
place the accomplishment thereof, as I apprehend, previous to Christ's
coming, our prayers are directed towards(4) the end of this world, to the
passing away thereof at the great day of the Lord--of His wrath and
vengeance--the last day, which is hidden (from all), and known to none but
the Father, although announced beforehand by signs and wonders, and the
dissolution of the elements, and the conflicts of nations. I would turn out
the words of the prophets, if the Lord Himself had said nothing (except
that prophecies were the Lord's own word); but it is more to my purpose
that He by His own mouth confirms their statement. Being questioned by His
disciples when those things were to come to pass which He had just been
uttering about the destruction of the temple, He discourses to them first
of the order of Jewish events until the overthrow of Jerusalem, and then of
such as concerned all nations up to the very end of the world. For after He
had declared that "Jerusalem was to be trodden down of the Gentiles, until
the times of the Gentiles should be fulfilled,"(5)--meaning, of course,
those which were to be chosen of God, and gathered in with the remnant of
Israel--He then goes on to proclaim, against this world and dispensation
(even as Joel had done, and Daniel, and all the prophets with one
consent(6)), that "there should be signs in the sun, and in the moon, and
in the stars, distress of nations with perplexity, the sea and the waves
roaring, men's hearts failing them for fear, and for looking after those
things which are coming on the earth."(1) "For," says He, "the powers of
heaven shall be shaken; and then shall they see the Son of man coming in
the clouds, with power and great glory. And when these things begin to come
to pass, then look up, and lift up your heads, for your redemption draweth
nigh."(2) He spake of its "drawing nigh," not of its being present already;
and of "those things beginning to come to pass," not of their having
happened: because when they have come to pass, then our redemption shall be
at hand, which is said to be approaching up to that time, raising and
exciting our minds to what is then the proximate harvest of our hope. He
immediately annexes a parable of this in "the trees which are tenderly
sprouting into a flower-stalk, and then developing the flower, which is the
precursor of the fruit."(3) "So likewise ye," (He adds), "when ye shall see
all these things come to pass, know ye that the kingdom of heaven is nigh
at hand."(4) "Watch ye, therefore, and pray always, that ye may be
accounted worthy to escape all those things, and to stand before the Son of
man;"(5) that is, no doubt, at the resurrection, after all these things
have been previously transacted. Therefore, although there is a sprouting
in the acknowledgment of all this mystery, yet it is only in the actual
presence of the Lord that the flower is developed and the fruit borne. Who
is it then, that has aroused the Lord, now at God's right hand so
unseasonably and with such severity "shake terribly" (as Isaiah(6)
expresses it ("that earth," which, I suppose, is as yet unshattered? Who
has thus early put "Christ's enemies beneath His feet" (to use the lan-
guage of David(7)), making Him more hurried than the Father, whilst every
crowd in our popular assemblies is still with shouts consigning "the
Christians to the lions?"(8) Who has yet beheld Jesus descending from
heaven in like manner as the apostles saw Him ascend, according to the
appointment of the two angels?(9) Up to the present moment they have not,
tribe by tribe, smitten their breasts, looking on Him whom they
pierced.(10) No one has as yet fallen in with Elias;(11) no one has as yet
escaped from Antichrist;(12) no one has as yet had to bewail the downfall
of Babylon.(13) And is there now anybody who has risen again, except the
heretic? He, of course, has already quitted the grave of his own corpse--
although he is even now liable to fevers and ulcers; he, too, has already
trodden down his enemies--although he has even now to struggle with the
powers of the world. And as a matter of course, he is already a king--
although he even now owes to Caesar the things which are Caesar's.(14)

CHAP. XXIII.--SUNDRY PASSAGES OF ST. PAUL, WHICH SPEAK OF A SPIRITUAL
RESURRECTION, COMPATIBLE WITH THE FUTURE RESURRECTION OF THE BODY, WHICH IS
EVEN ASSUMED IN THEM.

   The apostle indeed teaches, in his Epistle to the Colossians, that we
were once dead, alienated, and enemies to the Lord in our minds, whilst we
were living in wicked works;(15) that we were then buried with Christ in
baptism, and also raised again with Him through the faith of the operation
of God, who hath raised Him from the dead.(16) "And you, (adds he), when ye
were dead in sins and the uncircumcision of your flesh, hath He quickened
together with Him, having forgiven you all trespasses."(17) And again: "If
ye are dead with Christ from the elements of the world, why, as though
living in the world, are ye subject to ordinances?"(18) Now, since he makes
us spiritually dead--in such a way, however, as to allow that we shall one
day have to undergo a bodily death,--so, considering indeed that we have
been also raised in a like spiritual sense, he equally allows that we shall
further have to undergo a bodily resurrection. In so many words(19) he
says: "Since ye are risen with Christ, seek those things which are above,
where Christ sitteth at the right hand of God. Set your affection on things
above, not on things on the earth."(20) Accordingly, it is in our mind that
he shows that we rise (with Christ), since it is by this alone that we are
as yet able to reach to heavenly objects. These we should not "seek," nor
"set our affection on," if we had them already in our possession. He also
adds: "For ye are dead"--to your sins, he means, not to yourselves--"and
your life is hid with Christ in God."(21) Now that life is not yet
apprehended which is hidden. In like manner John says: "And it doth not yet
appear what we shall be: we know, however, that when He shall be manifest,
we shall be like Him."(1) We are far indeed from being already what we know
not of; we should, of course, be sure to know it if we were already (like
Him). It is therefore the contemplation of our blessed hope even in this
life by faith (that he speaks of)--not its presence nor its possession, but
only its expectation. Concerning this expectation and hope Paul writes to
the Galatians: "For we through the Spirit wait for the hope of
righteousness by faith."(2) He says "we wait for it," not we are in
possession of it. By the righteousness of God, he means that judgment which
we shall have to undergo as the recompense of our deeds. It is in
expectation of this for himself that the apostle writes to the Philippians:
"If by any means," says he, "I might attain to the resurrection of the
dead. Not as though I had already attained, or were already perfect."(3)
And yet he had believed, and had known all mysteries, as an elect vessel
and the great teacher of the Gentiles; but for all that he goes on to say:
"I, however, follow on, if so be I may apprehend that for which I also am
apprehended of Christ."(4) Nay, more: "Brethren," (he adds), "I count not
myself to have apprehended: but this one thing (I do), forgetting those
things which are behind, and reaching forth unto those things which are
before, I press toward the mark for the prize of blamelessness,(5) whereby
I may attain it;" meaning the resurrection from the dead in its proper
time. Even as he says to the Gala-tians: "Let us not be weary in well-
doing: for in due season we shall reap."(6) Similarly, concerning
Onesiphorus, does he also write to Timothy: "The Lord grant unto him that
he may find mercy in that day;"(7) unto which day and time he charges
Timothy himself "to keep what had been committed to his care, without spot,
unrebukable, until the appearing of the Lord Jesus Christ: which in His
times He shall show, who is the blessed and only Potentate, the King of
kings and Lord of lords,"(8) speaking of (Him as) God It is to these same
times that Peter in the Acts refers, when he says: "Repent ye therefore,
and be converted, that your sins may be blotted out, when the times of
refreshing shall come from the presence of the Lord; and He shall send
Jesus Christ, which before was preached unto you: whom the heaven must
receive until the times of restitution of all things, which God hath spoken
by the mouth of His holy prophets."(9)

CHAP. XXIV.--OTHER PASSAGES QUOTED FROM ST. PAUL, WHICH CATEGORICALLY
ASSERT THE RESURRECTION OF THE FLESH AT THE FINAL JUDGMENT.

   The character of these times learn, along with the Thessalonians. For
we read: "How ye turned from idols to serve the living and true God, and to
wait for His Son from heaven, whom He raised from the dead, even
Jesus."(10) And again: "For what is our hope, or joy, or crown of
rejoicing? Are not even ye in the presence of our Lord God, Jesus Christ,
at His coming?"(11) Likewise: "Before God, even our Father, at the coming
of the Lord Jesus Christ, with the whole company of His saints."(12) He
teaches them that they must "not sorrow concerning them that are asleep,"
and at the same time explains to them the times of the resurrection,
saying, "For if we believe that Jesus died and rose again, even so them
also which sleep in Jesus shall God bring with Him. For this we say unto
you by the word of the Lord, that we which are alive and remain unto the
coming of our Lord, shall not prevent them that are asleep. For the Lord
Himself shall descend from heaven with a shout, with the voice of the
archangel, and with the trump of God; and the dead in Christ shall rise
first: then we which are alive and remain shall be caught up together with
them in the clouds, to meet the Lord in the air; and so shall we be ever
with the Lord."(13) What archangel's voice, (I wonder), what trump of God
is now heard, except it be, forsooth, in the entertainments of the
heretics? For, allowing that the word of the gospel may be called "the
trump of God," since it was still calling men, yet they must at that time
either be dead as to the body, that they may be able to rise again; and
then how are they alive? Or else caught up into the clouds; and how then
are they here? "Most miserable," no doubt, as the apostle declared them,
are they "who in this life only" shall be found to have hope:(14) they will
have to be excluded while they are with premature haste seizing that which
is promised after this life; erring concerning the truth, no less than
Phygellus and Hermogenes.(15) Hence it is that the Holy Ghost, in His
greatness, foreseeing clearly all such interpretations as these, suggests
(to the apostle), in this very epistle of his to the Thessalonians, as
follows: "But of the times and the seasons, brethren, there is no necessity
for my writing unto you. For ye yourselves know perfectly, that the day of
the Lord cometh as a thief in the night. For when they shall say, 'Peace,'
and 'All things are safe,' then sudden destruction shall come upon
them."(1) Again, in the second epistle he addresses them with even greater
earnestness: "Now I beseech you, brethren, by the coming of our Lord Jesus
Christ, and by our gathering together unto Him, that ye be not soon shaken
in mind, nor be troubled, either by spirit, or by word," that is, the word
of false prophets, "or by letter," that is, the letter of false apostles,
"as if from us, as that the day of the Lord is at hand. Let no man deceive
you by any means. For that day shall not come, unless indeed there first
come a falling away," he means indeed of this present empire, "and that man
of sin be revealed," that is to say, Antichrist, "the son of perdition, who
opposeth and exalteth himself above all that is called God or religion; so
that he sitteth in the temple of God, affirming that he is God. Remember ye
not, that when I was with you, I used to tell you these things? And now ye
know what detaineth, that he might be revealed in his time. For the mystery
of iniquity doth already work; only he who now hinders must hinder, until
he be taken out of the way."(2) What obstacle is there but the Roman state,
the falling away of which, by being scattered into ten kingdoms, shall
introduce Antichrist upon (its own ruins)? "And then shall be revealed the
wicked one, whom the Lord shall consume with the spirit of His mouth, and
shall destroy with the brightness of His coming: even him whose coming is
after the working of Satan, with all power, and signs, and lying wonders,
and with all deceivableness of unrighteousness in them that perish."(3)

CHAP. XXV.--ST. JOHN, IN THE APOCALYPSE, EQUALLY EXPLICIT IN ASSERTING THE
SAME GREAT DOCTRINE.

   In the Revelation of John, again, the order of these times is spread
out to view, which "the souls of the martyrs" are taught to wait for
beneath the altar, whilst they earnestly pray to be avenged and judged:(4)
(taught, I say, to wait), in order that the world may first drink to the
dregs the plagues that await it out of the vials of the angels,(5) and that
the city of fornication may receive from the ten kings its deserved
doom,(6) and that the beast Antichrist with his false prophet may wage war
on the Church of God; and that, after the casting of the devil into the
bottomless pit for a while,(7) the blessed prerogative of the first
resurrection may be ordained from the thrones;(8) and then again, after the
consignment of him to the fire, that the judgment of the final and
universal resurrection may be determined out of the books.(9) Since, then,
the Scriptures both indicate the stages of the last times, and concentrate
the harvest of the Christian hope in the very end of the world, it is
evident, either that all which God promises to us receives its
accomplishment then, and thus what the heretics pretend about a
resurrection here falls to the ground; or else, even allowing that a
confession of the mystery (of  divine truth) is a resurrection, that there
is, without any detriment to this view, room for believing in that which is
announced for the end. It moreover follows, that the very maintenance of
this spiritual resurrection amounts to a presumption in favour of the other
bodily resurrection; for if none were announced for that time, there would
be fair ground for asserting only this purely spiritual resurrection.
Inasmuch, however, as (a resurrection) is proclaimed for the last time, it
is proved to be a bodily one, because there is no spiritual one also then
announced. For why make a second announcement of a resurrection of only one
character, that is, the spiritual one, since this ought to be undergoing
accomplishment either now, without any regard to different times, or else
then, at the very conclusion of all the periods? It is therefore more
competent for us even to maintain a spiritual resurrection a the
commencement of a life of faith, who acknowledge the full completion
thereof at the end of the world

CHAP. XXVI.--EVEN THE METAPHORICAL DESCRIPTIONS OF THIS SUBJECT IN THE
SCRIPTURES POINT TO THE BODILY RESURRECTION, THE ONLY SENSE WHICH SECURES
THEIR CONSISTENCY AND DIGNITY.

   To a preceding objection, that the Scriptures are allegorical, I have
still one answer to make--that it is open to us also to defend the bodily
character of the resurrection by means of the language of the prophets,
which is equally figurative. For consider that primeval sentence which God
spake when He called man earth; saying, "Earth thou art, and to earth shalt
thou return."(10) In respect, of course, to his fleshly substance, which
had been taken out of the ground, and which was the first to receive the
name of man, as we have already shown,(1) does not this passage give one
instruction to interpret in relation to the flesh also whatever of wrath or
of grace God has determined for the earth, because, strictly speaking, the
earth is not exposed to His judgment, since it has never done any good or
evil? "Cursed," no doubt, it was, for it drank the blood of man;(2) but
even this was as a figure of homicidal flesh. For if the earth has to
suffer either joy or injury, it is simply on man's account, that he may
suffer the joy or the sorrow through the events which happen to his
dwelling-place, whereby he will rather have to pay the penalty which,
simply on his account, even the earth must suffer. When, therefore, God
even threatens the earth, I would prefer saying that He threatens the
flesh: so likewise, when He makes a promise to the earth, I would rather
understand Him as promising the flesh; as in that passage of David: "The
Lord is King, let the earth be glad,"(3)--meaning the flesh of the saints,
to which appertains the enjoyment of the kingdom of God. Then he afterwards
says: "The earth saw and trembled; the mountains melted like wax at the
presence of the Lord,"--meaning, no doubt the flesh of the wicked; and (in
a similar sense) it is written: "For they shall look on Him whom they
pierced."(4) If indeed it will be thought that both these passages were
pronounced simply of the element earth, how can it be consistent that it
should shake and melt at the presence of the Lord, at whose royal dignity
it before exulted? So again in Isaiah, "Ye shall eat the good of the
land,"(5) the expression means the blessings which await the flesh when in
the kingdom of God it shall be renewed, and made like the angels, and
waiting to obtain the things "which neither eye hath seen, nor ear heard,
and which have not entered into the heart of man."(6) Otherwise, how vain
that God should invite men to obedience by the fruits of the field and the
elements of this life, when He dispenses these to even irreligious men and
blasphemers; on a general condition once for all made to man, "sending rain
on the good and on the evil, and making His sun to shine on the just and on
the unjust!"(7) Happy, no doubt, is faith, if it is to obtain gifts which
the enemies of God and Christ not only use, but even abuse, "worshipping
the creature itself in opposition  to the Creator!"(8) You will reckon, (I
suppose) onions and truffles among earth's bounties, since the Lord
declares that "man shall not live on bread alone!"(9) In this way the Jews
lose heavenly blessings, by confining their hopes to earthly ones, being
ignorant of the promise of heavenly bread, and of the oil of God's unction,
and the wine of the Spirit, and of that water of life which has its vigour
from the vine of Christ. On exactly the same principle, they consider the
special soil of Judaea to be that very holy land, which ought rather to be
interpreted of the Lord's flesh, which, in all those who put on Christ, is
thenceforward the holy land; holy indeed by the indwelling of the Holy
Ghost, truly flowing with milk and honey by the sweetness of His assurance,
truly Judaean by reason of the friendship of God. For "he is not a Jew
which is one outwardly, but he who is one inwardly."(10) In the same way it
is that both God's temple and Jerusalem (must be understood) when it is
said by Isaiah: "Awake, awake, O Jerusalem! put on the strength of thine
arm; awake, as in thine earliest time,"(11) that is to say, in that
innocence which preceded the fall into sin. For how can words of this kind
of exhortation and invitation be suitable for that Jerusalem which killed
the prophets, and stoned those that were sent to them, and at last
crucified its very Lord? Neither indeed is salvation promised to any one
land at all, which must needs pass away with the fashion of the whole
world. Even if anybody should venture strongly to contend that paradise is
the holy land, which it may be possible to designate as the land of our
first parents Adam and Eve, it will even then follow that the restoration
of paradise will seem to be promised to the flesh, whose lot it was to
inhabit and keep it, in order that man may be recalled thereto just such as
he was driven from it.

CHAP. XXVII.--CERTAIN METAPHORICAL TERMS EXPLAINED OF THE RESURRECTION OF
THE FLESH.

