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no such refreshings as the sea furnishes, through mist, dew, showers and streams, are needed. In that world of life, life is perennial in the vigor of its own undying nature. What a Paradise is that, where no leaf withers, and where no flower fades!

"Neither moth nor rust doth corrupt, thieves do not break through nor steal." Here also does the Saviour refer to the fact that earth is afflicted with disturbing forces which cause all things that are of earth to pass away. "How particularly," says Prof. Lange, "does He here characterize those disturbing forces which reign here below, in that He calls them moth, rust, and thieves! In calling them rust, he designates all chemical disturbing principles. In calling them moth, he designates the enemies of vegetable and animal organisms. In calling them thieves, he refers to ethical disturbing principles." How wide in its application is the fact that chemical influences, silently as rust, corrode the face of inanimate nature! How extensively do insects, quietly as moth, hasten on death and decay in the animate creation! In how many ways does sin, the great moral evil, as with thievish hand, steal away all that is pure and good-steal away heart, hope, and Heaven!

The same passage of the Saviour, however, directs our attention to the fact that these evils exist not in the higher sphere, and exhorts us to turn away from the perishable to that which perishes not. "Lay up for yourselves treasures in Heaven, where neither moth nor rust doth corrupt, and where thieves do not break through nor steal."

What a pure world for the pure! What forms of

holy beauty bloom in sight beneath the upper skies! How different from the sin-soiled earth. "There no idol temples pollute groves and mountain tops. There no spirit of horror broods over ancient battle-fields, and spots where dark deeds were done. There no frightful Golgothas, or places of skulls, waken up remembrances and associations of guilt and death. There no dark spirits rule in the air, or dwell amid desolations and tombs. There is no ground which once drank the blood of martyrs, or of God's own son." There no serpents hiss under the tree of life, or bruise the heel of those white-robed ones that stray by the fountains of living water. There no foul worms creep forth from the heart of ripening fruit, and no poisonous, softly stealing death, revels on the cheek of beauty. Bright, pure, and blessed world! Life without death.

without decay.

Beauty without blemish.

No sickness there,

No weary wasting of the frame away,
No fearful shrinking from the midnight air,
No dread of summer's bright and fervid ray!

No hidden grief,

No wild and cheerless vision of despair;
No vain petition for a swift relief,

No tearful eye, no broken heart, are there.

Care has no home

Bloom

Within that realm of ceaseless praise and song

Its tossing billows break and melt in foam,
Far from the mansions of the spirit-throng.

The storm's black wing

Is never spread athwart celestial skies,

Its wailings blend not with the voice of Spring,
As some too tender floweret fades and dies.

No night distils

Its chilling dews upon the tender frame;

No morn is needed there! the light which fills The land of glory, from its Maker came.

No parted friends

O'er mournful recollections have to weep-
No bed of death enduring love attends,
To watch the coming of a pulseless sleep!

No withered flower

Or blasted bud celestial gardens know!
No scorching blast, or fierce descending shower
Scatters destruction like a ruthless foe.

No battle-word

Startles the sacred hosts with fear and dread! The song of peace, Creation's morning heard, Is sung wherever angel footsteps tread!

Let us depart,

If home like this await the weary soul!

Look up, thou stricken one! thy wounded heart Shall bleed no more at sorrow's stern control.

With Faith our guide,

White-robed and innocent to tread the way,
Why fear to plunge in Jordan's rolling tide,
And find the Haven of Eternal day.

CHAPTER IX.

The Glorified Body.

As first downward the spirit incarnates itself in the body, so afterwards upwards, the body is glorified in the spirit. OLSHAUSEN.

FOR the idea that our happiness in Heaven is to be increased by the glorious perfection of the body, we are indebted entirely to the Sacred Scriptures. Human reason, unenlightened by revelation, would guess just the reverse. Hence it has been common for the wisdom of this world to regard the body as an enemy to the soul; and escaping from it, and from all matter, has been considered the height of salvation.

The reason and ground of this hatred to matter is, beyond doubt, to be sought in the ancient philosophical idea of two eternal principles existing independently of each other, matter and spirit. It was taken as a self-evident truth, that "nothing can produce nothing;" but, as matter exists, and was not made out of nothing, it must have existed, alongside of spirit, from all eternity, as an absolute and independent principle. If it has-so they reasoned then there are two eternal existences, spirit and matter; then also it follows that these two are rivals, and opposed

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to each other. Hence as God, or Spirit, is the eternal principle of Good, matter is the eternal principle of Evil. This evil principle has allured Spirit into its embraces, and enslaved it, and has always held it under its power for evil ends. Hence to be redeemed from this dark captivity to matter is salvation.

Hence Pagan philosophy regarded the body as "the prison and sepulchre of the soul." Celcus says, "The hope of the resurrection of the flesh is the hope of worms, a filthy, an abominable, an impossible thing, which God neither will nor can do, being base and contrary to nature." Henee, when Paul preached at Athens, and referred to the resurrection of the dead, "some mocked." It was under the influence of this mode of thinking, that so many primitive heretics denied so stoutly the resurrection of the flesh.

The Scriptures, on the contrary, hold up this destiny of the body as one of the sweetest hopes of a Christian. What the wisdom of the world despises, is the glory of religion. By all the Apostles, "Jesus and the resurrection" are held up as one and the same blessed hope. The resurrection of Christ is exhibited as the pledge and promise of all that is involved in salvation. 1 Cor. xv. 13–20. The salvation of the soul, according to their teachings, itself only becomes complete in the resurrection of the body. Separated, for a time, from the body, which sinks under the power of death, the soul still feels bound to it as the complement of itself, and moans after its absence like a lone dove for its mate. "For we know that the whole creation groaneth, and travaileth in pain together until now: and not only they, but ourselves also, which have

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