find it out in some part of Europe. As little boys at school do so wish that Virgil and Livy would but have written easily, so I am sometimes tempted to wish that my father would just have read more commonplace-ishly, and not quoted from such a number of out-of-the-way books, which not five persons in England, but himself, would ever look into. The trouble I take is so ridiculously disproportioned to any effect that can be produced, and we are so apt to measure our importance by the efforts we make, rather than the good we do, that I am obliged to keep reminding myself of this very truth, in order not to become a mighty person in my own eyes, while I remain as small as ever in the eyes of every one else.

Then my father had such a way of seizing upon the one bright thing, out of long tracts of (to most persons) dull and tedious matter. I remember a great campanula which grew in a wood at Keswick-two or three such I found in my native vale during the course of my flower-seeking days. As well might we present one of these as a sample of the blue-bells of bonny Cumberland, or the one or two oxlips, which may generally be found among a multitude of cowslips in a Somersetshire meadow, as specimens of the flowerhood of the field, as give these extracts for proof of what the writer was generally wont to produce.

XIV.

"S. T. C. on the Body "-The Essential Principle of Life not dependent on the Material Organism-Teaching of St. Paul on this Point The Glorified Humanity of Christ-Disembodied SoulsNatural Regrets arising from the Thought of our great Change. TO AUBREY DE VERE, Esq.

"What did Luther mean by a body? For to me the word seemeth capable of two senses, universal and special; first, a form indicating to A. B. C., etc., the existence and finiteness of some one other being, demonstrative as hic, and disjunctive as hic et non ille, and in this sense God

alone can be without body; secondly, that which is not merely hic distinctive, but divisive; yea, a product divisible from the producent as a snake from its skin, a precipitate and death of living power, and in this sense the body is proper to mortality, and to be denied of spirits made perfect, as well as of the spirits that never fell from perfection, and perhaps of those who fell below mortality, namely, the devils.”*

?

What did S. T. C. mean by a form, not material? A material form is here divisive as well as disjunctive, and this he denies of the essential body or bodily principle. Did he conceive the body in essence to be supersensuous, not an object of sense, not coloured or extended in space Of the bodily principle we know only this, that it is the power in us which constructs our outward material organism, builds up our earthly tenement of flesh and blood. Can this power, independently of the organism in and by which it is manifested, be conceived of as a form indicating the existence and finiteness of some one being to another? I believe that with our present faculties we are incapable of conceiving how a soul can be embodied, otherwise than in a sensuous frame, but knowing as we do, that our fleshly case is not a part of ourselves, but that there is a something in ourselves which thus clothes us in matter, I think we may infer that the human body in the deepest sense is independent of matter, and that it may, in another sphere of existence, be our form, that which indicates to other beings our finite distinct individual being, in a way which now we are not able to know or imagine.

But what did St. Paul mean when he declared so emphatically, "Now this I say, brethren, that flesh and blood cannot inherit the kingdom of God." Is he not to be understood literally? Must we suppose him to have

* Coleridge's "Notes Theological, Political,” etc., page 49.—E. C.

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meant only this, the carnal mind, or the man in whom the lower animal nature has the upper hand cannot inherit the kingdom? But how will such an interpretation suit the context? St. Paul has been speaking not of holiness and unholiness, but of soul and body and the state after death, when this mortal tabernacle shall have been dissolved. In reference to this subject he affirms that as we have borne the image of the earthy, that is a material body, we shall also bear the image of the heavenly, and then straightway adds that flesh and blood shall not inherit the Divine kingdom. To this, indeed, he adds again, "Neither doth corruption inherit incorruption, evidently identifying flesh and blood with the corruptible, not introducing the alien topic of spiritual corruption. Jeremy Taylor affirms in reference to this passage in Corinthians, that “in the resurrection our bodies are said to be spiritual, not in substance, but in effect and operation;" upon which my father observes, "This is, in the first place, a wilful interpretation, and secondly, it is absurd, for what sort of flesh and blood would incorruptible flesh and blood be? As well might we speak of marble flesh and blood. In the sense of St. Paul, as of Plato and all other dynamic philosophers, flesh and blood is ipso facto corruption, that is, the spirit of life in the mid or balancing state between fixation and reviviscence. "Who shall deliver me from the body of this death" is a Hebraism for "this death which the body is." For matter itself is but spiritus in coagulo, and organized matter the coagulum in the act of being restored, it is then repotentiating. Stop its self-destruction as matter, and you stop its self-reproduction as a vital