   We have also in the Scriptures robes mentioned as allegorizing the hope
of the flesh. Thus in the Revelation of John it is said: "These are they
which have not defiled their clothes with women,"(12)--indicating, of
course, virgins, and such as have become "eunuchs for the kingdom of
heaven's sake."(13) Therefore they shall be "clothed in white raiment,"(1)
that is, in the bright beauty of the unwedded flesh. In the gospel even,
"the wedding garment" may be regarded as the sanctity of the flesh.(2) And
so, when Isaiah tells us what sort of "fast the Lord hath chosen," and
subjoins a statement about the reward of good works, he says: "Then shall
thy light break forth as the morning, and thy garments,(3) shall speedily
arise;"(4) where he has no thought of cloaks or stuff gowns, but means the
rising of the flesh, which he declared the resurrection of, after its fall
in death. Thus we are furnished even with an allegorical defence of the
resurrection of the body. When, then, we read, "Go, my people, enter into
your closets for a little season, until my anger pass away,"(5) we have in
the closets graves, in which they will have to rest for a little while, who
shall have at the end of the world departed this life in the last furious
onset of the power of Antichrist. Why else did He use the expression
closets, in preference to some other receptacle, if it were not that the
flesh is kept in these closets or cellars salted and reserved for use, to
be drawn out thence on a suitable occasion? It is on a like principle that
embalmed corpses are set aside for burial in mausoleums and sepulchres, in
order that they may be removed therefrom when the Master shall order it.
Since, therefore, there is consistency in thus understanding the passage
(for what refuge of little closets could possibly shelter us from the wrath
of God?), it appears that by the very phrase which he uses, "Until His
anger pass away,"(5) which shall extinguish Antichrist, he in fact shows
that after that indignation the flesh will come forth from the sepulchre,
in which it had been deposited previous to the bursting out of the anger.
Now out of the closets nothing else is brought than that which had been put
into them, and after the extirpation of Antichrist shall be busily
transacted the great process of the resurrection.

CHAP. XXVIII.--PROPHETIC THINGS AND ACTIONS, AS WELL AS WORDS, ATTEST THIS
GREAT DOCTRINE.

   But we know that prophecy expressed itself by things no less than by
words. By words, and also by deeds, is the resurrection foretold. When
Moses puts his hand into his bosom, and then draws it out again  dead, and
again puts his hand into his bosom, and plucks it out living,(6) does not
this apply as a presage to all mankind?--inasmuch as those three signs(7)
denoted the threefold power of God: when it shall, first, in the appointed
order, subdue to man the old serpent, the devil,(8) however formidable;
then, secondly, draw forth the flesh from the bosom of death;(9) and then,
at last, shall pursue all blood (shed) in judgment.(10) On this subject we
read in the writings of the same prophet, (how that) God says: "For your
blood of your lives will I require of all wild beasts; and I will require
it of the hand of man, and of his brother's hand."(11) Now nothing is
required except that which is demanded back again, and nothing is thus
demanded except that which is to be given up; and that will of course be
given up, which shall be demanded and required on the ground of vengeance.
But indeed there cannot possibly be punishment of that which never had any
existence. Existence, however, it will have, when it is restored in order
to be punished. To the flesh, therefore, applies everything which is
declared respecting the blood, for without the flesh there cannot be blood.
The flesh will be raised up in order that the blood may be punished. There
are, again, some statements (of Scripture) so plainly made as to be free
from all obscurity of allegory, and yet they strongly require(12) their
very simplicity to be interpreted. There is, for instance, that passage in
Isaiah: "I will kill, and I will make alive."(13) Certainly His making
alive is to take place after He has killed. As, therefore, it is by death
that He kills, it is by the resurrection that He will make alive. Now it is
the flesh which is killed by death; the flesh, therefore, will be revived
by the resurrection. Surely if killing means taking away life from the
flesh, and its opposite, reviving, amounts to restoring life to the flesh,
it must needs be that the flesh rise again, to which the life, which has
been taken away by killing, has to be restored by vivification.

CHAP. XXIX.--EZEKIEL'S VISION OF THE DRY BONES QUOTED.

   Inasmuch, then, as even the figurative portions of Scripture, and the
arguments of facts, and some plain statements of Holy Writ, throw light
upon the resurrection of the flesh (although without specially naming the
very substance), how much more effectual for determining the question will
not those passages be which indicate the actual substance of the body by
expressly mentioning it! Take Ezekiel: "And the hand of the Lord," says he,
"was upon me; and the Lord brought me forth in the Spirit, and set me in
the midst of a plain which was full of bones; and He led me round about
them in a circuit: and, behold, there were many on the face of the plain;
and, lo, they were very dry. And He said unto me, Son of man, will these
bones live? And I said, O Lord God, Thou knowest. And He said unto me,
Prophesy upon these bones; and thou shalt say, Ye dry bones, hear the word
of the Lord. Thus saith the Lord God to these bones, Behold, I bring upon
you the breath of life, and ye shall live: and I will give unto you the
spirit, and I will place muscles over you, and I will spread skin upon you;
and ye shall live, and shall know that I am the Lord. And I prophesied as
the Lord commanded me: and while I prophesy, behold there is a voice,
behold also a movement, and bones approached bones. And I saw, and behold
sinews and flesh came up over them, and muscles were placed around them;
but there was no breath in them. And He said unto me, Prophesy to the wind,
son of man, prophesy and say, Thus saith the Lord God, Come from the four
winds, O breath, and breathe in these dead men, and let them live. So I
prophesied to the wind, as He commanded me, and the spirit entered into the
bones, and they lived, and stood upon their feet, strong and exceeding
many. And the Lord said unto me, Son of man, these bones are the whole
house of Israel. They say themselves, Our bones are become dry, and our
hope is perished, and we in them have been violently destroyed. Therefore
prophesy unto them, (and say), Behold, even I will open your sepulchres,
and will bring you out of your sepulchres, O my people, and will bring you
into the land of Israel: and ye shall know how that I the Lord opened your
sepulchres, and brought you, O my people, out of your sepulchres; and I
will give my Spirit unto you, and ye shall live, and shall rest in your own
land: and ye shall know how that I the Lord have spoken and done these
things, saith the Lord."(1)

CHAP. XXX.--THIS VISION INTERPRETED BY TERTULLIAN OF THE RESURRECTION OF
THE BODIES OF THE DEAD. A CHRONOLOGICAL ERROR OF OUR AUTHOR, WHO SUPPOSES
THAT EZEKIEL IN HIS CH. XXXI. PROPHESIED BEFORE THE CAPTIVITY.

   I am well aware how they torture even this prophecy into a proof of the
allegorical sense, on the ground that by saying, "These bones are the whole
house of Israel," He made them a figure of Israel, and removed them from
their proper literal condition; and therefore (they contend) that there is
here a figurative, not a true prediction of the resurrection, for (they
say) the state of the Jews is one of humiliation, in a certain sense dead,
and very dry, and dispersed over the plain of the world. Therefore the
image of a resurrection is allegorically applied to their state, since it
has to be gathered together, and recompacted bone to bone (in other words,
tribe to tribe, and people to people), and to be reincorporated by the
sinews of power and the nerves of royalty, and to be brought out as it were
from sepulchres, that is to say, from the most miserable and degraded
abodes of captivity, and to breathe afresh in the way of a restoration, and
to live thenceforward in their own land of Judaea. And what is to happen
after all this? They will die, no doubt. And what will there be after
death? No resurrection from the dead, of course, since there is nothing of
the sort here revealed to Ezekiel. Well, but the resurrection is elsewhere
foretold: so that there will be one even in this case, and they are rash in
applying this passage to the state of Jewish affairs; or even if it do
indicate a different recovery from the resurrection which we are
maintaining, what matters it to me, provided there be also a resurrection
of the body, just as there is a restoration of the Jewish state? In fact,
by the very circumstance that the recovery of the Jewish state is
prefigured by the reincorporation and reunion of bones, proof is offered
that this event will also happen to the bones themselves; for the metaphor
could not have been formed from bones, if the same thing exactly were not
to be realized in them also. Now, although there is a sketch of the true
thing in its image, the image itself still possesses a truth of its own: it
must needs be, therefore, that must have a prior existence for itself,
which is used figuratively to express some other thing. Vacuity is not a
consistent basis for a similitude, nor does nonentity form a suitable
foundation for a parable. It will therefore be right to believe that the
bones are destined to have a rehabiliment of flesh and breath, such as it
is here said they will have, by reason indeed of which their renewed state
could alone express the reformed condition of Jewish affairs, which is
pretended to be the meaning of this passage. It is. however, more
characteristic of a religious spirit to maintain the truth on the authority
of a literal interpretation, such as is required by the sense of the
inspired passage. Now, if this vision had reference to the condition of the
Jews, as soon as He had revealed to him the position of the bones, He would
at once have added, "These bones are the whole house of Israel," and so
forth. But immediately on showing the bones, He interrupts the scene by
saying somewhat of the prospect which is most suited to bones; without yet
naming Israel, He tries the prophet's own faith: "Son of man, can these
bones ever live?" so that he makes answer: "O Lord, Thou knowest." Now God
would not, you may be sure, have tried the prophet's faith on a point which
was never to be a real one, of which Israel should never hear, and in which
it was not proper to repose belief. Since, however, the resurrection of the
dead was indeed foretold, but Israel, in the distrust of his great
unbelief, was offended at it; and, whilst gazing on the condition of the
crumbling grave, despaired of a resurrection; or rather, did not direct his
mind mainly to it, but to his own harassing circumstances,--therefore God
first instructed the prophet (since he, too, was not free from doubt), by
revealing to him the process of the resurrection, with a view to his
earnest setting forth of the same. He then charged the people to believe
what He had revealed to the prophet, telling them that they were
themselves, though refusing to believe their resurrection, the very bones
which were destined to rise again. Then in the concluding sentence He says,
"And ye shall know how that I the Lord have spoken and done these things,"
intending of course to do that of which He had spoken; but certainly not
meaning to do that which He had spoken of, if His design had been to do
something different from what He had said.

CHAP. XXXI.--OTHER PASSAGES OUT OF THE PROPHETS APPLIED TO THE RESURRECTION
OF THE FLESH.

   Unquestionably, if the people were indulging in figurative murmurs that
their bones were become dry, and that their hope had perished--plaintive at
the consequences of their dispersion--then God might fairly enough seem to
have consoled their figurative despair with a figurative promise. Since,
however, no injury had as yet alighted on the people from their dispersion,
although the hope of the resurrection had very frequently failed amongst
them, it is manifest that it was owing to the perishing condition of their
bodies that their faith in the resurrection was shaken. God, therefore was
rebuilding the faith which the people were pulling down. But even if it
were true that Israel was then depressed at some shock in their existing
circumstances, we must not on that account suppose that the purpose of
revelation could have rested in a parable: its aim must have been to
testify a resurrection, in order to raise the nation's hope to even an
eternal salvation and an indispensable restoration, and thereby turn off
their minds from brooding over their present affairs. This indeed is the
aim of other prophets likewise. "Ye shall go forth," (says Malachi), "from
your sepulchres, as young calves let loose from their bonds, and ye shall
tread down your enemies."(1) And again, (Isaiah says): "Your heart shall
rejoice, and your bones shall spring up like the grass,"(2) because the
grass also is renewed by the dissolution and corruption of the seed. In a
word, if it is contended that the figure of the rising bones refers
properly to the state of Israel, why is the same hope announced to all
nations, instead of being limited to Israel only, of reinvesting those
osseous remains with bodily substance and vital breath, and of raising up
their dead out of the grave? For the language is universal: "The dead shall
arise, and come forth from their graves; for the dew which cometh from Thee
is medicine to their bones."(3) In another passage it is written: "All
flesh shall come to worship before me, saith the Lord."(4) When? When the
fashion of this world shall begin to pass away. For He said before: "As the
new heaven and the new earth, which I make, remain before me, saith the
Lord, so shall your seed remain."(5) Then also shall be fulfilled what is
written afterwards: "And they shall go forth" (namely, from their graves),
"and  shall see the carcases of those who have transgressed: for their worm
shall never die, nor shall their fire be quenched; and they shall be a
spectacle to all flesh"(6) even to that which, being raised again from the
dead and brought out from the grave, shall adore the Lord for this great
grace.

CHAP. XXXII.--EVEN UNBURIED BODIES WILL BE RAISED AGAIN. WHATEVER BEFALLS
THEM GOD WILL RESTORE THEM AGAIN. JONAH'S CASE QUOTED IN ILLUSTRATION OF
GOD'S POWER.

   But, that you may not suppose that it is merely those bodies which are
consigned to tombs whose resurrection is foretold, you have it declared in
Scripture: "And I will command the fishes of the sea, and they shall cast
up the bones which they have devoured; and I will bring joint to joint, and
bone to bone." You will ask, Will then the fishes and other animals and
carnivorous birds be raised again, in order that they may vomit up what
they have consumed, on the ground of your reading in the law of Moses, that
blood is required of even all the beasts? Certainly not. But the beasts and
the fishes are mentioned in relation to the restoration of flesh and blood,
in order the more emphatically to express the resurrection of such bodies
as have even been devoured, when redress is said to be demanded of their
very devourers. Now I apprehend that in the case of Jonah we have a fair
proof of this divine power, when he comes forth from the fish's belly
uninjured in both his natures--his flesh and his soul. No doubt the bowels
of the whale would have had abundant time during three days for consuming
and digesting Jonah's flesh, quite as effectually as a coffin, or a tomb,
or the gradual decay of some quiet and concealed grave; only that he wanted
to prefigure even those beasts (which symbolize) especially the men who are
wildly opposed to the Christian name, or the angels of iniquity, of whom
blood will be required by the full exaction of an avenging judgment. Where,
then, is the man who, being more disposed to learn than to assume, more
careful to believe than to dispute, and more scrupulous of the wisdom of
God than wantonly bent on his own, when he hears of a divine purpose
respecting sinews and skin, and nerves and bones, will forthwith devise
some different application of these words, as if all that is said of the
substances in question were not naturally intended for man? For either
there is here no reference to the destiny of man--in the gracious provision
of the kingdom (of heaven), in the severity of the judgment-day, in all the
incidents of the resurrection; or else, if there is any reference to his
destiny, the destination must necessarily be made in reference to those
substances of which the man is composed, for whom the destiny is reserved.
Another question I have also to ask of these very adroit transformers of
bones and sinews, and nerves and sepulchres: Why, when anything is declared
of the soul, do they not interpret the soul to be something else, and
transfer it to another signification?--since, whenever any distinct
statement is made of a bodily substance, they will obstinately prefer
taking any other sense whatever, rather than that which the name indicates.
If things which pertain to the body are figurative, why are not those which
pertain to the soul figurative also? Since, however, things which belong to
the soul have nothing allegorical in them, neither therefore have those
which belong to the body. For man is as much body as he is soul; so that it
is impossible for one of these natures to admit a figurative sense, and the
other to exclude it.

CHAP. XXXIII.--SO MUCH FOR THE PROPHETIC SCRIPTURES. IN THE GOSPELS,
CHRIST'S PARABLES, AS EXPLAINED BY HIMSELF, HAVE A CLEAR REFERENCE TO THE
RESURRECTION OF THE FLESH.

   This is evidence enough from the prophetic Scriptures. I now appeal to
the Gospels. But here also I must first meet the same sophistry as advanced
by those who contend that the Lord, like (the prophets), said everything in
the way of allegory, because it is written: "All these things spake Jesus
in parables, and without a parable spake He not unto them,"(1) that is, to
the Jews. Now the disciples also asked Him, "Why speakest Thou in
parables?"(2) And the Lord gave them this answer: "Therefore I speak unto
them in parables: because they seeing, see not; and hearing, they hear not,
according to the prophecy of Esaias."(3) But since it was to the Jews that
He spoke in parables, it was not then to all men; and if not to all, it
follows that it was not always and in all things parables with Him, but
only in certain things, and when addressing a particular class. But He
addressed a particular class when He spoke to the Jews. It is true that He
spoke sometimes even to the disciples in parables. But observe how the
Scripture relates such a fact: "And He spake a parable unto them."(4) It
follows, then, that He did not usually address them in parables; because if
He always did so, special mention would not be made of His resorting to
this mode of address. Besides, there is not a parable which you will not
find to be either explained by the Lord Himself, as that of the sower,
(which He interprets) of the management of the word of God;(5) or else
cleared by a preface from the writer of the Gospel, as in the parable of
the arrogant judge and the importunate widow, which is expressly applied to
earnestness in prayer;(6) or capable of being spontaneously understood,(7)
as in the parable of the fig-tree, which was spared a while in hopes of
improve-ment--an emblem of Jewish sterility. Now, if even parables obscure
not the light of the gospel, how unlikely it is that plain sentences and
declarations, which have an unmistakeable meaning, should signify any other
thing than their literal sense! But it is by such declarations and
sentences that the Lord sets forth either the last judgment, or the
kingdom, or the resurrection: "It shall be more tolerable," He says, "for
Tyre and Sidon in the day of judgment than far you."[1] And "Tell them that
the kingdom of God is at hand."[2] And again, "It shall be recompensed to
you at the resurrection of the just."[3] Now, if the mention of these
events (I mean the judgment-day, and the kingdom of God, and the
resurrection) has a plain and absolute sense, so that nothing about them
can be pressed into an allegory, neither should those statements be forced
into parables which describe the arrangement, and the process, and the
experience of the kingdom of God, and of the judgment, and of the
resurrection. On the contrary, things which are destined for the body
should be carefully understood in a bodily sense,--not in a spiritual
sense, as having nothing figurative in their nature. This is the reason why
we have laid it down as a preliminary consideration, that the bodily
substance both of the soul and of the flesh is liable to the recompense,
which will have to be awarded in return for the co-operation of the two
natures, that so the corporeality of the soul may not exclude the bodily
nature of the flesh by suggesting a recourse to figurative descriptions,
since both of them must needs be regarded as destined to take part in the
kingdom, and the judgment, and the resurrection. And now we proceed to the
special proof of this proposition, that the bodily character of the flesh
is indicated by our Lord whenever He mentions the resurrection, at the same
time without disparagement to the corporeal nature of the soul,--a point
which has been actually admitted but by a few.

