THE RESURRECTION OF THE BODY.

Thames Star, Volume X, Issue 3172, 19 April 1879, Page 4

THE RESURRECTION OF THE BODY.

Looking backward from my present standpoint over the earnest past, a boyhood fond of play and physical action, but averse to school-work lies before me. The aversion did not arise from intellectual apathy, of want of appetite for knowledge, but mainly from the fact that my earliest teachers, lacked the power of imparting vitality to what they taught. Athwart all play and amusement, however, a thread of seriousness ran through my character, and many a sleepless night of my childhood has been passed fretted by the question, " Who made God ?" I was< well versed in Scripture, for I loved the Bible, and was prompted by that love to commit large portions of it to memory. Later on I became adroit in turning my scriptural knowledge against the Church of Rome, but the characteristic doctrines of that church marked only for a time the limits of inquiry. The Eternal Sonship of Christ, for example, as enunciated in the Athanasian Creed, perplexed me. The resurrection of the body was also a thorn in my mind; and here I remember that a passage in Blair's "Grave" gave me momentary rest:

" Sure the same power That rear'd the piece atfirsf and took it down Can reassemble the loose, scatter'd parts, And put them as they were. 1'

The conclusion seemed for the moment entirely fair, but, with further thought, my difficulties came back to me. I bad seen cows and sheep browsing upon churchyard grass, which sprang from the decaying mould of dead men. The flesh of these animals was undoubtedly a modification of human flesh, and the persons who fed upon them were as undoubtedly, in part, a more remote modification.of the same substance. I figured the self-same molecules as belonging first to one body and afterwards to a different one, ana asked myself how two bodies so related could possibly arrange their claims at the day of resurrection. The scattered parts of each were to be reassembled and set as they were. But, if handed to the one, how could they possibly enter into the composition of the other? Omnipotence itself, I concluded, could not reconcile the contradiction. Thus the plank which Blair's mechanical theory of the resurrection brought momentarily into sight disappeared, and I was again cast abroad on the waste ocean of speculation.—Prof. Tyndall, in Nineteenth Century.