elements are received chiefly as proximate elements—that is, as elements in composition. But material elements have certain invariable properties by which they are distinguished, and when certain known elements enter into certain known combinations, whether by the chemistry of mere elective affinities, or by that chemistry which inheres in the mysterious principle called vital force, their properties, or, in other words, their phenomena will be invariable. Therefore, if the constituency of the risen body is to be precisely the same, in its elemental structure, with the present mortal body, it can not, without the annulling of some, at least, of the essential properties of matter, possess any attributes different from those of its former state. The very conclusion that the risen body is not a vile, weak, corruptible, mortal body, but a glorious, powerful, incorruptible, immortal body, involves the necessity of a change in its material constituency. Hence, if it is asked, In what does the identity subsisting between the dead and the risen bodies consist? we answer, first, not in their being possessed of the same distinguishing properties; and second, not in their being constituted of the same material elements. 4. In what, then, does this identity consist-not negatively, but affirmatively? Can we tell? Perhaps it may be denied that there is any such thing as identity predicable of man in the different periods of his earthly history. If so, our consciousness will belie the denial. We feel we know that we are the same through all the vicissitudes of this life, and through all periods of it. We may not be able to furnish any philosophical explanation of it, but the fact is a fact of experience, and this suffices to assure us that it is a fact, whether we can explain it or not. It is testified to by the instinctive, involuntary consciousness of our being, and no sane man will refuse to trust in the evidence of his consciousness. But this identity is not felt by us to consist in a particular identity of material constituency and organization of the body, through all the periods of its waste and repair, its growth and decline. Indeed, according to our consciousness, it does not inhere at all in the body as a whole, nor in its parts; and yet it does in some way still attach to the body. But not to the body as composed of certain material elements to the exclusion of others, and as having certain proportions and harmonies of form, and certain temperaments, and susceptibilities and powers in distinction from others, but to the body simply and wholly as our own body and not the body of another. This, therefore, we infer, is the essence of bodily identity. It is an identity resulting from the soul proprietorship; and the voice of consciousness which attests its existence, is the voice, not of the body in whole or in part, but of the proper person of man, the soul-the living, thinking, reasoning and conscious principle within-saying through all periods and conditions of the compound being of said person, whether before or after the resurrection: this body is my own true, proper body—a part of my compound self; for God gives to every soul, as to every seed, his own body. This is the only identity which can be truly predicated of the continued relationship of the human body to itself through the different periods of its mortal life-an identity subsisting really in the soul, and predicable of the body only in so far as it is the soul's own body, and not the body of another. And this identity will reach beyond the grave, and extend throughout eternity as easily and as certainly as from one moment to another in time. VI. Let analogies come to our aid for argument and illustration. Paul has given us an example of an analogy, to which we have already referred, and which he employed with skill and force in reply to a certain objector, who said, "How are the dead raised up, and with what body do they come?" "Thou fool," said Paul, "that which thou sowest is not quickened except it die; and that which thou sowest, thou sowest not that body that shall be, but bare grain, it may chance of wheat or of some other grain; but God giveth it a body as it hath pleased him, and to every seed his own body." In commenting on this passage, Dr. Candlish remarks, in his Life in a Risen Saviour: "You sow the seed with a view to its being quickened and living. But you sow it in the full knowledge that it can be quickened and can live, only by its undergoing a process of death, decay and dissolution. That is the condition of its being quickened and living. And the process which it must undergo is such as to change its whole nature and character; and so to change it, that what springs up is something altogether new-thou sowest not that body that shall be.' What you sow is 'bare grain;' it is 'the mere seed of wheat, or some other kind of corn.' What comes up has a very different material or corporeal structure and organization from that which the 'bare grain' you sow possesses. What sort of body it is that is to come up depends on the sovereign will of the great Husbandman. God giveth it a body as it hath pleased him.' But whatever change there may be, identity is not, in any wise, to be lost; for there is to 'every seed his own body."" And in immediate connection with this analogy from the natural world, Paul employs several others, all contributing to the same result-to show that it is not incredible that God should raise the dead, and that the connection, involving identity, which the common faith of Christians accept as destined to subsist between the dead and the risen bodies, is a connection the bonds of which are in the life or soul by which these bodies respectively are animated, and not in the inert, unconscious matter which may at any time sustain an organic union with said life or soul. And what is there in this that is "intrinsically inconceivable and incredible?" What is there in this that does not accord with the lifetime experience and intuitive convictions of every intelligent creature? VII. But we propose another analogy, after the manner of Paul, for argument and illustration, derived from the vegetable kingdom. 