CHAP. XXXIV.--CHRIST PLAINLY TESTIFIES TO THE RESURRECTION OF THE ENTIRE
MAN. NOT IN HIS SOUL ONLY, WITHOUT THE BODY.

   To begin with the passage where He says that He is come to "to seek and
to save that which is lost."[4] What do you suppose that to be which is
lost? Man, undoubtedly. The entire man, or only a part of him? The whole
man, of course. In fact, since the trangression which caused man's ruin was
committed quite as much by the instigation of the soul from concupiscence
as by the action of the flesh from actual fruition, it has marked the
entire man with the sentence of transgression, and has therefore made him
deservedly amenable to perdition. So that he will be wholly saved, since he
has by sinning been wholly lost. Unless it be true that the sheep (of the
parable) is a" lost" one, irrespective of its body; then its recovery may
be effected without the body. Since, however, it is the bodily substance as
well as the soul, making up the entire animal, which was carried on the
shoulders of the Good Shepherd, we have here unquestionably an example how
man is restored in both his natures. Else how unworthy it were of God to
bring only a moiety of man to salvation--and almost less than that; whereas
the munificence of princes of this world always claims for itself the merit
of a plenary grace! Then must the devil be understood to be stronger for
injuring man, ruining him wholly? and must God have the character of
comparative weakness, since He does not relieve and help man in his entire
state? The apostle, however, suggests that "where sin abounded, there has
grace much more abounded."[5] How, in fact, can he be regarded as saved,
who can at the same time be said to be lost--lost, that is, in the flesh,
but saved as to his soul? Unless, indeed, their argument now makes it
necessary that the soul should be placed in a "lost" condition, that it may
be susceptible of salvation, on the ground that is properly saved which has
been lost. We, however, so understand the soul's immortality as to believe
it "lost," not in the sense of destruction, but of punishment, that is, in
hell. And if this is the case, then it is not the soul which salvation will
affect, since it is "safe"already in its own nature by reason of its
immortality, but rather the flesh, which, as all readily allow, is subject
to destruction. Else, if the soul is also perishable (in this sense), in
other words, not immortal--the condition of the flesh--then this same
condition ought in all fairness to benefit the flesh also, as being
similarly mortal and perishable, since that which perishes the Lord
purposes to save. I do not care now to follow the clue of our discussion,
so far as to consider whether it is in one of his natures or in the other
that perdition puts in its claim on man, provided that salvation is equally
distributed over the two substances, and makes him its aim in respect of
them both. For observe, in which substance so-ever you assume man to have
perished, in the other be does not perish. He will therefore be saved in
the substance in which he does not perish, and yet obtain salvation in that
in which he does perish. You have (then) the restoration of the entire man,
inasmuch as the Lord purposes to save that part of him which perishes,
whilst he will not of course lose that portion which cannot be lost, Who
will any longer doubt of the safety  of both natures, when one of them is
to obtain salvation, and the other is not to lose it? And, still further,
the Lord explains to us the meaning of the thing when He says: "I came not
to do my own will, but the Father's, who hath sent me."[1] What, I ask, is
that will? "That of all which He hath given me I should lose nothing, but
should raise it up again at the last day."[2] Now, what had Christ received
of the Father but that which He had Himself put on? Man, of course, in his
texture of flesh and soul. Neither, therefore, of those parts which He has
received will He allow to perish; nay, no considerable portion--nay, not
the least fraction, of either. If the flesh be, as our opponents
slightingly think, but a poor fraction, then the flesh is safe, because not
a fraction of man is to perish; and no larger portion is in danger, because
every portion of man is in equally safe keeping with Him. If, however, He
will not raise the flesh also up at the last day, then He will permit not
only a fraction of man to perish, but (as I will venture to say, in
consideration of so important a part) almost the whole of him.  But when He
repeats His words with increased emphasis, "And this is the Father's will,
that every one which seeth the Son, and believeth on Him, may have eternal
life: and I will raise him up at the last day,"[3]--He asserts the full
extent of the resurrection. For He assigns to each several nature that
reward which is suited to its services: both to the flesh, for by it the
Son was "seen;" and to the soul, for by it He was "believed on." Then, you
will say, to them was this promise given by whom Christ was "seen." Well,
be it so; only let the same hope flow on from them to us! For if to them
who saw, and therefore believed, such fruit then accrued to the operations
of the flesh and the soul, how much more to us! For more "blessed," says
Christ, "are they who have not seen, and yet have believed;"[4] since, even
if the resurrection of the flesh must be denied to them, it must at any
rate be a fitting boon to us, who are the more blessed. For how could we be
blessed, if we were to perish in any part of us?

CHAP. XXXV.--EXPLANATION OF WHAT IS MEANT BY THE BODY, WHICH IS TO BE
RAISED AGAIN. NOT THE CORPOREALITY OF THE SOUL.

   But He also teaches us, that "He is rather to be feared, who is able to
destroy both body and soul in hell," that is, the Lord alone; "not those
which kill the body, but are not able to hurt the soul,"[5] that is to say,
all bureau powers. Here, then, we have a recognition of the natural
immortality of the soul, which cannot be killed by men; and of the
mortality of the body, which may be killed: whence we learn that the
resurrection of the dead is a resurrection of the flesh; for unless it were
raised again, it would be impossible for the flesh to be "killed in hell."
But as a question may be here captiously raised about the meaning of "the
body" (or "the flesh "), I will at once state that I understand by the
human body nothing else than that fabric of the flesh which, whatever be
the kind of material of which it is constructed and modified, is seen and
handled, and sometimes indeed killed, by men. In like manner, I should not
admit that anything but cement and stones and bricks form the body of a
wall. If any one imports into our argument some body of a subtle, secret
nature, he must show, disclose, and prove to me that identical body is the
very one which was slain by human violence, and then (I will grant) that it
is of such a body that (our scripture) speaks. If, again, the body or
corporeal nature of the soul[6] is cast in my teeth. it will only be an
idle subterfuge!  For since both substances are set before us (in this
passage, which affirms) that "body and soul" are destroyed in bell, a
distinction is obviously made between the two; and we are left to
understand the body to be that which is tangible to us, that is, the flesh,
which, as it will be destroyed in hell--since it did not "rather fear"
being destroyed by God--so also will it be restored to life eternal, since
it preferred to be killed by human hands. If, therefore, any one shall
violently suppose that the destruction of the soul and the flesh in hell
amounts to a final annihilation of the two substances, and not to their
penal treatment (as if they were to be consumed, not punished), let him
recollect that the fire of hell is eternal--expressly announced as an
everlasting penalty; and let him then admit that it is from this
circumstance that this never-ending "killing" is more formidable than a
merely human murder, which is only temporal. He will then come to the
conclusion that substances must be eternal, when their penal "killing" is
an eternal one. Since, then, the body after the resurrection has to be
killed by God in hell along with the soul, we surely have sufficient
information in this fact respecting both the issues which await it, namely
the resurrection of the flesh, and its eternal "killing." Else it would be
most absurd if the flesh should be raised up and destined to "the killing
in hell," in order to be put an end to, when it might suffer such an
annihilation (more directly) if not raised again at all. A pretty
paradox,[1] to be sure, that an essence must be refitted with life, in
order that it may receive that annihilation which has already in fact
accrued to it! But Christ, whilst confirming us in the selfsame hope, adds
the example of "the sparrows"--how that "not one of them falls to the
ground without the will of God."[2] He says this, that you may believe that
the flesh which has been consigned to the ground, is able in like manner to
rise again by the will of the same God. For although this is not allowed to
the sparrows, yet "we are of more value than many sparrows,"[3] for the
very reason that, when fallen, we rise again. He affirms, lastly, that "the
very hairs of our head are all numbered,"[4] and ir the affirmation He of
course includes the promise of their safety; for if they were to be lost,
where would be the use of having taken such a numerical care of them?
Surely the only use lies (in this truth): "That of all which the Father
hath given to me, I should lose none,"[5]--not even a hair, as also not an
eye nor a tooth. And yet whence shall come that "weeping and gnashing of
teeth,"[6] if not from eyes and teeth?--even at that time when the body
shall be slain in hell, and thrust out into that outer darkness which shall
be the suitable torment of the eyes. He also who shall not be clothed at
the marriage feast in the raiment of good works, will have to be " bound
hand and foot,"--as being, of course, raised in his body. So, again, the
very reclining at the feast in the kingdom of God, and sitting on Christ's
thrones, and standing at last on His right hand and His left, and eating of
the tree of life: what are all these but most certain proofs of a bodily
appointment and destination?

CHAP. XXXVI.--CHRIST'S REFUTATION OF THE SADDUCEES, AND AFFIRMATION OF
CATHOLIC DOCTRINE.

   Let us now see whether (the Lord) has not imparted greater strength to
our doctrine in breaking down the subtle cavil of the Sadducees. Their
great object, I take it, was to do away altogether with the resurrection,
for the Sadducees in fact did not admit any salvation either for the soul
or the flesh;[7] and therefore, taking the strongest case they could for
impairing the credibility of the resurrection, they adapted an argument
from it in support of the question which they started. Their specious
inquiry concerned the flesh, whether or not it would be subject to marriage
after the resurrection; and they assumed the case of a woman who had
married seven brothers, so that it was a doubtful point to which of them
she should be restored.[8] Now, let the purport both of the question and
the answer be kept steadily in view, and the discussion is settled at once.
For since the Sadducees indeed denied the resurrection, whilst the Lord
affirmed it; since, too, (in affirming it,) He reproached them as being
both ignorant of the Scriptures--those, of course which had declared the
resurrection--as well as incredulous of the power of God, though, of
course, effectual to raise the dead, and lastly, since He immediately added
the words, "Now, that the dead are raised,"[9] (speaking) without
misgiving, and affirming the very thing which was being denied, even the
resurrection of the dead before Him who is "the God of the living,"--(it
clearly follows) that He affirmed this verity in the precise sense in which
they were denying it; that it was, in fact, the resurrection of the two
natures of man. Nor does it follow, (as they would have it,) that because
Christ denied that men would marry, He therefore proved that they would not
rise again. On the contrary, He called them "the children of the
resurrection,"[10] in a certain sense having by the resurrection to undergo
a birth; and after that they marry no more, but in their risen life are
"equal unto the angels,"[1] inasmuch as they are not to marry, because they
are not to die, but are destined to pass into the angelic state by putting
on the raiment of incorruption, although with a change in the substance
which is restored to life. Besides, no question could be raised whether we
are to marry or die again or not, without involving in doubt the
restoration most especially of that substance which has a particular
relation both to death and marriage--that is, the flesh. Thus, then, you
have the Lord affirming against the Jewish heretics what is now
encountering the denial of the Christian Sadducees--the resurrection of the
entire man.

CHAP. XXXVII.--CHRIST'S ASSERTION ABOUT THE UNPROFITABLENESS OF THE FLESH
EXPLAINED CONSISTENTLY WITH OUR DOCTRINE.

   He says, it is true, that "the flesh profiteth nothing;"[1] but then,
as in the former case, the meaning must be regulated by the subject which
is spoken of. Now, because they thought His discourse was harsh and
intolerable, supposing that He had really and literally enjoined on them to
eat his flesh, He, with the view of ordering the state of salvation as a
spiritual thing, set out with the principle, "It is the spirit that
quickeneth;" and then added, "The flesh profiteth nothing,"--meaning, of
course, to the giving of life. He also goes on to explain what He would
have us to understand by spirit: "The words that I speak unto you, they are
spirit, and they are life." In a like sense He had previously said: "He
that heareth my words, and believeth on Him that sent me, hath everlasting
life, and shall not come into condemnation, but shall pass from death unto
life."[2] Constituting, therefore, His word as the life-giving principle,
because that word is spirit and life, He likewise called His flesh by the
same appelation; because, too, the Word had become flesh,[3] we ought
therefore to desire Him in order that we may have life, and to devour Him
with the ear, and to ruminate on Him with the understanding, and to digest
Him by faith. Now, just before (the passage in hand), He had declared His
flesh to be "the bread which cometh down from heaven,"[4] impressing on
(His hearers) constantly under the figure of necessary food the memory of
their forefathers, who had preferred the bread and flesh of Egypt to their
divine calling.[5] Then, turning His subject to their reflections, because
He perceived that they were going to be scattered from Him, He says: "The
flesh profiteth nothing." Now what is there to destroy the resurrection of
the flesh? As if there might not reasonably enough be something which,
although it" profiteth nothing" itself, might yet be capable of being
profited by something else. The spirit "profiteth," for it imparts life.
The flesh profiteth nothing, for it is subject to death. Therefore He has
rather put the two propositions in a way which favours our belief: for by
showing what "profits," and what "does not profit," He has likewise thrown
light on the object which receives as well as the subject which gives the
"profit." Thus, in the present instance, we have the Spirit giving life to
the flesh which has been subdued by death; for "the hour," says He, "is
coming, when the dead shall hear the voice of the Son of God, and they that
hear shall live."[6]  Now, what is "the dead" but the flesh? and what is
"the voice of God" but the Word? and what is the Word but the Spirit,[7]
who shall justly raise the flesh which He had once Himself become, and that
too from death, which He Himself suffered, and from the grave, which He
Himself once entered? Then again, when He says, "Marvel not at this: for
the hour is coming, in which all that are in the graves shall hear the
voice of the Son of God, and shall come forth; they that have done good, to
the resurrection of life; and they that have done evil, unto the
resurrection of damnation,"[8]--none will after such words be able to
interpret the dead "that are in the graves" as any other than the bodies of
the flesh, because the graves themselves are nothing but the resting-place
of corpses: for it is incontestable that even those who partake of "the old
man," that is to say, sinful men--in other words, those who are dead
through their ignorance of God (whom our heretics, forsooth, foolishly
insist on understanding by the word "graves"[9])--are plainly here spoken
of as having to come from their graves for judgment. But how are graves to
come forth from graves?

CHAP. XXXVIII.--CHRIST, BY RAISING THE DEAD, ATTESTED IN A PRACTICAL WAY
THE DOCTRINE OF THE RESURRECTION OF THE FLESH.

   After the Lord's words, what are we to think of the purport of His
actions, when He raises dead persons from their biers and their graves? To
what end did He do so? If it was only for the mere exhibition of His power,
or to afford the temporary favour of restoration to life, it was really no
great matter for Him to raise men to die over again. If, however, as was
the truth, it was rather to put in secure keeping men's belief in a future
resurrection, then it must follow from the particular form of His own
examples, that the said resurrection will be a bodily one. I can never
allow it to be said that the resurrection of the future, being destined for
the soul only, did then receive these preliminary illustrations of a
raising of the flesh, simply because it would have been impossible to have
shown the resurrection of an invisible soul except by the resuscitation of
a visible substance. They have but a poor knowledge of God, who suppose Him
to be only capable of doing what comes within the compass of their own
thoughts; and after all, they cannot but know full well what His capability
has ever been, if they only make acquaintance with the writings of John.
For unquestionably he, who has exhibited to our sight the martyrs' hitherto
disembodied souls resting under the altar, was quite able to display them
before our eyes rising without a body of flesh. I, however, for my part
prefer (believing) that it is impossible for God to practise deception
(weak as He only could be in respect of artifice), from any fear of seeming
to have given preliminary proofs of a thing in a way which is inconsistent
with His actual disposal of the thing; nay more, from a fear that, since He
was not powerful enough to show us a sample of the resurrection without the
flesh, He might with still greater infirmity be unable to display (by and
by) the full accomplishment of the sample in the self-same substance of the
flesh. No example, indeed, is greater than the thing of which it is a
sample. Greater, however, it is, if souls with their body are to be raised
as the evidence of their resurrection without the body, so as that the
entire salvation of man in saul and body should become a guarantee for only
the half, the soul; whereas the condition in all examples is, that which
would be deemed the less--I mean the resurrection of the soul only--should
be the foretaste, as it were, of the rising of the flesh also at its
appointed time. And therefore, according to our estimate of the truth,
those examples of dead persons who were raised by the Lord were indeed a
proof of the resurrection both of the flesh and of the soul,--a proof, in
fact, that this gift was to be denied to neither substance. Considered,
however, as examples only, they expressed all the less significance--less,
indeed, than Christ will express at last--for they were not raised up for
glory and immortality, but only for another death.

