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xx. 27-40). Whether the Sadducees were or were not satisfied by this answer we are not told, but it is quite certain that their modern representatives could not accept it. For the inquirers had hit upon one of the real difficulties attending the doctrine of a future life. We are always assured that one of the great consolations of this doctrine is the hope it holds out of meeting again those whom we have loved on earth, and living with them in a kind of communion not wholly unlike that which we have enjoyed here. Earthly relationships, it is assumed, will be prolonged into that happier world. There the parent will find again the child whom he has lost, and the child will rejoin his parent; there the bereaved husband will be restored to his wife, and the widow will be comforted by the sight of the companion of her wedded years. All this is simple enough. Complications inevitably arise, however, when we endeavor to pick up again in another life the tangled skein of our relations in this. Not only may the feelings with which we look forward to meeting former friends be widely different after many years' separation from what they were at their death; but even in marriage there may be a preferance for a first or a second husband or wife, which may render the thought of meeting the other positively unpleasant. And if the sentiments of the other should nevertheless be those of undiminished love, the question may well arise, whose husband is he, or whose wife is she of the two? Are all three to live together? But then, along with the comfort of meeting one whom we love, we have the less agreeable prospect of meeting another whom we have ceased to love. Or will one of the two wives or two husbands be preferred and the other slighted? If so, the last will suffer and not gain by the reunion. Take the present case. Assume that the wife loved only her first husband, but that all the seven were attached to her. Then we may well ask, whose wife will she be of them? Will her affections be divided among the seven, or will they all be given to the first? In the former case, she will be compelled to live in a society for which she has no desire; in the latter, six of her seven husbands will be unable to enjoy the full benefit of her presence. The question is merely evaded by saying that in the resurrection there is neither marriage nor giving in marriage, but that men are like angels. Either there is no con-