1. Suppose we have an acorn in our hand. It is the seed of an oak. But how different in aspect from the parent tree! Who would ever suspect, from any visible indications, that there was any relationship between them! They sustain not the slightest apparent similitudes to each other, and yet their internal nature is the same. The oak is in the tree, and in the acorn alike; but the tree is not an acorn, nor the acorn a tree. But both are visible and peculiar manifestations of the oak. What a mystery, and what a power are confined-shut up within the pale of the narrow cup of the one; and what a no greater mystery and power are developed through the huge trunk, and gnarled branches, and rich sinuate foliage of the other! "The pulpy acorn, ere it swells, contains The oak's vast branches in its milky veins, We contemplate the acorn. It is a living, vegetable existence, and that living vegetable existence is an oak. The vital force the mysterious, incomprehensible, vital force present in the acorn, and which endows it as a living seed, is the same vital force which subsequently pervades the tree that proceeds from it, and which endows it, not as a living tree only, but as a living oak tree. But in what does this vital force consist? Can we dissect or analyze it? Can we subject it to experimental observation by the aid of the microscope, or trace out its occult elements by any means within our power? We can not. It is a hidden, mysterious, wonder-working power, of the effects of which alone we are privileged to become cognizant. Itself evades our most searching scrutiny. 2. We take the acorn and plant it in the earth, in suitable conditions for vegetation and growth. If the vital force be not present in the seed, the acorn will very soon be dissolved and entirely disappear without any vegetable or organized product whatever resulting from it. But upon the supposition that it is a living acorn-that the vitality of the oak pervades it, we will soon discover that the homogeneous mass of the seed is assuming a new aspect-that the material elements are assuming new arrangements, and a plant is developed. The radicle sends forth its little branches to sieze upon the soil, and the plume looks upward to the air and the sun. The seed has been absorbed as nourishment by the embryo, and having fulfilled its peculiar mission, is not perpetuated. Now instead of the acorn, we have the infant tree in the form of a little plant, and that plant is an oak-plant; and it is an oak-plant, not by virtue of the mere relations and properties of the material elements which enter into its organic structure and form, but by virtue of the oak-life which pervades it, and in which the organic potency of its being subsists. Soon the plant becomes a shrub, the tree in its childhood, and that shrub is an oakshrub, for the same oak-life which pervaded the smaller growth of the plant, pervades the larger development of the shrub. But from the earth and the air, through the instrumentality of its roots and its leaves, it receives new accessions of material constituents continually to its vegetable organic structure, and increases daily in magnitude, until, in the progress of centuries, it becomes the monarch of the woods. But at no point of time in all this progressive development, from its first germination up to its now majestic proportions, running through a period of hundreds of years, has it ever ceased to be the same identical oak, of which the seed, the plant, the shrub, and the tree, are but the body in various stages of development. And in the meanwhile what a flux and reflux of material constituency have transpired in the structure and composition of this body of the oak! Through no two successive moments of all this extent of time of the oak's existence and development, have the material particles in union with its organic body been precisely the same. And yet the identity of the oak remains inviolate, in the midst of all these material changes-this incessant waste and repair of its material embodiment. We contemplate the tree, now towering high in the might of its majesty, and suppose we are familiar with its history. Five hundred years ago, we say, a certain man planted this tree. In common language we say, he planted the tree; but literally, he did not plant the tree, but the acorn, and the tree was long subsequent to the planting. More accurately speaking, he planted the oak, then an acorn, now a tree; and the oak, subsisting in and manifested through this tree, is the same identical oak, which was planted nearly half a millennium since. To maintain that the identity here acknowledged is dependent on and the result of the continuity of the same material elements as entering into the same material organs and organization, and as performing the same physical or vegetable functions, is at variance with common understanding. There is no such identity nor can there be. And yet we are sure there is what we recognize as an identity. But it is an identity more grand and sublime than that which is the result of mere material organism-an identity growing out of, and dependent on, the continuity of the same vital force-the oak-life-which is the efficient created cause, subordinate to the primary creative cause, of all the various material |