CHAP. XXXIX.--ADDITIONAL EVIDENCE AFFORDED TO US IN THE ACTS OF THE
APOSTLES.

   The Acts of the Apostles, too, attest[2] the resurrection. Now the
apostles had nothing else to do, at least among the Jews, than to-
explain[3] the Old Testament and confirm[4] the New, and above all, to
preach God in Christ. Consequently they introduced nothing new concerning
the resurrection, besides announcing it to the glory of Christ: in every
other respect it had been already received in simple and intelligent faith,
without any question as to what sort of resurrection it was to be, and
without encountering any other opponents than the Sadducees. So much easier
was it to deny the resurrection altogether, than to understand it in an
alien sense. You find Paul confessing his faith before the chief priests,
under the shelter of the chief captain,[5] among the Sadducees and the
Pharisees: "Men and brethren," he says, "I am a Pharisee, the son of a
Pharisee; of the hope and resurrection of the dead I am now called in
question by you,"[6]--referring, of course, to the nation's hope; in order
to avoid, in his present condition, as an apparent transgressor of the law,
being thought to approach to the Sadducees in opinion on the most important
article of the faith--even the resurrection. That belief, therefore, in the
resurrection which he would not appear to impair, he really confirmed in
the opinion of the Pharisees, since he rejected the views of the Sadducees,
who denied it. In like manner, before Agrippa also, he says that he was
advancing "none other things than those which the prophets had
announced."[7] He was therefore maintaining just such a resurrection as the
prophets had foretold. He mentions also what is written by "Moses ",
touching the resurrection of the dead; (and in so doing) he must have known
that it would be a rising in the body, since requisition will have to be
made therein of the blood of man.[8] He declared it then to be of such a
character as the Pharisees had admitted it, and such as the Lord had
Himself maintained it, and such too as the Sadducees refused to believe it-
-such refusal leading them indeed to an absolute rejection of the whole
verity. Nor had the Athenians previously understood Paul to announce any
other resurrection.[9] They had, in fact, derided his announcement; but
they would have indulged no such derision if they had heard from him
nothing but the restoration of the soul, for they would have received that
as the very common anticipation of their own native philosophy. But when
the preaching of the resurrection, of which they had previously not heard,
by its absolute novelty excited the heathen, and a not unnatural
incredulity in so wonderful a matter began to harass the simple faith with
many discussions, then the apostle took care in almost every one of his
writings to strengthen men's belief of this Christian hope, pointing out
that there was such a hope, and that it had not as yet been realized, and
that it would be in the body,--a point which was the especial object of
inquiry, and, what was besides a doubtful question, not in a body of a
different kind from ours.

CHAP, XL.--SUNDRY PASSAGES OF ST. PAUL WHICH ATTEST OUR DOCTRINE RESCUED
FROM THE PERVERSIONS OF HERESY.

   Now it is no matter of surprise if arguments are captiously taken from
the writings of (the apostle) himself, inasmuch as there "must needs be
heresies;"[1] but these could not be, if the Scriptures were not capable of
a false interpretation. Well, then, heresies finding that the apostle had
mentioned two "men"--"the inner man," that is, the soul, and "the outward
man," that is, the flesh--awarded salvation to the soul or inward man, and
destruction to the flesh or outward man, because it is written (in the
Epistle) to the Corinthians: "Though our outward man decayeth, yet the
inward man is renewed day by day."[2] Now, neither the soul by itself alone
is "man" (it was subsequently implanted in the clayey mould to which the
name man had been already given), nor is the flesh without the soul " man
": for after the exile of the soul from it, it has the title of corpse.
Thus the designation man is, in a certain sense, the bond between the two
closely united substances, under which designation they cannot but be
coherent natures. As for the inward man, indeed, the apostle prefers its
being regarded as the mind and heart[3] rather than the soul;[4] in other
words, not so much the substance itself as the savour of the substance.
Thus when, writing to the Ephesians, he  spoke of "Christ dwelling in their
inner man," he meant, no doubt, that the Lord ought to be admitted into
their senses.[5] He then added, "in your hearts by faith, rooted and
grounded in love,"--making "faith" and "love" not substantial parts, but
only conceptions of the soul. But when he used the phrase "in your hearts,"
seeing that these are substantial parts of the flesh, he at once assigned
to the flesh the actual "inward man," which he placed in the heart.
Consider now in what sense he alleged that "the outward man decayeth, while
the inward man is renewed day by day." You certainly would not maintain
that he could mean that corruption of the flesh which it undergoes from the
moment of death, in its appointed state of perpetual decay; but the wear
and tear which for the name of Christ it experiences during its course of
life before and until death, in harassing cares and tribulations as well as
in tortures and persecutions. Now the inward man will have, of course, to
be renewed by the suggestion of the Spirit, advancing by faith and holiness
day after day, here in this life, not there after the resurrection, were
our renewal is not a gradual process from day to day, but a consummation
once for all complete. You may learn this, too, from the following passage,
where the apostle says: "For our light affliction, which is but for a
moment, worketh for as a far more exceeding and eternal weight of glory;
while we look not at the things which are seen," that is, our sufferings,
"but at the things which are not seen," that is, our rewards: "for the
things which are seen are temporal, but the things which are not seen are
eternal."[6] For the afflictions and injuries wherewith the outward man is
worn away, he affirms to be only worthy of being despised by us, as being
light and temporary; preferring those eternal recompenses which are also
invisible, and that "weight of glory" which will be a counterpoise for the
labours in the endurance of which the flesh here suffers decay. So that the
subject in this passage is not that corruption which they ascribe to the
outward man in the utter destruction of the flesh, with the view of
nullifying the resurrection. So also he says elsewhere: "If so be that we
suffer with Him, that we may be also glorified together; for I reckon that
the sufferings of the present time are not worthy to be compared with the
glory that shall be revealed in us."[7] Here again he shows us that our
sufferings are less than their rewards. Now, since it is through the flesh
that we suffer with Christ--for it is the property of the flesh to be worn
by sufferings--to the same flesh belongs the recompense which is promised
for suffering with Christ. Accordingly, when he is going to assign
afflictions to the flesh as its especial liability--according to the
statement he had already made--he says, "When we were come into Macedonia,
our flesh had no rest;"[8] then, in order to make the soul a fellow-
sufferer with the body, he adds, "We were troubled on every side; without
were fightings," which of course warred down the flesh, "within were
fears," which afflicted the soul.[9] Although, therefore, the outward man
decays--not in the sense of missing the resurrection, but of enduring
tribulation--it will be understood from this scripture that it is not
exposed to its suffering without the inward man. Both therefore, will be
glorified together, even as they have suffered together. Parallel with
their participation in troubles, must necessarily run their association
also in rewards.

CHAP. XLI.--THE DISSOLUTION OF OUR TABERNACLE CONSISTENT WITH THE
RESURRECTION OF OUR BODIES.

   It is still the same sentiment which he follows up in the passage in
which he puts the recompense above the sufferings: "for we know;" he says,
"that if our earthly house of this tabernacle were dissolved, we have a
house not made with hands, eternal in the heavens;"[1] in other words,
owing to the fact that our flesh is undergoing dissolution through its
sufferings, we shall be provided with a home in heaven. He remembered the
award (which the Lord assigns) in the Gospel: "Blessed are they who are
persecuted for righteousness' sake, for theirs is the kingdom of
heaven."[2] Yet, when he thus contrasted the recompense of the reward, he
did not deny the flesh's restoration; since the recompense is due to the
same substance to which the dissolution is attributed,--that is, of course,
the flesh. Because, however, he had called the flesh a horse, he wished
elegantly to use the same term in his comparison of the ultimate reward;
promising to the very house, which undergoes dissolution through suffering,
a better house through the resurrection. Just as the Lore also promises us
many mansions as of a house in His Father's home;[3] although this may
possibly be understood of the domicile of this world, on the dissolution of
whose fabric an eternal abode is promised in heaven, inasmuch as the
following context, having a manifest reference to the flesh, seems to show
that these preceding words have no such reference. For the apostle makes a
distinction, when he goes on to say, "For in this we groan, earnestly
desiring to be clothed upon with our house which is from heaven, if so be
that being clothed we shall not be found naked;"[4]   which means, before
we put off the garment of the flesh, we wish to be clothed with the
celestial glory of immortality. Now the privilege of this favour awaits
those who shall at  the coming of the Lord be found in the flesh, and who
shall, owing to the oppressions of the time of Antichrist, deserve by an
instantaneous death,[5] which is accomplished by a sudden change, to become
qualified to join the rising saints; as he writes to the Thessalonians:
"For this we say unto you by the word of the Lord, that we which are alive
and remain unto the coming of the Lord shall not prevent them which are
asleep. For the Lord Himself shall descend from heaven with a shout, with
the voice of the archangel, and with the trump of God: and the dead in
Christ shall rise first: then we too shall ourselves be caught up together
with them in the clouds, to meet the Lord in the air: and so shall we ever
be with the Lord."[6]

CHAP. XLII.--DEATH CHANGES, WITHOUT DESTROYING, OUR MORTAL BODIES.
REMAINS OF THE GIANTS.

   It is the transformation these shall undergo which he explains to the
Corinthians, when he writes: "We shall all indeed rise again (though we
shall not all undergo the transformation) in a moment, in the twinkling of
an eye, at the last trump "--for none shall experience this change but
those only who shall be found in the flesh. "And the dead," he says, "shall
be raised, and we shall be changed." Now, after a careful consideration of
this appointed order, you will be able to adjust what follows to the
preceding sense. For when he adds, "This corruptible must put on
incorrruption, and this mortal must put on immortality,"[7] this will
assuredly be that house from heaven, with which we so earnestly desire to
be clothed upon, whilst groaning in this our present body,--meaning, of
course, over this flesh in which we shall be surprised at last; because he
says that we are burdened whilst in this tabernacle, which we do not wish
indeed to be stripped of, but rather to be in it clothed over, in such a
way that mortality may be swallowed up of life, that is, by putting on over
us whilst we are transformed that vestiture which is from heaven. For who
is there that will not desire, while he is in the flesh, to put on
immortality, and to continue his life by a happy escape from death, through
the transformation which must be experienced instead of it, without
encountering too that Hades which will exact the very last farthing?[8]
Nothwithstanding, he who has already traversed Hades is destined also to
obtain the change after the resurrection. For from this circumstance it is
that we definitively declare that the flesh will by all means rise again,
and, from the change that is to come over it, will assume the condition of
angels. Now, if it were merely in the case of those who shall be found in
the flesh that the change must be undergone, in order that mortality may be
swallowed up of life--in other words, that the flesh (be covered) with the
heavenly and eternal raiment--it would either follow that those who shall
be found in death would not obtain life, deprived as they would then be of
the material and so to say the aliment of life, that is, the flesh; or
else, these also must needs undergo the change, that in them too mortality
may be swallowed up of life, since it is appointed that they too should
obtain life. But, you say, in the case of the dead, mortality is already
swallowed up of life. No, not in all cases, certainly. For how many will
most probably be found of men who had just died--so recently put into their
graves, that nothing in them would seem to be decayed? For you do not of
course deem a thing to be decayed unless it be cut off, abolished, and
withdrawn from our perception, as having in every possible way ceased to be
apparent. There are the carcases of the giants of old time; it will be
obvious enough that they are not absolutely decayed, for their bony frames
are still extant. We have already spoken of this elsewhere.[1] For
instance,[2] even lately in this very city,[3] when they were
sacrilegiously laying the foundations of the Odeum on a good many ancient
graves, people were horror-stricken to discover, after some five hundred
years, bones, which still retained their moisture, and hair which had not
lost its perfume. It is certain not only that bones remain indurated, but
also that teeth continue undecayed for ages--both of them the lasting germs
of that body which is to sprout into life again in the resurrection.
Lastly, even if everything that is mortal in all the dead shall then be
found decayed--at any rate consumed by death, by time, and through age,--is
there nothing which will be "swallowed up of life,"[4] nor by being covered
over and arrayed in the vesture of immortality? Now, he who says that
mortality is going to be swallowed up of life has already admitted that
what is dead is not destroyed by those other before-mentioned devourers.
And verily it will be extremely fit that all shall be consummated and
brought about by the operations of God, and not by the laws of nature.
Therefore, inasmuch as what is mortal has to be swallowed up of life, it
must needs be brought out to view in order to be so swallowed up; (needful)
also to be swallowed up, in order to undergo the ultimate transformation.
If you were to say that a fire is to be lighted, you could not possibly
allege that what is to kindle it is sometimes necessary and sometimes not.
In like manner, when he inserts the words "If so be that being unclothed[5]
we be not found naked."[6]--refering, of course, to those who shall not be
found in the day of the Lord alive and in the flesh--he did not say that
they whom he had just described as unclothed or stripped, were naked in any
other sense than meaning that they should be understood to be reinvested
with the very same substance they had been divested of. For although they
shall be found naked when their flesh has been laid aside, or to some
extent sundered or worn away (and this condition may well be called
nakedness,) they shall afterwards recover it again, in order that, being
reinvested with the flesh, they may be able also to have put over that the
supervestment of immortality; for it will be impossible for the outside
garment to fit except over one who is already dressed.

CHAP. XLIII.--NO DISPARAGEMENT OF OUR DOCTRINE IN ST. PAUL'S PHRASE, WHICH
CALLS OUR RESIDENCE IN THE FLESH ABSENCE FROM THE LORD.

   In the same way, when he says, "Therefore we are always confident, and
fully aware, that while we are at home in the body we are absent from the
Lord; for we walk by faith, not be sight,''[7] it is manifest that in this
statement there is no design of disparaging the flesh, as if it separated
us from the Lord. For there is here pointedly addressed to us an
exhortation to disregard this present life, since we are absent from the
Lord as long as we are passing through it--walking by faith, not by sight;
in other words, in hope, not in reality. Accordingly he adds: "We are
indeed confident and deem it good rather to be absent from the body, and
present with the Lord;''[8] in order, that is, that we may walk by sight
rather than by faith, in realization rather than in hope. Observe how he
here also ascribes to the excellence of martyrdom a contempt for the body.
For no one, on becoming absent from the body, is at once a dweller in the
presence of the Lord, except by the prerogative of martyrdom,[9] he gains a
lodging in Paradise, not in the lower regions. Now, had the apostle been at
a loss for words to describe the departure from the body? Or does he
purposely use a novel phraseology? For, wanting to express our temporary
absence from the body, he says that we are strangers, absent from it,
because a man who goes abroad returns after a while to his home. Then he
says even to all: "We therefore earnestly desire to be acceptable unto God,
whether absent or present; for we must all appear before the judgment-seat
of Christ Jesus."[1] If all of us, then all of us wholly; if wholly, then
our inward man and outward too--that is, our bodies no less than our souls.
"That every one," as he goes on to say, "may receive the things done in his
body, according to that he hath done, whether it be good or bad."[2] Now I
ask, how do you read this passage? Do you take it to be confusedly
constructed, with a transposition[3] of ideas? Is the question about what
things will have to be received by the body, or the things which have been
already done in the body? Well, if the things which are to be borne by the
body are meant, then undoubtedly a resurrection of the body is implied; and
if the things which have been already done in the body are referred to,
(the same conclusion follows): for of course the retribution will have to
be paid by the body, since it was by the body that the actions were
performed. Thus the apostle's whole argument from the beginning is
unravelled in this concluding clause, wherein the resurrection of the flesh
is set forth; and it ought to be understood in a sense which is strictly in
accordance with this conclusion.

CHAP. XLIV.--SUNDRY OTHER PASSAGES OF ST. PAUL EXPLAINED IN A SENTENCE
CONFIRMATORY OF OUR DOCTRINE.