St. Paul declares that in the resurrection we are to be clothed with a spiritual body, and to leave behind the natural body which we had from Adam. Now what is a * "Notes on English Divines," vol. ii. p. 284.-E. C.

spiritual as opposed to a natural body? Surely the latter is a material and fleshly body, and no body of flesh and blood can be otherwise than natural, or can be properly spiritual. Make the flesh and blood ever so thin, fine, and aerial, still the difference betwixt that and any other flesh and blood will be one of degree, not of kind. But the Apostle does not promise us a body of refined flesh and blood, such as, according to some theologians, Adam had before the fall, but sets aside our Adamite body altogether, and seems indeed to imply that the first man had no spirituality at any time, for he is opposed to the second man as being of the earth, earthy, as if in his character of the first man, and not as fallen man, he was the source of earthiness, the Lord from Heaven alone being the foundation of the spiritual.

There are some who believe that the Lord from Heaven is now sitting at the right hand of the Father in a material and fleshly body, such as He wore upon earth, and appeared in after the Resurrection,-a metaphorical right hand, as Pearson explains it, but the body of Him who sits thereat, of flesh and blood. It is quite natural for such believers to expect that the bodies of the saints in the resurrection will be fleshly too. As the first fruits, so they must think will be all that follow. This argument, however, seems to prove too much for those who contend that our bodies in the future world are to be of flesh and blood, but refined and glorified, and no longer natural. For the body in which our Lord ascended was the same as that which He had before He rose from the dead. It was certainly a natural body, that could be felt as well as seen, and which ate and drank.

But my father believed that there will be a resurrection of the body, which will have nothing to do with flesh and blood; he speaks of a noumenal body, as opposed to our present phenomenal one, which appears to the senses, "no

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visible, tangible, accidental body, that is, a cycle of images and sensations in the imagination of the beholders, but a supersensual body, the noumenon of the human nature."* In truth, he considered this body inseparable from the being of man, indispensable to the actual existence of finite spirits; the notion of disembodied souls floating about in some unknown region in the intermediate state, after the dissolution of the material organism, and before the union of the soul with a celestial, incorruptible flesh-and-blood body, he looked upon as a mere dream, a chimera suited only to the times when men were wont to convert abstractions into persons, and to ascribe objective reality to creatures which the intellectual and imaginative faculty engendered within itself. He laughed at the notion of the separability of the real body from the soul, the arbitrary notion of man as a mixture of heterogeneous components. "On this doctrine," he says, "the man is a mere phenomenal result, a sort of brandy-sop, a toddy-punch, a doctrine unsanctioned by, indeed inconsistent with, the Scriptures. It is not true that body plus soul makes man. Man is not the syntheton or composition of body and soul, as the two component units. No-man is the unit, the prothesis, and body and soul are the two poles, the positive and negative, the thesis and antithesis of the man, even as attraction and repulsion are the two poles in and by which one and the same magnet manifests itself."†

I continually feel sorrowful at the thought of never again beholding the faces of my friends, or rather, about to be sorrowful. I come up to the verge of the thought ever and anon, but before I can enter into it am met by the reflection, "O vain and causeless melancholy!"-whatever satisfaction and happiness I can conceive as accruing to me in this way, cannot the Omnipotent bestow it upon me in some * "Notes on English Divines," vol. ii. p. 52.—E. C. † Ibid., vol. ii. p. 96.-E. C.