haps by some tyrant scattered to the wanton wind, as Tiberius served the relics of his two nephews; to collect which seems a much more difficult task than to retrieve and muster up each particle dissipated only within the compass of a 2. What intelligible account can be given respecting the Anthropophagi, that feed on man's flesh; and whose bodies. are as it were builded up out of the ruins of others? At the resurrection, how shall one body serve two; much less more men? 3. Why should we assert the identity of the body in the resurrection, when it is never here the same? since, as some parts in this our fleshly cottage are continually wasting, other new ones daily succeed into their room : πάντα ῥεῖ, κ' οὐδὲν μéver there is a perpetual flux of parts, and never one durance in the same stated condition; therefore it seems unreasonable that an old man's body should be punished in the other world for those youthful sins of which this carcass was never guilty. All these, and the like subtile disputes of the scoffing atheist, may well be cut off at once with the sharp return of the Apostle, ἄφρον -thou fool;' for it tastes of the greatest imaginable folly to cavil about a thing which is proved certainly to be so, only because we cannot explain how it is so he that expects a demonstration 700 diori, an account of the manner, and why the thing is, before he will yield his belief, must banish most truths and beings out of the world. Although a man performs all the actions of a common animal, and besides that, thinks, speaks, disputes, and reasons on sublime notions, yet we may defy the most ripe-witted pretender to tell how these noble effects are produced by the soul; or if he smiles at the term soul, let him clearly show how it is any way possible for the body to do it alone, by all the powers and laws of mere matter and motion: nevertheless, if he be not quite forsaken of his reason, he will grant that he lives, and is conscious of the reality of these effects; the mode or mauner whereof is without the reach of his capacity clearly to explain. Who is there, that according to the most rational hypothesis extant can so solve any phenomenon in nature, as that his solution shall not be liable to dispute at least, if not charged with inconsistences? Motion, time, and place, are things obvious to the sense and apprehension of the vulgar; and yet their natures and proportions have confounded the brains of the most considering philosophers in all ages, and must be reckoned among the intricate ænigmata reserved for the coming of the great Elijah. Now if, in most of these ordinary things which we own to be brought to pass by mean and limited causes, (where we have a full demonstration To őr, that they are,) we ought in reason to be satisfied, notwithstanding we cannot unfold and discover the mode of them; how much more ought we in the notions of a creation, or resurrection, where not the activity of a finite soul, or the casual or uncertain jumblings of matter are concerned, but the unlimited and immense power of the Almighty God? His power and wisdom are both infinite; and their ways and methods must be so too; it is as vain for man to think or desire, with his contracted and narrow faculties, to comprehend the infinite manner of God's exerting his power, as to endeavor to encompass the whole earthly globe within his arms: and therefore St. Paul does not go about to satisfy the curiosity of this fool, and to tell him exactly the manner of the resurrection; which I have now demonstrated to be impossible, on account of God's infinity. Nay, if it be impossible that flesh and blood should inherit the kingdom of heaven, (if the words are to be taken literally, as some learned men judge they are) it was not to be granted that man, so long as he continues united to matter, could conceive the glory of incorruption; so that I am almost persuaded that this is the mere reason why it is no where in Scripture revealed what or how we shall be, because pure flesh and blood is not able to understand it: wherefore St. Paul, that I may not seem to put you off any longer with a plausibility only, and leave the former difficulties wholly unanswered, though he was caught up into paradise, and had a glimpse of its glory, yet tells us no more but that he heard äppnra phμara, unspeakable words, which it was not possible or lawful for man to utter: and here, in this place, though he had the fairest occasion offered imaginable to tell he vo us how and with what bodies the dead are raised up, luntarily waives the discourse as too sublime; yet clearly satisfies the first objection by parity of reason; with which modest but approved and ingenious way I shall endeavor to answer all the rest. 1. What reason then is there why it should seem so incredible a thing that the body, when putrefied and corrupted, should again be revived; being that we see a thousand instances of this daily in the common productions of nature? Every grain of corn putrefies, and admits almost a perfect dissolution among its parts in the womb of the earth; and yet after all this alteration, it sprouts out into a blade, and then brings forth a body such as was sown, and proper to its kind. And indeed the manner of the production of all animals seems as inexplicable as that of the resurrection of the human body. How have the curious inquirers into the mysteries of nature been puzzled in assigning the immediate cause of the formation of the fœtus! What, out of a rude indigested mass of matter, should so sagaciously shape every limb, and with so great exactness justly proportion every part? Some speak of we know not what spirit of the world, as mysterious and unintelligible as the thing itself; others of as blind a principle, the plastic power of the soul; and some offer a solution from a ferment in the small particles of matter, obeying the laws of motion and impulse ; which, though it seem most plain and facile to the apprehension, yet may be urged by inconveniencies for which we shall not easily find an answer. Now, though men can neyer agree as to the positive cause, or the method of these productions, yet all acknowlege that they are frequently done; all come to pass by the ordinary powers of nature; insomuch that we have no reason to doubt of a like result in the resurrection; which is the immediate work, not of secondary causes, but of God himself. 