   Now, if you will examine the words which precede the passage where
mention is made of the outward and the inward man, will you not discover
the whole truth, both of the dignity and the hope of the flesh? For, when
he speaks of the "light which God hath commanded to shine in our hearts, to
give the light of the knowledge of the glory of the Lord in the person of
Jesus Christ,"[4] and says that "we have this treasure in earthen
vessels,"[5] meaning of course the flesh, which is meant--that the flesh
shall be destroyed, because it is "an earthen vessel," deriving its origin
from clay; or that it is to be glorified, as being the receptacle of a
divine treasure? Now if that true light, which is in the person of Christ,
contains in itself life, and that life with its light is committed to the
flesh, is that destined to perish which has life entrusted to it? Then, of
course, the treasure will perish also; for perishable things are entrusted
to things which are themselves perishable, which is like putting new wine
into old bottles. When also he adds, "Always bearing about in our body the
dying of the Lord Jesus Christ"[6] what sort of substance is that which,
after (being called) the temple of God, can now be also designated the tomb
of Christ? But  why do we bear about in the body the dying of the Lord? In
order, as he says, "that His life also may be manifested."[7] Where? "In
the body." In what body? "In our mortal body."[8] Therefore in the flesh,
which is mortal indeed through sin, but living through grace--how great a
grace you may see when the purpose is, "that the life of Christ may be
manifested in it." Is it then in a thing which is a stranger to salvation,
in a substance which is perpetually dissolved, that the life of Christ will
be manifested, which is eternal, continuous, incorruptible, and already the
life of God? Else to what epoch belongs that life of the Lord which is to
be manifested in our body? It surely is the life which He lived up to His
passion, which was not only openly shown among the Jews, but has now been
displayed even to all nations. Therefore that life is meant which" has
broken the adamantine gates of death and the brazen bars of the lower
world,"[9]--a life which thenceforth has been and will be ours. Lastly, it
is to be manifested in the body. When? After death. How? By rising in our
body, as Christ also rose in His. But lest any one should here object, that
the life of Jesus has even now to be manifested in our body by the
discipline of holiness, and patience, and righteouness, and wisdom, in
which the Lord's life abounded, the most provident wisdom of the apostle
inserts this purpose: "For we which live are alway delivered unto death for
Jesus' sake, that His life may be manifested in our mortal body."[10] In
us, therefore, even when dead, does he say that this is to take place in
us. And if so, how is this possible except in our body after its
resurrection? Therefore he adds in the concluding sentence: "Knowing that
He which raised up the Lord Jesus, shall raise up us also with Him,"[11]
risen as He is already from the dead. But perhaps "with Him" means "like
Him:" well then, if it be like Him, it is not of course without the flesh.

CHAP. XLV.--THE OLD MAN AND THE NEW MAN OF ST. PAUL EXPLAINED.

   But in their blindness they again impale themselves on the point of the
old and the new man. When the apostle enjoins us "to put off the old man,
which is corrupt according to the deceitful lusts; and to be renewed in the
spirit of our mind; and to put on the new man, which after God is created
in righteousness and true holiness,"[1] (they maintain) that by here also
making a distinction between the two substances, and applying the old one
to the flesh and the new one to the spirit, he ascribes to the old man--
that is to say, the flesh--a permanent corruption. Now, if you follow the
order of the substances, the soul cannot be the new man because it comes
the later of the two; nor can the flesh be the old man because it is the
former. For what fraction of time was it that intervened between the
creative hand of God and His afflatus? I will venture to say, that even if
the soul was a good deal prior to the flesh, by the very circumstance that
the soul had to wait to be itself completed, it made the other[2] really
the former. For everything which gives the finishing stroke and perfection
to a work, although it is subsequent in its mere order, yet has the
priority in its effect. Much more is that prior, without which preceding
things could have no existence. If the flesh be the old man, when did it
become so? From the beginning? But Adam was wholly a new man, and of that
new man there could be no part an old man. And from that time, ever since
the blessing which was pronounced upon man's generation,[3] the flesh and
the soul have had a simultaneous birth, without any calcuable difference in
time; so that the two have been even generated together in the womb, as we
have shown in our Treatise an the Saul.[4] Contemporaneous in the womb,
they are also temporally identical in their birth. The two are no doubt
produced by human parents[5] of two substances, but not at two different
periods; rather they are so entirely one, that  neither is before the other
in paint of time. It  is more correct (to say), that we are either
entirely the old man or entirely the new, for we cannot tell how we can
possibly be anything else. But the apostle mentions a very clear mark of
the old man. For "put off," says he, "concerning the former conversation,
the old man; "[6] (he does) not say concerning the seniority of either
substance. It is not indeed the flesh which he bids us to put off, but the
works which he in another passage shows to be "works of the flesh."[7] He
brings no accusation against men's bodies, of which he even writes as
follows: "Putting away lying, speak every man truth with his neighbor: for
we are members one of another. Be ye angry, and sin not: let not the sun go
down upon your wrath: neither give place to the devil. Let him that stole
steal no more: but rather let him labour, working with his hands (the thing
which is good), that he may have to give to him that needeth. Let no
corrupt communication proceed out of your mouth, but that which is good for
the edification of faith, that it may minister grace unto the hearers. And
grieve not the Holy Spirit of God, whereby ye are sealed unto the day of
redemption. Let all bitterness, and wrath, and anger, and clamour, and
evil-speaking, be put away from you, with all malice: but be ye kind one to
another, tender-hearted, forgiving one another, even as God in Christ hath
forgiven you.''[8] Why, therefore, do not those who suppose the flesh to be
the old man, hasten their own death, in order that by laying aside the old
man they may satisfy the apostle's precepts? As for ourselves, we believe
that the whole of faith is to be administered in the flesh, nay more, by
the flesh, which has both a mouth for the utterance of all holy words, and
a tongue to refrain from blasphemy, and a heart to avoid all irritation,
and hands to labour and to give; while we also maintain that as well the
old man as the new has relation to the difference of moral conduct, and not
to any discrepancy of nature. And just as we acknowledge that that which
according to its former conversation was "the old man" was also corrupt,
and received its very name in accordance with "its deceitful lusts," so
also (do we hold) that it is "the old man in reference to its former
conversation,"[9] and not in respect of the flesh through any permanent
dissolution. Moreover, it is still unimpaired in the flesh, and identical
in that nature, even when it has become "the new man;" since it is of its
sinful course of life, and not of its corporeal substance, that it has been
divested.

CHAP. XLVI.--IT IS THE WORKS OF THE FLESH, NOT THE SUBSTANCE OF THE FLESH,
WHICH ST. PAUL ALWAYS CONDEMNS.

   You may notice that the apostle everywhere condemns the works of the
flesh in such a way as to appear to condemn the flesh; but no one can
suppose him to have any such view as this, since he goes on to suggest
another sense, even though somewhat resembling it. For when he actually
declares that "they who are in the flesh cannot please God," he immediately
recalls the statement from an heretical sense to a sound one, by adding,
"But ye are not in the flesh, but in the Spirit.''[1] Now, by denying them
to be in the flesh who yet obviously were in the flesh, he showed that they
were not living amidst the works of the flesh, and therefore that they who
could not please God were not those who were in the flesh, but only those
who were living after the flesh; whereas they pleased God, who, although
existing in the flesh, were yet walking after the Spirit. And, again, he
says that "the body is dead;" but it is "because of sin," even as "the
Spirit is life because of righteousness."[2] When, however, he thus sets
life in opposition to the death which is constituted in the flesh, he
unquestionably promises the life of righteousness to the same state for
which he determined the death of sin, But unmeaning is this opposition
which he makes between the "life" and the "death," if the life is not there
where that very thing is to which he opposes it--even the death which is to
be extirpated of course from the body. Now, if life thus extirpates death
from the body, it can accomplish this only by penetrating thither where
that is which it is excluding. But why am I resorting to knotty
arguments,[3] when the apostle treats the subject with perfect plainness?
"For if," says he, "the Spirit of Him that raised up Jesus from the dead
dwell in you, He that raised up Jesus from the dead shall also quicken your
mortal bodies, because of His Spirit that dwelleth in you;"[4] so that even
if a person were to assume that the soul is "the mortal body," he would
(since he cannot possibly deny that the flesh is this also) be constrained
to acknowledge a restoration even of the flesh, in consequence of its
participation  in the selfsame state. From the following words, moreover,
you may learn that it is the works of the flesh which are condemned, and
not the flesh itself: "Therefore, brethren, we are debtors, not to the
flesh, to live  after the flesh: for if ye live after the flesh ye shall
die; but if ye, through the Spirit,  do mortify the deeds of the body, ye
shall live."[5] Now (that I may answer each point separately), since
salvation is promised to those who are living in the flesh, but walking
after the Spirit, it is no longer the flesh which is an adversary to
salvation, but the working of the flesh. When, however, this operativeness
of the flesh is done away with, which is the cause of death, the flesh is
shown  to be safe, since it is freed from the cause of  death. "For the
law," says he, "of the Spirit of life in Christ Jesus hath made me free
from the law of sin and death,"[6]--that, surely, which he previously
mentioned as dwelling in our members.[7] Our members, therefore, will no
longer be subject to the law of death, because they cease to serve that of
sin, from both which they have been set free. "For what the law could not
do, in that it was weak through the flesh, God sending His own Son in the
likeness of sinful flesh, and through[8] sin condemned sin in the flesh
"[9]--not the flesh in sin, for the house is not to be condemned with its
inhabitant. He said, indeed, that "sin dwelleth in our body."[10] But the
condemnation of sin is the acquittal of the flesh, just as its non-
condemnation subjugates it to the law of sin and death. In like manner, he
called "the carnal mind" first "death,"[11] and afterwards "enmity against
God;"[12] but he never predicated this of the flesh itself. But to what
then, you will say, must the carnal mind be ascribed, if it be not to the
carnal substance itself? I will allow your objection, if you will prove to
me that the flesh has any discernment of its own. If, however, it has no
conception of anything without the soul, you must understand that the
carnal mind must be referred to the soul, although ascribed sometimes to
the flesh, on the ground that it is ministered to for the flesh and through
the flesh. And therefore (the apostle) says that "sin dwelleth in the
flesh," because the soul by which sin is provoked has its temporary lodging
in the flesh, which is doomed indeed to death, not however on its own
account, but on account of sin. For he says in another passage also  "How
is it that you conduct yourselves as if you were even now living in the
world?"[13] where he is not writing to dead persons, but to those who ought
to have ceased to live after the ways of the world.

CHAP. XLVII.--ST. PAUL, ALL THROUGH, PROMISES ETERNAL LIFE TO THE BODY.

For that must be living after the world, which, as the old man, he declares
to be " crucified with Christ,"[1] not as a bodily structure, but as moral
behaviour. Besides, if we do not understand it in this sense, it is not our
bodily frame which has been transfixed (at all events), nor has our flesh
endured the cross of Christ; but the sense is that which he has subjoined,
"that the body of sin might be made void,''[2] by an amendment of life, not
by a destruction of the substance, as he goes on to say, "that henceforth
we should not serve sin; "[3] and that we should believe ourselves to be
"dead with Christ," in such a manner as that "we shall also live with
Him.''[4] On the same principle he says: "Likewise reckon ye also
yourselves to be dead indeed.''[5] To what? To the flesh? No, but "unto
sin."[6] Accordingly as to the flesh they will be saved--" alive unto God
in Christ Jesus,"[7] through the flesh of course, to which they will not be
dead; since it is "unto sin," and not to the flesh, that they are dead. For
he pursues the point still further: "Let not sin therefore reign in your
mortal body, that ye should obey it, and that ye should yield your members
as instruments of unrighteousness unto sin: but yield ye yourselves unto
God, as those that are alive from the dead "--not simply alive, but as
alive from the dead--" and your members as instruments of
righteousness."[8] And again: "As ye have yielded your members servants of
uncleanness, and of iniquity unto iniquity, even so now yield your members
servants of righteousness unto holiness; for whilst ye were the servants of
sin, ye were free from righteousness. What fruit had ye then in those
things of which ye are now ashamed? For the end of those things is death.
But now, being made free from sin, and become servants to God, ye have your
fruit unto holiness, and the end everlasting life. For the wages of sin is
death, but the gift of God is eternal life through Jesus Christ our
Lord."[9] Thus throughout this series of passages, whilst withdrawing our
members from unrighteousness and sin, and applying them to righteousness
and holiness, and transferring the same from the wages of death to the
donative of eternal life, he undoubtedly promises to the flesh the
recompense of salvation. Now it would not at all have been consistent that
any rule of holiness and righteousness should be especially enjoined for
the flesh, if the reward of such a discipline were not also within its
reach; nor could even baptism be properly ordered for the flesh, if by its
regeneration a course were not inaugurated tending to its restitution; the
apostle himself suggesting this idea: "Know ye not, that so many of us as
are baptized into Jesus Christ, are baptized into His death? We are
therefore buried with Him by baptism into death, that just as Christ was
raised up from the dead, even so we also should walk in newness of
life."[10] And that you may not suppose that this is said merely of that
life which we have to walk in the newness of, through baptism, by faith,
the apostle with superlative forethought adds: " For if we have been
planted together in the likeness of Christ's death, we shall be also in the
likeness of His resurrection."[11] By a figure we die in our baptism, but
in a reality we rise again in the flesh, even as Christ did, "that, as sin
has reigned in death, so also grace might reign through righteousness unto
life eternal, through Jesus Christ our Lord.''[12] But how so, unless
equally in the flesh? For where the death is, there too must be the life
after the death, because also the life was first there, where the death
subsequently was. Now, if the dominion of death operates only in the
dissolution of the flesh, in like manner death's contrary, life, ought to
produce the contrary effect, even the restoration of the flesh; so that,
just as death had swallowed it up in its strength, it also, after this
mortal was swallowed up of immortality, may hear the challenge pronounced
against it: "O death, where is thy sting? O grave, where is thy
victory?"[13] For in this way "grace shall there much more abound, where
sin once abounded."[14] In this way also "shall strength be made perfect in
weakness,"[15]--saving what is lost, reviving what is dead, healing what is
stricken, curing what is faint, redeeming what is lost, freeing what is
enslaved, recalling what has strayed, raising what is fallen; and this from
earth to heaven, where, as the apostle teaches the Philippians, "we have
our citizenship,[16] from whence also we look for our Saviour Jesus Christ,
who shall change our body of humiliation, that it may be fashioned like
unto His glorious body"[17]--of course after the resurrection, because
Christ Himself was not glorified before He suffered. These must be "the
bodies" which he "beseeches" the Romans to "present" as "a living
sacrifice, holy, acceptable unto God."[1] But how a living sacrifice, if
these bodies are to perish? How a holy one, if they are profanely soiled?
How acceptable to God, if they are condemned? Come, now, tell me how that
passage (in the Epistle) to the Thessalonians--which, because of its
clearness, I should suppose to have been written with a sunbeam--is
understood by our heretics, who shun the light of Scripture: "And the very
God of peace sanctify you wholly." And as if this were not plain enough, it
goes on to say: "And may your whole body, and soul, and spirit be preserved
blameless unto the coming of the Lord."[2] Here you have the entire
substance of man destined to salvation, and that at no other time than at
the coming of the Lord, which is the key of the resurrection.[3]

CHAP. XLVIII.--SUNDRY PASSAGES IN THE GREAT CHAPTER OF THE RESURRECTION
OF THE DEAD EXPLAINED IN DEFENCE OF OUR DOCTRINE.

   But "flesh and blood," you say, "cannot inherit the kingdom of God."[4]
We are quite aware that this too is written; but although our opponents
place it in the front of the battle, we have intentionally reserved the
objection until now, in order that we may in our last assault overthrow it,
after we have removed out of the way all the questions which are auxiliary
to it. However, they must contrive to recall to their mind even now our
preceding arguments, in order that the occasion which originally suggested
this passage may assist our judgment in arriving at its meaning. The
apostle, as I take it, having set forth for the Corinthians the details of
their church discipline, had summed up the substance of his own gospel, and
of their belief in an exposition of the Lord's death and resurrection, for
the purpose of deducing therefrom the rule of our hope, and the groundwork
thereof. Accordingly he subjoins this statement: "Now if Christ be preached
that He rose from the dead, how say some among you that there is no
resurrection of the dead? If there be no resurrection of the dead, then
Christ is not risen: and if Christ be not risen, then is our preaching
vain, and your faith is also vain. Yea, and we are found false witnesses of
God; because we have testified of God that He raised up Christ, whom He
raised not up, if so be that  the dead rise not. For if the dead rise not,
then is not Christ raised: and if Christ be not raised, your faith is vain,
because ye are yet in your sins, and they which have fallen asleep in
Christ are perished."[5] Now, what is the point which he evidently labours
hard to make  us believe throughout this passage? The resurrection of the
dead, you say, which was denied: he certainly wished it to be believed on
the strength of the example which he adduced--the Lord's resurrection.
Certainly, you say. Well now, is an example borrowed from different
circumstances, or from like ones? From like ones, by all means, is your
answer. How then did Christ rise again? In the flesh, or not? No doubt,
since you are told that He "died according to the Scriptures,"[6] and "that
He was buried according to the Scriptures,"[7] no otherwise than in the
flesh, you will also allow that it was in the flesh that He was raised from
the dead. For the very same body which fell in death, and which lay in the
sepulchre, did also rise again; (and it was) not so much Christ in the
flesh, as the flesh in Christ. If, therefore, we are to rise again after
the example of Christ, who rose in the flesh, we shall certainly not rise
according to that example, unless we also shall ourselves rise again in the
flesh. "For," he says, "since by man came death, by man came also the
resurrection of the dead."[8] (This he says) in order, on the one hand, to
distinguish the two authors--Adam of death, Christ of resurrection; and, on
the other hand, to make the resurrection operate on the same substance as
the death, by comparing the authors themselves under the designation man.
For if "as in Adam all die, even so in Christ shall all be made alive,"[9]
their vivification in Christ must be in the flesh, since it is in the flesh
that arises their death in Adam. "But every man in his own order," [10]
because of course it will be also every man in his own body. For the order
will be arranged severally, on account of the individual merits. Now, as
the merits must be ascribed to the body, it must needs follow that the
order also should be arranged in respect of the bodies, that it may be in
relation to their merits. But inasmuch as "some are also baptized for the
dead,"[11] we will see whether there be a good reason for this. Now it is
certain that they adopted this (practice) with such a presumption as made
them suppose that the vicarious baptism (in question) would be beneficial
to the flesh of another in anticipation of the resurrection; for unless it
were a bodily resurrection, there would be no pledge secured by this
process of a corporeal baptism. "Why are they then baptized for the
dead,''[1] he asks, unless the bodies rise again which are thus baptized?
For it is not the soul which is sanctified by the baptismal bath:[2] its
sanctification comes from the "answer."[3] "And why," he inquires, "stand
we in jeopardy every hour?"[4]--meaning, of course, through the flesh. "I
die daily,"[5] (says he); that is, undoubtedly, in the perils of the body,
in which "he even fought with beasts at Ephesus,"[6]--even with those
beasts which caused him such peril and trouble in Asia, to which he alludes
in his second epistle to the same church of Corinth: "For we would not,
brethren, have you ignorant of our trouble which came to us in Asia, that
we were pressed above measure, above strength, insomuch that we despaired
even of life."[7] Now, if I mistake not, he enumerates all these
particulars in order that in his unwillingness to have his conflicts in the
flesh supposed to be useless, he may induce an unfaltering belief in the
resurrection of the flesh. For useless must that conflict be deemed (which
is sustained in a body) for which no resurrection is in prospect. "But some
man will say, How are the dead to be raised? And with what body will they
come?"[8] Now here he discusses the qualities of bodies, whether it be the
very same, or different ones, which men are to resume. Since, however, such
a question as this must be regarded as a subsequent one, it will in passing
be enough for us that the resurrection is determined to be a bodily one
even from this, that it is about the quality of bodies that the inquiry
arises.

CHAP. XLIX.--THE SAME SUBJECT CONTINUED. WHAT DOES THE APOSTLE EXCLUDE
FROM THE DEAD? CERTAINLY NOT THE SUBSTANCE OF THE FLESH.

   We come now to the very gist[9] of the whole question: What are the
substances, and of what nature are they, which the apostle has disinherited
of the kingdom of God? The t preceding statements give us a clue to this t
point also. He says: "The first man is of  i the earth, earthy "--that is,
made of dust,   that is, Adam; " the second man is from   heaven"[10]--that
is, the Word of God, which  is Christ, in no other way, however, man
(although "from heaven "), than as being Himself flesh and soul, just as a
human being is, just as Adam was. Indeed, in a previous passage He is
called "the second Adam, "[11] deriving the identity of His name from His
participation in the substance, because not even Adam was flesh of human
seed, in which Christ is also like Him.[12] "As is the earthy, such are
they also that are earthy; and as is the heavenly, such are they also that
are heavenly."[13] Such (does he mean), in substance; or first of all in
training, and afterwards in the dignity and worth which that training aimed
at acquiring? Not in substance, however, by any means will the earthy and
the heavenly be separated, designated as they have been by the apostle once
for all, as men. For even if Christ were the only true "heavenly," nay,
super-celestial Being, He is still man, as composed of body and soul; and
in no respect is He separated from the quality of "earthiness," owing to
that condition of His which makes Him a partaker of both substances. In
like manner, those also who after Him are heavenly, are understood to have
this celestial quality predicated of them not from their present nature,
but from their future glory; because in a preceding sentence, which
originated this distinction respecting difference of dignity, there was
shown to be "one glory in celestial bodies, and another in terrestrial
ones,"[14]--"one glory of the sun, and another glory of the moon, and
another glory of the stars: for even one star differeth from another star
in glory, "[15] although not in substance. Then, after having thus premised
the difference in that worth or dignity which is even now to be aimed at,
and then at last to be enjoyed, the apostle adds an exhortation, that we
should both here in our training follow the example of Christ, and there
attain His eminence in glory: "As we have borne the image of the earthy,
let us also bear the image of the heavenly."[16] We have indeed borne the
image of the earthy, by our sharing in his trangression, by our
participation in his death, by our banishment from Paradise. Now, although
the image of Adam is here borne by s in the flesh, yet we are not exhorted
to put off the flesh; but if not the flesh, it is the conversation, in
order that we may then bear the image of the heavenly in ourselves,--no
longer indeed the image of God, and no longer the image of a Being whose
state is in heaven; but after the lineaments of Christ, by our walking here
in holiness, righteousness, and truth. And so wholly intent on the
inculcation of moral conduct is he throughout. this passage, that he tells
us we ought to bear the image of Christ in this flesh of ours, and in this
period of instruction and discipline. For when he says "let us bear" in the
imperative mood, he suits his words to the present life, in which man
exists in no other substance than as flesh and soul; or if it is another,
even the heavenly, substance to which this faith (of ours) looks forward,
yet the promise is made to that substance to which the injunction is given
to labour earnestly to merit its reward. Since, therefore, he makes the
image both of the earthy and the heavenly consist of moral conduct--the one
to be abjured, and the other to be pursued--and then consistently adds,
"For this I say" (on account, that is, of what I have already said, because
the conjunction "for" connects what follows with the preceding words) "that
flesh and blood cannot inherit the kingdom of God,"[1]--he means the flesh
and blood to be understood in no other sense than the before-mentioned
"image of the earthy;" and since this is reckoned to consist in "the old
conversation,"[2] which old conversation receives not the kingdom of God,
therefore flesh and blood, by not receiving the kingdom of God, are reduced
to the life of the old conversation. Of course, as the apostle has never
put the substance for the works of man, he cannot use such a construction
here. Since, however he has declared of men which are yet alive in the
flesh, that they "are not in the flesh,"[3] meaning that they are not
living in the works of the flesh, you ought not to subvert its form nor its
substance, but only the works done in the substance (of the flesh),
alienating us from the kingdom of God. It is after displaying to the
Galatians these pernicious works that he professes to warn them beforehand,
even as he had "told them in time past, that they which do such things
should not inherit the kingdom of God,"[4] even because they bore not the
image of the heavenly, as they had borne the image of the earthy; and so,
in consequence of their old conversation, they were to be regarded as
nothing else than flesh and blood. But even if the apostle had abruptly
thrown out the sentence that flesh and blood must be excluded from the
kingdom of God, without any previous intimation, of his meaning, would it
not have been equally our duty to interpret these two substances as the old
man abandoned to mere flesh and blood--in other words, to eating and
drinking, one feature of which would be to speak against the faith of the
resurrection: "Let us eat and drink, for to-morrow we die."[5]  Now, when
the apostle parenthetically inserted  this, he censured flesh and blood
because of   their enjoyment in eating and drinking.

CHAP. L.--IN WHAT SENSE FLESH AND BLOOD ARE EXCLUDED FROM THE KINGDOM OF
GOD.

   Putting aside, however, all interpretations of this sort, which
criminate the works of the flesh and blood, it may be permitted me to claim
for the resurrection these very substances, understood in none other than
their natural sense. For it is not the resurrection that is directly denied
to flesh and blood, but the kingdom of God, which is incidental to[6] the
resurrection (for there is a resurrection of judgment[7] also); and there
is even a confirmation of the general resurrection of the flesh, whenever a
special one is excepted. Now, when it is clearly stated what the condition
is to which the resurrection does not lead, it is understood what that is
to which it does lead; and, therefore, whilst it is in consideration of
men's merits that a difference is made in their resurrection by their
conduct in the flesh, and not by the substance thereof, it is evident even
from this, that flesh and blood are excluded from the kingdom of God in
respect of their sin, not of their substance; and although in respect of
their natural condition[8] they will rise again for the judgment, because
they rise not for the kingdom. Again, I will say, "Flesh and blood cannot
inherit the kingdom of God;"[9] and justly (does the apostle declare this
of them, considered) alone and in themselves, in order to show that the
Spirit is still needed (to qualify them) for the kingdom.[10] For it is
"the Spirit that quickeneth" us for the kingdom of God; "the flesh
profiteth nothing."[11] There is, however, something else which can be
profitable thereunto, that is, the Spirit; and through the Spirit, the
works also of the Spirit. Flesh and blood, therefore, must in every case
rise again, equally, in their proper quality. But they to whom it is
granted to enter the kingdom of God, will have to put on the power of an
incorruptible and immortal life; for without this, or before they are able
to obtain it, they cannot enter into the kingdom of God. With good reason,
then, flesh and blood, as we have already said, by themselves fail to
obtain the kingdom of God. But inasmuch as "this corruptible (that is, the
flesh) must put on incorruption, and this mortal (that is, the blood) must
put on immortality,''[1] by the change which is to follow the resurrection,
it will, for the best of reasons, happen that flesh and blood, after that
change and investiture,[2] will become able to inherit the kingdom of God--
but not without the resurrection. Some will have it, that by the phrase
"flesh and blood," because of its rite of circumcision, Judaism is meant,
which is itself too alienated from the kingdom of God, as being accounted
"the old or former conversation," and as being designated by this title in
another passage of the apostle also, who, "when it pleased God to reveal to
him His Son, to preach Him amongst the heathen, immediately conferred not
with flesh and blood," as he writes to the Galatians,[3] (meaning by the
phrase) the circumcision, that is to say, Judaism.

CHAP. LI.--THE SESSION OF JESUS IN HIS INCARNATE NATURE AT THE RIGHT HAND
OF GOD A GUARANTEE OF THE RESURRECTION OF OUR FLESH.

   That, however, which we have reserved for a concluding argument, will
now stand as a plea for all, and for the apostle himself, who in very deed
would have to be charged with extreme indiscretion, if he had so abruptly,
as   some will have it, and as they say, blindfold,  and so
indiscriminately, and so unconditionally, excluded from the kingdom of God,
and indeed from the court of heaven itself, all flesh and blood whatsoever;
since Jesus is still sitting there at the right hand of the Father,[4] man,
yet God--the last Adam,[5] yet the primary Word--flesh and blood, yet purer
than ours--who "shall descend in like manner as He ascended into heaven"[6]
the same both in substance and form, as the angels affirmed,[7] so as even
to be recognised by those who pierced Him.[8] Designated, as He is, "the
Mediator' between God and man," He keeps in His own self the deposit of the
flesh which has been committed to Him by both parties--the pledge and
security of its entire perfection. For as "He has given to us the earnest
of the Spirit, "[10] so has He received from us the earnest of the flesh,
and has carried it with Him into heaven as a pledge of that complete
entirety which is one day to be restored to it. Be not disquieted, O flesh
and blood, with any care; in Christ you have acquired both heaven and the
kingdom of God. Otherwise, if they say that you are not in Christ, let them
also say that Christ is not in heaven, since they have denied you heaven.
Likewise "neither shall corruption," says he, "inherit incorruption.[11]
This he says, not that you may take flesh and blood to be corruption, for
they are themselves rather the subjects of corruption,--I mean through
death, since death does not so much corrupt, as actually consume, our flesh
and blood. But inasmuch as he had plainly said that the works of the flesh
and blood could not obtain the kingdom of God, with the view of stating
this with accumulated stress, he deprived corruption itself--that is,
death, which profits so largely by the works of the flesh and blood--from
all inheritance of incorruption. For a little afterwards, he has described
what is, as it were, the death of death itself: "Death," says he, "is
swallowed up in victory. O death, where is thy sting? O grave, where is thy
victory? The sting of death is sin "--here is the corruption; "and the
strength of sin is the law"[10]--that other law, no doubt, which he has
described "in his members as warring against the law of his mind,"[13]--
meaning, of course, the actual power of sinning against his will. Now he
says in a previous passage (of our Epistle to the Corinthians), that "the
last enemy to be destroyed is death."[14] In this way, then, it is that
corruption shall not inherit incorruption; in other words, death shall not
continue. When and how shall it cease? In that "moment, that twinkling of
an eye, at the last trump, when the dead shall rise incorruptible."[15] But
what are these, if not they who were corruptible before--that is, our
bodies; in other words, our flesh and blood? And we undergo the change. But
in what condition, if not in that wherein we shall be found? "For this
corruptible must put on incorruption, and this mortal must put on
immortality."[16] What mortal is this but the flesh? what corruptible but
the blood. Moreover, that you may not suppose the apostle to have any other
meaning, in his care to teach you, and that you may understand him
seriously to apply his statement to the flesh, when he says "this
corruptible" and "this mortal," he utters the words while touching the
surface of his own body.[1] He certainly could not have pronounced these
phrases except in reference to an object which was palpable and apparent.
The expression indicates a bodily exhibition. Moreover, a corruptible body
is one thing, and corruption is another; so a mortal body is one thing, and
mortality is another. For that which suffers is one thing, and that which
causes it to suffer is another. Consequently, those things which are
subject to corruption and mortality, even the flesh and blood, must needs
also be susceptible of incorruption and immortality.

CHAP. LII.--FROM ST. PAUL'S ANALOGY OF THE SEED WE LEARN THAT THE BODY
WHICH DIED WILL RISE AGAIN, GARNISHED WITH THE APPLIANCES OF ETERNAL
LIFE.

   Let us now see in what body he asserts that the dead will come. And
with a felicitous sally he proceeds at once to illustrate the point, as if
an objector had plied him with some such question. "Thou fool," says he,
"that which thou sowest is not quickened, except it die."[2] From this
example of the seed it is then evident that no other flesh is quickened
than that which shall have undergone death, and therefore all the rest of
the question will become clear enough. For nothing which is incompatible
with the idea suggested by the example can possibly be understood; nor from
the clause which follows, "That which thou sowest, thou sowest not the body
which shall be,"[3] are you permitted to suppose that in the resurrection a
different body is to arise from that which is sown in death. Otherwise you
have run away from the example. For if wheat be sown and dissolved in the
ground, barley does not spring up. Still it is not[4] the very same grain
in kind; nor is its nature the same, or its quality and form. Then whence
comes it, if it is not the very same? For even the decay is a proof of the
thing itself, since it is the decay of the actual grain. Well, but does not
the apostle himself suggest in what sense it is that "the body which shall
be" is not the body which is sown, even when he says, "But bare grain, it
may chance of wheat, or of some other grain; but God giveth it a body as it
pleaseth Him?''[5] Gives it of course to the grain which he says is sown
bare. No doubt, you say. Then the grain is safe enough, to which God has to
assign a body. But how safe, if it is nowhere in existence, if it does not
rise again if it rises not again its actual self? If it rises not again, it
is not safe; and if it is not even safe, it cannot receive a body from God.
But there is every possible proof that it is safe. For what purpose,
therefore, will God give it "a body, as it pleases Him," even when it
already has its own "bare" body, unless it be that in its resurrection it
may be no longer bare? That therefore will be additional matter which is
placed over the bare body; nor is that at all destroyed on which the
superimposed matter is put,--nay, it is increased. That, however, is safe
which receives augmentation. The truth is, it is sown the barest grain,
without a husk to cover it, without a spike even in germ, without the
protection of a bearded top, without the glory of a stalk. It rises,
however, out of the furrow enriched with a copious crop, built up in a
compact fabric, constructed in a beautiful order, fortified by cultivation,
and clothed around on every side. These are the circumstances which make it
another body from God, to which it is changed not by abolition, but by
amplification. And to every seed God has assigned its own body[6]--not,
indeed, its own in the sense of its primitive body--in order that what it
acquires from God extrinsically may also at last be accounted its own.
Cleave firmly then to the example, and keep it well in view, as a mirror of
what happens to the flesh: believe that the very same flesh which was once
sown in death will bear fruit in resurrection-life--the same in essence,
only more full and perfect; not another, although reappearing in another
form. For it shall receive in itself the grace and ornament which God shall
please to spread over it, according to its merits. Unquestionably it is in
this sense that he says, "All flesh is not the same flesh;"[7] meaning not
to deny a community of substance, but a parity of prerogative,--reducing
the body to a difference of honour, not of nature. With this view he adds,
in a figurative sense, certain examples of animals and heavenly bodies:
"There is one flesh of man" (that is, servants of God, but really human),
"another flesh of beasts" (that is, the heathen, of whom the prophet
actually says, "Man is like the senseless cattle"[8]), "another flesh of
birds" (that is, the martyrs which essay to mount up to heaven), "another
of fishes" (that is, those whom the water of baptism has submerged).[9] In
like manner does he take examples from the heavenly bodies: "There is one
glory of the sun" (that is, of Christ), "and another glory of the moon"
(that is, of the Church), "and another glory of the stars" (in other words,
of the seed of Abraham). "For one star differeth from another star in
glory: so there are bodies terrestrial as well as celestial" (Jews, that
is, as well as Christians).[1] Now, if this language is not to be construed
figuratively, it was absurd enough for him to make a contrast between the
flesh of mules and kites, as well as the heavenly bodies and human bodies;
for they admit of no comparison as to their condition, nor in respect of
their attainment of a resurrection. Then at last, having conclusively shown
by his examples that the difference was one of glory, not of substance, he
adds:  "So also is the resurrection of the dead."[2] How so? In no other
way than as differing in glory only. For again, predicating the
resurrection of the same substance and returning once more to (his
comparison of) the grain, he says: "It is sown in corruption, it is raised
in incorruption; it is sown in dishonour, it is raised in glory; it is sown
in weakness, it is raised in power; it is sown a natural body, it is raised
a spiritual body."[3] Now, certainly nothing else is raised than that which
is sown; and nothing else is sown than that which decays in the ground; and
it is nothing else than the flesh which is decayed in the ground. For this
was the substance which God's decree demolished, "Earth thou art, and to
earth shalt thou return;"[4] because it was taken out of the earth. And it
was from this circumstance that the apostle borrowed his phrase of the
flesh being "sown," since it returns to the ground, and the ground is the
grand depository for seeds which are meant to be deposited in it, and again
sought out of it. And therefore he confirms the passage afresh, by putting
on it the impress (of his own inspired authority), saying, "For so it is
written;"[5] that you may not suppose that the "being sown" means anything
else than "thou shalt return to the ground, out of which thou wast taken;"
nor that the phrase "for so it is written" refers to any other thing that
the flesh.