2. The second difficulty mentioned was, how all the particles, once totally dispersed and dissipated, should ever be recalled from their remote cells, and again marshalled in their former array? For the solution of which, we shall follow the example of the Apostle; and searching into the history of nature, see if she have no similitude or analogy to this divine truth. What is more common than to dissolve gold and silver in their proper liquors? and yet when those opaque bodies are so wonderfully diffused, that they become transparent and quite vanish out of our sight, any inferior chymist, by many easy means, can recall them again into a mass, not losing the least particle. And why should it seem a thing incredible for the divine power to recall all the wandering and scattered parcels of a man's body, when we see how faithfully the small filings of iron obey the summons of the load-stone? whether they were straying on the ground, or drowned in the water, or cast into the air, nay buried in a heap of dust, they start out of their graves at its approach! But that we may enter yet into a larger sphere, how infinite are the stories we might recount of sympathy! What remarkable effects and feats will bodies at vast distances work on one another! what more strange, than the direction and variation of the needle, once touched with the magnet? that virtue, or those particles, (call it as you please,) that equally charm it to north or south, must come a great journey to execute their charge. But if all these effects are done by the common principles of nature, shall not the grand Author of nature, that prescribed these very motions and laws to singular bodies at their creation, be able by an equal power to determine each particle in my body, though never so remote, to meet its fellows? If, as the ingenious atomical hypothesis expresses it, all the frisks in nature are wrought only from a bare congruity in mode and figure, which some parts of matter have with these, and not with those, and by consequence can more easily skip into the pores of these bodies than others, and be united with them; why should we despair that the least parts in our bodies, which now are friends and well agree, should in the resurrection again be united by the same congruity; especially since there will be an all-seeing eye to control them? 3. Now in the third place, as to our cannibals and Antliropophagi, I think I may with confidence assert that there never were a people who ate man's flesh, as their sole and constant diet the stories of the fabulous Pliny mention, indeed, some that were man-eaters, as the Cyclopes and Lestrigones, and some of the Scythians; but it is probable that, being a warlike Q BAR. VOL. IV. people, they were called Anthropophagi only from their fierceness and merciless carriage towards their own species; just as the Arimaspi were said, by him and other authors, to have but one eye in their foreheads, when their being excellent archers, and their winking with one eye, gave the only ground for the fable. As for some inhabitants of America, the same discoverers who tell us they did eat man's flesh, tell us likewise that they had varieties of other food: if it were only their naizefacca bread, it will be enough for our purpose: nay, I think it demonstratively impossible that such vast numbers of people (scarce any place being uninhabited) should only be sustained by man's flesh; therefore what was eaten among them was rather on some special occasion, than constantly, as the intombing a dear relation in their own bowels; or perhaps, as Juvenal reports of the superstitious Egyptians, after a conquest they might pursue their fury on the carcases of the dead or as by him is also said of the Vascones, when driven to extremity some way, as in a siege, they might break the common bonds of humanity. However, that we may not seem in the least to be afraid of this formidable argument, I shall grant it as a very truth, that some people have from their very birth lived only on man's flesh, to a full stature. Now if we show it manifestly possible in such a case, that not one particle of the bodies devoured need go to the making of the body of him that eats them, I shall leave ground enough for God's power in the resurrection, and by consequence for my faith. Nourishment, by consent of all physicians, is made by additions of very little and insensible particles; and that seems to be the meaning of great Hippocrates' aphorism, Lib. ii. Aph. 11. ῥᾶον πληροῦσθαι ποτοῦ, ἢ σιτίου· πληροῦσθαι, that is, refici, recreari, as it is expounded by Heurnius and others, to this sense, that liquids are easier converted into nourishment than more solid food, because consisting of more subtile parts: now since all men require meat as well as drink, according to the principles of both philosophies, especially the new, why may not the parts of that drink, mixed with the solid meat, receive * Thus it is written in the Ms.; but what Naize-facca bread is, I am unable to learn.-ED. |