CHAP. LIII.--NOT THE SOUL, BUT THE NATURAL BODY WHICH DIED, IS THAT WHICH
IS TO RISE AGAIN. THE RESURRECTION OF LAZARUS COMMENTED ON. CHRIST'S
RESURRECTION, AS THE SECOND ADAM, GUARANTEES OUR OWN.

   Some, however, contend that the soul is "the natural (or animate) body,
"[6] with the view of withdrawing the flesh from all connection with the
risen body. Now, since it is a clear and fixed point that the body which is
to rise again is that which was sown in death, they must be challenged to
an examination of the very fact itself. Else let them show that the soul
was sown after death; in a word, that it underwent death,--that is, was
demolished, dismembered, dissolved in the ground, nothing of which was ever
decreed against it by God: let them display to our view its corruptibility
and dishonour (as well as) its weakness, that it may also accrue to it to
rise again in incorruption, and in glory, and in power? Now in the ease of
Lazarus, (which we may take as) the palmary instance of a resurrection, the
flesh lay prostrate in weakness, the flesh was almost putrid in the
dishonour of its decay, the flesh stank in corruption, and yet it was as
flesh that Lazarus rose again--with his soul, no doubt. But that soul was
incorrupt; nobody had wrapped it in its linen swathes; nobody had deposited
it in a grave; nobody had yet preceived it "stink;" nobody for four days
had seen it "sown." Well, now, this entire condition, this whole end of
Lazarus, the flesh indeed of all men is still experiencing, but the soul of
no one. That substance, therefore, to which the apostle's whole description
manifestly refers, of which he clearly speaks, must be both the natural (or
animate) body when it is sown, and the spiritual body when it is raised
again. For in order that you may understand it in this sense, he points to
this same conclusion, when in like manner, on the authority of the same
passage of Scripture, he displays to us "the first man Adam as made a
living soul."[8] Now since Adam was the first man, since also the flesh was
man prior to the soul? it undoubtedly follows that it was the flesh that
became the living soul. Moreover, since it was a bodily substance that
assumed this condition, it was of course the natural (or animate) body that
became the living soul. By what designation would they have it called,
except that which it became through the soul, except that which it was not
previous to the soul, except that which it can never be after the soul, but
through its resurrection? For after it has recovered the soul, it once more
becomes the natural (or animate) body, in order that it may become a
spiritual body. For it only resumes in the resurrection the condition which
it once had. There is therefore by no means the same good reason why the
soul should be called the natural (or animate) body, which the flesh has
for bearing that designation. The flesh, in fact, was a body before it was
an animate body. When the flesh was joined by the soul,[1] it then became
the natural (or animate) body. Now, although the soul is a corporeal
substance,[2] yet, as it is not an animated body, but rather an animating
one, it cannot be called the animate (or natural) body, nor can it become
that thing which it produces. It is indeed when the soul accrues to
something else that it makes that thing animate; but unless it so accrues,
how will it ever produce animation? As therefore the flesh was at first an
animate (or natural) body on receiving the soul, so at last will it become
a spiritual body when invested with the spirit. Now the apostle, by
severally adducing this order in Adam and in Christ, fairly distinguishes
between the two states, in the very essentials of their difference. And
when he calls Christ "the last Adam,"[3] you may from this circumstance
discover how strenuously he labours to establish throughout his teaching
the resurrection of the flesh, not of the soul. Thus, then, the first man
Adam was flesh, not soul, and only afterwards became a living soul; and the
last Adam, Christ, was Adam only because He was man, and only man as being
flesh, not as being soul. Accordingly the apostle goes on to say: "Howbeit
that was not first which is spiritual, but that which is natural, and
afterward that which is spiritual,"[4] as in the case of the two Adams.
Now, do you not suppose that he is distinguishing between the natural body
and the spiritual body in the same flesh, after having already drawn the
distinction therein in the two Adams, that is, in the first man and in the
last? For from which substance is it that Christ and Adam have a parity
with each other? No doubt it is from their flesh, although it may be from
their soul also. It is, however, in respect of the flesh that they are both
man; for the flesh was man prior to the saul. It was actually from it that
they were able to take rank, so as to be deemed--one the first, and the
other the last man, or Adam. Besides, things which are different in
character are only incapable of being arranged in the same order when their
diversity is one of substance; for when it is a diversity either in respect
of place, or of time, or of condition, they probably do admit of
classification together. Here, however, they are called first and last,
from the substance of their (common) flesh, just as afterwards again the
first man (is said to be) of the earth, and the second of heaven;[3] but
although He is "of heaven" in respect of the spirit, He is yet man
according to the flesh. Now since it is the flesh, and not the soul, that
makes an order (or classification together) in the two Adams compatible, so
that the distinction is drawn between them of "the first man becoming a
living soul, and the last a quickening spirit,"[6] so in like manner this
distinction between them has already suggested the conclusion that the
distinction is due to the flesh; so that it is of the flesh that these
words speak: "Howbeit that was not first which is spiritual, but that which
is natural, and afterward that which is spiritual."[7] And thus, too, the
same flesh must be understood in a preceding passage: "That which is sown
is the natural body, and that which rises again is the spiritual body;
because that is not first which is spiritual, but that which is natural:
since the first Adam was made a living soul, the last Adam a quickening
spirit."[8] It is all about man, and all about the flesh because about man.

   What shall we say then? Has not the flesh even now (in this life) the
spirit by faith? so that the question still remains to be asked, how it is
that the animate (or natural) body can be said to be sown? Surely the flesh
has received even here the spirit--but only its "earnest;"[9] whereas of
the soul (it has received) not the earnest, but the full possession.
Therefore it has the name of animate (or natural) body, expressly because
of the higher substance of the soul (or animal,) in which it is sown,
destined hereafter to become, through the full possession of the spirit
which it shall obtain, the spiritual body, in which it is raised again.
What wonder, then, if it is more commonly called after the substance with
which it is fully furnished, than after that of which it has yet but a
sprinkling?

CHAP. LIV.--DEATH SWALLOWED UP OF LIFE. MEANING OF THIS PHRASE IN
RELATION TO THE RESURRECTION OF THE BODY.

   Then, again, questions very often are suggested by occasional and
isolated terms, just as much as they are by connected sentences. Thus,
because of the apostle's expression, "that mortality may be swallowed up of
life "[10]-- in reference to the flesh--they wrest the word swallowed up
into the sense of the actual destruction of the flesh; as if we might not
speak of ourselves as swallowing bile, or swallowing grief, meaning that we
conceal and hide it, and keep it within ourselves. The truth is, when it is
written, "This mortal must put on immortality,"[1] it is explained in what
sense it is that "mortality is swallowed up of life "--even whilst, clothed
with immortality, it is hidden and concealed, and contained within it, not
as consumed, and destroyed, and lost. But death, you will say in reply to
me, at this rate, must be safe, even when it has been swallowed up. Well,
then, I ask you to distinguish words which are similar in form according to
their proper meanings. Death is one thing, and morality is another. It is
one thing for death to be swallowed up, and another thing for mortality to
be swallowed up. Death is incapable of immortality, but not so mortality.
Besides, as it is written that "this mortal must put on immortality,"[2]
how is this possible when it is swallowed up of life? But how is it
swallowed up of life, (in the sense of destroyed by it) when it is actually
received, and restored, and included in it? For the rest, it is only just
and right that death should be swallowed up in utter destruction, since it
does itself devour with this same intent. Death, says the apostle, has
devoured by exercising its strength, and therefore has been itself devoured
in the struggle "swallowed up in victory."[3] "O death, where is thy sting?
O death, where is thy victory?"[4] Therefore life, too, as the great
antagonist of death, will in the struggle swallow up for salvation what
death, in its struggle, had swallowed up for destruction.

CHAP. LV.--THE CHANGE OF A THING'S CONDITION IS NOT THE DESTRUCTION OF
ITS SUBSTANCE. THE APPLICATION OF THIS PRINCIPLE TO OUR SUBJECT.

   Now although, in proving that the flesh shall rise again we ipso facto
prove that no other flesh will partake of that resurrection than that which
is in question, yet insulated questions and their occasions do require even
discussions of their own, even if they have been already sufficiently met.
We will therefore give a fuller explanation of the force and the reason of
a change which (is so great, that it) almost suggests the presumption that
it is a different flesh which is to rise again; as if, indeed, so great a
change amounted to utter cessation, and a complete destruction of the
former self. A distinction, however, must be made between a change, however
great, and everything which has the character of distruction. For
undergoing change is one thing, but being destroyed is another thing. Now
this distinction would no longer exist, if the flesh were to suffer such a
change as amounts to destruction. Destroyed, however, it must be by the
change, unless it shall itself persistently remain throughout the altered
condition which shall be exhibited in the resurrection. For precisely as it
perishes, if it does not rise again, so also does it equally perish even if
it does rise again, on the supposition that it is lost[5] in the change. It
will as much fail of a future existence, as if it did not rise again at
all. And how absurd is it to rise again for the purpose of not having a
being, when it had it in its power not to rise again, and so lose airs
being--because it had already begun its non-existence! Now, things which
are absolutely different, as mutation and destruction are, will not admit
of mixture and confusion; in their operations, too, they differ. One
destroys, the other changes. Therefore, as that which is destroyed is not
changed, so that which is changed is not destroyed. To perish is altogether
to cease to be what a thing once was, whereas to be changed is to exist in
another condition. Now, if a thing exists in another condition, it can
still be the same thing itself; for since it does not perish, it has its
existence still. A change, indeed, it has experienced, but not a
destruction. A thing may undergo a complete change, and yet remain still
the same thing. In like manner, a man also may be quite himself in
substance even in the present life, and for all that undergo various
changes--in habit, in bodily bulk, in health, in condition, in dignity, and
m age--in taste, business, means, houses, laws and customs--and still lose
nothing of his human nature, nor so to be made another man as to cease to
be the same; indeed, I ought hardly to say another man, but another thing.
This form of change even the Holy Scriptures give us instances of. The hand
of Moses is changed, and it becomes like a dead one, bloodless, colourless,
and stiff with cold; but on the recovery of heat, and on the restoration of
its natural colour, it is again the same flesh and blood? Afterwards the
face of the same Moses is changed,[7] with a brightness which eye could not
bear. But he was Moses still, even when he was not visible. So also Stephen
had already put on the appearance of an angel,[8] although they were none
other than his human knees[1] which bent beneath the stoning. The Lord,
again, in the retirement of the mount, had changed His raiment for a robe
of light; but He still retained features which Peter could recognise.[2] In
that same scene Moses also and Elias gave proof that the same condition of
bodily existence may continue even in glory--the one in the likeness of a
flesh which he had not yet recovered, the other in the reality of one which
'he had not yet put off.[3] It was as full of this splendid example that
Paul said: "Who shall change our vile body, that it may be fashioned like
unto His glorious body."[4] But if you maintain that a transfiguration and
a conversion amounts to the annihilation of any substance, then it follows
that "Saul, when changed into another man,"[5] passed away from his own
bodily substance; and that Satan himself, when "transformed into an angel
of light,"[6] loses his own proper character. Such is not my opinion. So
likewise changes, conversions and reformations will necessarily take place
to bring about the resurrection, but the substance of the flesh will still
be preserved safe.

CHAP. LVI.--THE PROCEDURE OF THE LAST JUDGMENT, AND ITS AWARDS, ONLY
POSSIBLE ON THE IDENTITY OF THE RISEN BODY WITH OUR PRESENT FLESH.

   For how absurd, and in truth how unjust, and in both respects how
unworthy of God, for one substance to do the work, and another to reap the
reward: that this flesh of ours should be torn by martyrdom, and another
wear the crown; or, on the other hand, that this flesh of ours should
wallow in uncleanness, and another receive the condemnation! Is it not
better to renounce all faith at once in the hope of the resurrection,[7]
than to trifle with the wisdom and justice of God?[8] Better that Marcion
should rise again than Valentinus. For it cannot be believed that the mind,
or the memory, or the conscience of existing man is abolished by putting on
that change of raiment which immortality and incorruption supplies; for in
that case all the gain and fruit of the resurrection, and the permanent
effect[9] of God's judgment both on soul and body,[10] would certainly fall
to the ground. If I remember not that it is I who have served Him, how
shall I ascribe glory to God? How sing to Him "the new song,"[11]if I am
ignorant that it is I who owe Him thanks? But why is exception taken only
against the change of the flesh, and not of the soul also, which in all
things is superior to the flesh? How happens it, that the self-same soul
which in our present flesh has gone through all life's course, which has
learnt the knowledge of God, and put on Christ, and sown the hope of
salvation in this flesh, must reap its harvest in another flesh of which we
know nothing? Verily that must be a most highly favoured flesh, which shall
have the enjoyment of life at so gratuitous a rate! But if the soul is not
to be changed also, then there is no resurrection of the soul; nor will it
be believed to have itself risen, unless it has risen some different thing.

CHAP. LVII.--OUR BODIES, HOWEVER MUTILATED BEFORE OR AFTER DEATH, SHALL
RECOVER THEIR PERFECT INTEGRITY IN THE RESURRECTION. ILLUSTRATION' OF
THE ENFRANCHISED SLAVE.

   We now come to the most usual cavil of unbelief. If, they say, it be
actully the selfsame substance which is recalled to life with all its form,
and lineaments, and quality, then why not with all its other
characteristics? Then the blind, and the lame, and the palsied, and whoever
else may have passed away with any conspicuous mark, will return again with
the same. What now is the fact, although you in the greatness of your
conceit[11] thus disdain to accept from God so vast a grace? Does it not
happen that, when you now admit the salvation of only the soul, you ascribe
it to men at the cost of half their nature? What is the good of believing
in the resurrection, unless your faith embraces the whole of it? If the
flesh is to be repaired after its dissolution, much more will it be
restored after some violent injury. Greater cases prescribe rules for
lesser ones. Is not the amputation or the crushing of a limb the death of
that limb? Now, if the death of the whole person is rescinded by its
resurrection, what must we say of the death of a part of him? If we are
changed for glory, how much more for integrity![12] Any loss sustained by
our bodies is an accident to them, but their entirety is their natural
property. In this condition we are born. Even if we become injured in the
womb, this is loss suffered by what is already a human being. Natural
condition"[14] is prior to injury. As life is bestowed by God, so is it
restored by Him. As we are when we receive it, so are we when we recover
it. To nature, not to injury, are we restored; to our state by birth, not
to our condition by accident, do we rise again. If God raises not men
entire, He raises not the dead. For what dead man is entire, although he
dies entire? Who is without hurt, that is without life? What body is
uninjured, when it is dead, when it is cold, when it is ghastly, when it is
stiff, when it is a corpse? When is a man more infirm, than when he is
entirely infirm? When more palsied, than when quite motionless? Thus, for a
dead man to be raised again, amounts to nothing short of his being restored
to his entire condition,--lest he, forsooth, be still dead in that part in
which he has not risen again. God is quite able to re-make what He once
made. This power and this unstinted grace of His He has already
sufficiently guaranteed in Christ; and has displayed Himself to us (in Him)
not only as the restorer of the flesh, but as the repairer of its breaches.
And so the apostle says: "The dead shall be raised incorruptible" (or
unimpaired).[1] But how so, unless they become entire, who have wasted away
either in the loss of their health, or in the long decrepitude of the
grave? For when he propounds the two clauses, that "this corruptible must
put on incorruption, and this mortal must put on immortality, "[2] he does
not repeat the same statement, but sets forth a distinction. For, by
assigning immortality to the repeating of death, and incorruption to the
repairing of the wasted body, he has fitted one to the raising and the
other to the retrieval of the body. I suppose, moreover, that he promises
to the Thessalonians the integrity of the whole substance of man.[3] So
that for the great future there need be no fear of blemished or defective
bodies. Integrity, whether the result of preservation or restoration, will
be able to lose nothing more, after the time that it has given back to it
whatever it had lost. Now, when you contend that the flesh will still have
to undergo the same sufferings, if the same flesh be said to have to rise
again, you rashly set up nature against her Lord, and impiously contrast
her law against His grace; as if it were not permitted the Lord God both to
change nature, and to preserve her, without subjection to a law. How is it,
then, that we read, "With men these things are impossible, but with God all
things are possible;"[4] and again, "God hath chosen the foolish things of
the world to confound the wise?" [5] Let me ask you, if you were to manumit
your slave (seeing that the same flesh and soul will remain to him, which
once were exposed to the whip, and the fetter, and the stripes), will it
therefore be fit for him to undergo the same old sufferings? I trow not. He
is instead thereof honoured with the grace of the white robe, and the
favour of the gold ring, and the name and tribe as well as table of his
patron. Give, then, the same prerogative to God, by virtue of such a
change, of reforming our condition, not our nature, by taking away from it
all sufferings, and surrounding it with safeguards of protection. Thus our
flesh shall remain even after the resurrection--so far indeed susceptible
of suffering, as it is the flesh, and the same flesh too; but at the same
time impassible, inasmuch as it has been liberated by the Lord for the very
end and purpose of being no longer capable of enduring suffering.

CHAP. LVIII.--FROM THIS PERFECTION OF OUR RESTORED BODIES WILL FLOW THE
CONSCIOUSNESS OF UNDISTURBED JOY AND PEACE.

   "Everlasting joy," says Isaiah, "shall be upon their heads."[6] Well,
there is nothing eternal until after the resurrection. "And sorrow and
sighing," continues he, "shall flee away."[7] The angel echoes the same to
John: "And God shall wipe away all tears from their eyes;"[8] from the same
eyes indeed which had formerly wept, and which might weep again, if the
loving-kindness of God did not dry up every fountain of tears. And again:
"God shall wipe away all tears from their eyes; and there shall be no more
death,"[9] and therefore no more corruption, it being chased away by
incorruption, even as death is by immortality. If sorrow, and mourning, and
sighing, and death itself, assail us from the afflictions both of soul and
body, how shall they be removed, except by the cessation of their causes,
that is to say, the afflictions of flesh and soul? where will you find
adversities in the presence of God? where, incursions of an enemy in the
bosom of Christ? where, attacks of the devil in the face of the Holy
Spirit?--now that the devil himself and his angels are "cast into the lake
of fire." [10] Where now is necessity, and what they call fortune or fate?
What plague awaits the redeemed from death, after their eternal pardon?
What wrath is there for the reconciled, after grace? What weakness, after
their renewed strength? What risk and danger, after their salvation? That
the raiment and shoes of the children of Israel remained unworn and fresh
for the space of forty years; [1] that in their very persons the exact
point[2] of convenience and propriety checked the rank growth of their
nails and hair, so that any excess herein might not be attributed to
indecency; that the fires of Babylon injured not either the mitres or the
trousers of the three brethren, however foreign such dress might be to the
Jews;[3] that Jonah was swallowed by the monster of the deep, in whose
belly whole ships were devoured, and after three days was vomited out again
safe and sound;[4] that Enoch and Elias, who even now, without experiencing
a resurrrection (because they have not even encountered death), are
learning to the full what it is for the flesh to be exempted from all
humilation, and all loss, and all injury, and all disgrace--translated as
they have been from this world, and from this very cause already candidates
for everlasting life;[5] --to what faith do these notable facts bear
witness, if not to that which ought to inspire in us the belief that they
are proofs and documents of our own future integrity and perfect
resurrection? For, to borrow the apostle's phrase, these were "figures of
ourselves; "[6] and they are written that we may believe both that the Lord
is more powerful than all natural laws about the body, and that He shows
Himself the preserver of the flesh the more emphatically, in that He has
preserved for it its very clothes and shoes.

CHAP. LIX.--OUR FLESH IN THE RESURRECTION CAPABLE, WITHOUT LOSING ITS
ESSENTIAL IDENTITY, OF BEARING THE CHANGED CONDITIONS OF ETERNAL     LIFE,
OR OF DEATH ETERNAL.

   But, you object, the world to come bears the character of a different
dispensation, even  an eternal one; and therefore, you maintain, that the
non-eternal substance of this life is incapable of possessing a state of
such different features. This would be true enough, if man were made for
the future dispensation, and not the dispensation for man. The apostle,
however, in his epistle says, "Whether it be the world, or life, or death,
or things present, or things to come; all are yours: "[7] and he here
constitutes us heirs even of the future world. Isaiah gives you no help
when he says, "All flesh is grass;"[8] and in another passage, "All flesh
shall see the salvation of God."[9] It is the issues of men, not their
substances, which he distinguishes. But who does not hold that the judgment
of God consists in the twofold sentence, of salvation and of punishment?
Therefore it is that "all flesh is grass," which is destined to the fire;
and "all flesh shall see the salvation of God," which is ordained to
eternal life. For myself, I am quite sure that it is in no other flesh than
my own that I have committed adultery, nor in any other flesh am I striving
after continence. If there be any one who bears about in his person two
instruments of lasciviousness, he has it in his power, to be sure, to mow
down[10] "the grass" of the unclean flesh, and to reserve for himself only
that which shall see the salvation of God. But when the same prophet
represents to us even nations sometimes estimated as "the small dust of the
balance,"[11] and as "less than nothing, and vanity,"[12] and sometimes as
about to hope and "trust in the name"[13] and arm of the Lord, are we at
all misled respecting the Gentile nations by the diversity of statement?
Are some of them to turn believers, and are others accounted dust, from any
difference of nature? Nay, rather Christ has shone as the true light on the
nations within the ocean's limits, and from the heaven which is over us
all.[14] Why, it is even on this earth that the Valentinians have gone to
school for their errors; and there will be no difference of condition, as
respects their body and soul, between the nations which believe and those
which do not believe. Precisely, then, as He has put a distinction of
state, not of nature, amongst the same nations, so also has He
discriminated their flesh, which is one and the same substance in those
nations, not according to their material structure, but according to the
recompense of their merit.

CHAP. LX.--ALL THE CHARACTERISTICS OF OUR BODIES--SEX, VARIOUS LIMBS, ETC.-
-WILL BE RETAINED, WHATEVER CHANGE OF FUNCTIONS THESE MAY HAVE, OF WHICH
POINT, HOWEVER, WE ARE NO JUDGES. ANALOGY OF THE REPAIRED SHIP.

   But behold how presistently they still accumulate their cavils against
the flesh, especially against its identity, deriving their arguments even
from the functions of our limbs; on the one hand saying that these ought to
continue permanently pursuing their labours and enjoyments, as appendages
to the same corporeal frame; and on the other hand contending that,
inasmuch as the functions of the limbs shall one day come to an end, the
bodily frame itself must be destroyed, its permanence without its limbs
being deemed to be as inconceivable, as that of the limbs themselves
without their functions !What, they ask, will then be the use of the cavity
of our mouth, and its rows of teeth, and the passage of the throat, and the
branch-way of the stomach, and the gulf of the belly, and the entangled
tissue of the bowels, when there shall no longer be room for eating and
drinking? What more will there be for these members to take in, masticate,
swallow, secrete, digest, eject? Of what avail will be our very hands, and
feet, and all our labouring limbs, when even all care about food shall
cease? What purpose can be served by loins, conscious of seminal
secretions, and all the other organs of generation, in the two sexes, and
the laboratories of embryos, and the fountains of the breast, when
concubinage, and pregnancy, and infant nurture shall cease? In short, what
will be the use of the entire body, when the entire body shall become
useless? In reply to all this, we have then already settled the principle
that the dispensation of the future state ought not to be compared with
that of the present world, and that in the interval between them a change
will take place; and we now add the remark, that these functions of our
bodily limbs will continue to supply the needs of this life up to the
moment when life itself shall pass away from time to eternity, as the
natural body gives place to the spiritual, until "this mortal puts on
immorality, and this corruptible puts on incorruption:"[1] so that when
life shall itself become freed from all wants, our limbs shall then be
freed also from their services, and therefore will be no longer wanted.
Still, although liberated from their offices, they will be yet preserved
for judgment, "that every one may receive the things done in his body."[2]
For the judgment-seat of God requires that man be kept entire. Entire,
however, he cannot be without his limbs, of the substance of which, not the
functions, he consists; unless, forsooth, you will be bold enough to
maintain that a ship is perfect without her keel, or her bow, or her stern,
and without the solidity of her entire t frame. And yet how often have we
seen the same ship, after being shattered with the storm and broken by
decay, with all her timbers repaired and restored, gallantly riding on the
wave in all the beauty of a renewed fabric! Do we then disquiet ourselves
with doubt about God's skill, and will, and rights? Besides, if a wealthy
shipowner, who does not  grudge money merely for his amusement or show,
thoroughly repairs his ship, and then chooses that she should make no
further voyages, will you contend that the old form and finish is still not
necessary to the vessel, although she is no longer meant for actual
service, when the mere safety of a ship requires such completeness
irrespective of service? The sole question, therefore, which is enough for
us to consider here, is whether the Lord, when He ordains salvation for
man, intends it for his flesh; whether it is His will that the selfsame
flesh shall be renewed. If so, it will be improper for you to rule, from
the inutility of its limbs in the future state, that the flesh will be
incapable of renovation. For a thing  may be renewed, and yet be useless
from having nothing to do; but it cannot be said to be useless if it has no
existence. If, indeed, it has existence, it will be quite possible for it
also not to be useless; it may possibly have something to do; for in the
presence of God there will be no idleness.

CHAP. LXI.--THE DETAILS OF OUR BODILY SEX, AND OF THE FUNCTIONS OF OUR
VARIOUS MEMBERS. APOLOGY FOR THE NECESSITY WHICH HERESY IMPOSES OF HUNTING
UP ALL ITS UNBLUSHING CAVILS.

   Now you have received your mouth, O man, for the purpose of devouring
your food and imbibing your drink: why not, however, for the higher purpose
of uttering speech, so as to distinguish yourself from all other animals?
Why not rather for preaching the gospel of God, that so you may become even
His priest and advocate before men? Adam indeed gave their several names to
the animals, before he plucked the fruit of the tree; before he ate, he
prophesied. Then, again, you received your teeth for the consumption of
your meal: why not rather for wreathing your mouth with suitable defence on
every opening thereof, small or wide? Why not, too, for moderating the
impulses of your tongue, and guarding your articulate speech from failure
and violence? Let me tell you, (if you do not know), that there are
toothless persons in the world. Look at them, and ask whether even a cage
of teeth be not an honour to the mouth. There are apertures in the lower
regions of man and woman, by means of which they gratify no doubt their
animal passions; but why are they not rather regarded as outlets for the
cleanly discharge of natural fluids? Women, moreover, have within them
receptacles where human seed may collect; but are they not designed for the
secretion of those sanguineous issues, which their tardier and weaker sex
is inadequate to disperse? For even details like these require to be
mentioned, seeing that heretics single out what parts of our bodies may
suit them, handle them without delicacy, and, as their whim suggests, pour
torrents of scorn and contempt upon the natural functions of our members,
for the purpose of upsetting the resurrection, and making us blush over
their cavils; not reflecting that before the functions cease, the very
causes of them will have passed away. There will be no more meat, because
no more hunger; no more drink, because no more thirst; no more concubinage,
because no more child-bearing; no more eating and drinking, because no more
labour and toil. Death, too, will cease; so there will be no more need of
the nutriment of food for the defence of life, nor will mothers' limbs any
longer have to be laden for the replenishment of our race. But even in the
present life there may be cessations of their office for our stomachs and
our generative organs. For forty days Moses[1] and Elias[2] fasted, and
lived upon God alone. For even so early was the principle consecrated: "Man
shall not live by bread alone, but by every word that proceedeth out of the
mouth of God."[3] See here faint outlines of our future strength! We even,
as we may be able, excuse our mouths from food, and withdraw our sexes from
union. How many voluntary eunuchs are there! How many virgins espoused to
Christ! How many, both of men and women, whom nature has made sterile, with
a structure which cannot procreate! Now, if even here on earth both the
functions and the pleasures of our members may be suspended, with an
intermission which, like the dispensation itself, can only be a temporary
one, and yet man's safety is nevertheless unimpaired, how much more, when
his salvation is secure, and especially in an eternal dispensation, shall
we not cease to desire those things, for which, even here below, we are not
unaccustomed to check our longings!

CHAP. LXII.--OUR DESTINED LIKENESS TO THE ANGELS IN THE GLORIOUS LIFE OF
THE RESURRECTION.

   To this discussion, however, our Lord's declaration puts an effectual
end: "They shall be," says He, "equal unto the angels."[4] As by not
marrying, because of not dying, so, of course, by not having to yield to
any like necessity of our bodily state; even as the angels, too, sometimes.
were "equal unto" men, by eating and drinking, and submitting their feet to
the washing of the bath--having clothed themselves in human guise, without
i the loss of their own intrinsic nature. If therefore angels, when they
became as men, submitted in their own unaltered substance of spirit to be
treated as if they were flesh, why shall not men in like manner, when they
become "equal unto the angels," undergo in their unchanged substance of
flesh the treatment of spiritual beings, no more exposed to the usual
solicitations of the flesh in their angelic garb, than were the angels once
to those of the spirit when encompassed in human form? We shall not
therefore cease to continue in the flesh, because we cease to be importuned
by the usual wants of the flesh; just as the angels ceased not therefore to
remain in their spiritual substance, because of the suspension of their
spiritual incidents. Lastly, Christ said not, "They shall be angels," in
order not to repeal their existence as men; but He said, "They shall be
equal unto the angels,[5] that He might preserve their humanity unimpaired.
When He ascribed an angelic likeness to the flesh,[6] He took not from it
its proper substance.

CHAP. LXIII.--CONCLUSION. THE RESURRECTION OF THE FLESH IN ITS ABSOLUTE
IDENTITY AND PERFECTION. BELIEF OF THIS HAD BECOME WEAK. HOPES FOR ITS
REFRESHING RESTORATION UNDER THE INFLUENCES OF THE PARACLETE.

   And so the flesh shall rise again, wholly in every man, in its own
identity, in its absolute integrity. Wherever it may be, it is in safe
keeping in God's presence, through that most faithful "Mediator between God
and man, (the man) Jesus Christ,"[7] who shall reconcile both God to man,
and man to God; the spirit to the flesh, and the flesh to the spirit. Both
natures has He already united in His own self; He has fitted them together
as bride and bridegroom in the reciprocal bond of wedded life. Now, if any
should insist on making the soul the bride, then the flesh will follow the
soul as her dowry. The soul shall never be an outcast, to be had home by
the bridegroom bare and naked. She has her dower, her outfit, her fortune
in the flesh, which shall accompany her with the love and fidelity of a
foster-sister. But suppose the flesh to be the bride, then in Christ Jesus
she has in the contract of His blood received His Spirit as her spouse.
Now, what you take to be her extinction, you may be sure is only her
temporary retirement. It is not the soul only which withdraws from view.
The flesh, too, has her departures for a while--in waters, in fires, in
birds, in beasts; she may seem to be dissolved into these, but she is only
poured into them, as into vessels. And should the vessels themselves
afterwards fail to hold her, escaping from even these, and returning to her
mother earth, she is absorbed once more, as it were, by its secret
embraces, ultimately to stand forth to view, like Adam when summoned to
hear from his Lord and Creator the words, "Behold, the man is become as one
of us!"[1]--thoroughly "knowing" by that time "the evil" which she had
escaped, "and the good" which she has acquired. Why, then, O soul, should
you envy the flesh? There is none, after the Lord, whom you should love so
dearly; none more like a brother to you, which is even born along with
yourself in God. You ought rather to have been by your prayers obtaining
resurrection for her: her sins, whatever they were, were owing to you.
However, it is no wonder if you hate her; for you have repudiated her
Creator.[2] You have accustomed yourself either to deny or change her
existence even in Christ[3]--corrupting the very Word of God Himself, who
became flesh, either by mutilating or misinterpreting the Scripture,[4] and
introducing, above all, apocryphal mysteries and blasphemous fables.[5] But
yet Almighty God, in His most gracious providence, by "pouring out of His
Spirit in these last days, upon all flesh, upon His servants and on His
handmaidens,"[6] has checked these impostures of unbelief and perverseness,
reanimated men's faltering faith in the resurrection of the flesh, and
cleared from all obscurity and equivocation the ancient Scriptures (of both
God's Testaments[7]) by the clear light of their (sacred) words and
meanings. Now, since it was "needful that there should be heresies, in
order that they which are approved might be made manifest;"[8] since,
however, these heresies would be unable to put on a bold front without some
countenance from the Scriptures, it therefore is plain enough that the
ancient Holy Writ has furnished them with sundry materials for their evil
doctrine, which very materials indeed (so distorted) are refutable from the
same Scriptures. It was fit and proper, therefore, that the Holy Ghost
should no longer withhold the effusions of His gracious light upon these
inspired writings, in order that they might be able to disseminate the
seeds of truth with no admixture of heretical subtleties, and pluck out
from it their tares. He has accordingly now dispersed all the perplexities
of the past, and their self-chosen allegories and parables, by the open and
perspicuous explanation of the entire mystery, through the new prophecy,
which descends in copious streams from the Paraclete. If you will only draw
water from His fountains, you will never thrist for other doctrine: no
feverish craving after subtle questions will again consume you; but by
drinking in evermore the resurrection of the flesh, you will be satisfied
with the refreshing draughts.


Taken from "The Early Church Fathers and Other Works" originally published
by Wm. B. Eerdmans Pub. Co. in English in Edinburgh, Scotland beginning in
1867. (ANF 3, Roberts and Donaldson). The digital version is by The
Electronic Bible Society, P.O. Box 701356, Dallas, TX 75370, 214-407-WORD.

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